Port Arthur

by Richard Barry

[Chapter Sixteen]
THE COST OF TAKING PORT ARTHUR

Port Arthur stood formidable and haughty on the night of February 8th, when Togo first saluted it with his turret six-inchers. That salute of the shell was lengthy and costly. For ten months it kept up from nearly seven hundred guns, approximately two hundred and forty in the navy and three hundred and fifty in the army. Each gun fired its weight in metal twenty times over. About two thousand tons of bursting shell went into that proud and mighty citadel, cordoned with its cunningly hung and ingeniously intrenched forts. Each firing cost an average of twenty-four gold dollars. Thus the moneyed treasure hurled against the fortress exceeded thirty millions. And men—but of the human later.

What bait lured and what force repelled that money and blood? To comprehend we must review briefly Port Arthur, its fortification, and its siege. Nature there was the greatest ally the Russians ever had. Topographically, Port Arthur was fitted with a defense that taught tricks to the most skillful engineers. Two ranges of hills, almost concentric, surrounded the harbor. The crests of these were broken by a series of successive conical elevations. Here was a suggestion that the mightiest engineer—an Archimedes or a Michelangelo—would have seized. The Italians who helped the Russians in laying out their defenses, taking these concentric ranges for the primary grand scheme, ran completely about the city two concentric lines of fortifications. Massive masonry forts were built on the shoulders of the high summits, and were connected by continuous defensive works. Hugging the city close, distant from one thousand yards to a mile and a half, lay the inner line of permanent defense, whose backbone was an old Chinese wall, broadened, deepened, and loopholed. Beyond, and filling the interstices between these forts, were semi-permanent works. The forts were so related to each other that they gave mutual support. Each one was dominated by fire from neighboring heights, and it often happened that the Japanese seized positions, which, though untenable for the Russians, they were unable to hold themselves. The slopes of the hills were steep. Also, they were smooth and free from cover. To rush the works charges had to be made over a broad glacis, swept by the shrapnel, machine gun, and rifle fire of the defenders. Should the assault survive the scientific deathtraps of this danger zone, the valiant few were confronted by massive masonry parapets, through which they could not force an entrance.

This wonderful network of fortifications, strong by nature, strong by virtue of the skill and care with which it had been built, was distinguished from all previous defensive works by the fact that here for the first time were used all those terrible agencies of war which science in the last century has rendered available. There were steel shields to protect skirmishers, machine guns, smokeless powder, artillery of high velocity and great range, high explosive shells, the magazine rifle, the telescopic sight, giving marvelous accuracy of fire; the range-finder, giving instantaneously the exact distance of the enemy; the searchlight, the telegraph and the telephone, starlight bombs, barbed-wire entanglements, and a dozen other diabolic inventions, the sum of which, allied to this stupendous fortification of nature by man, enabled the military authorities of the world to pronounce upon Port Arthur that superlative word, impregnable.

Reducing the scale of this fortress, we might see in miniature its intricate construction if we looked upon the hair-clippers of a barber. The forts were the teeth, the murderous scientific apparatus the death blades of this monstrous clipper. For five months they shaved clean everything that approached them.

At the beginning of the operations, in the War Office at Tokyo, the plan of campaign against Port Arthur was laid out as all Japanese campaigns are laid out—by the General Staff. With a passion for detail and a mania for precision, the fortress was plotted and the operations against it mathematically separated into stages. Now that Port Arthur calls on history for an answer, the exact nature of this plan, and how rigidly it was adhered to, may be for the first time disclosed.

There were to be four stages in the reduction of the fortress. The work was divided into stages, because the Japanese are so practical that they must plainly see on paper what they project. They live by system. They have reduced accomplishment to a problem of economics. They believe that the most successful man is he who makes the closest analysis. It was fore-ordained that they would be successful, for they analyzed Port Arthur.

The first of the four stages laid out comprehended the capture of the Chinese wall, which is the main line of permanent Russian land defense on the east, and its protection of twelve forts; three permanent, four semi-permanent, and three redoubts. The second stage comprehended the taking of Etzeshan and Anzushan (the Table and Chair forts), which are considered the keys to the west defenses, with the lunettes, batteries, and redoubts which formed their out and in works. The third stage comprehended the capture of the town of Port Arthur, and the great sea forts located on the Tiger’s Tail and Golden Hill. The fourth and final stage, in which it was expected that the desperation of defense would mount to the height of a fierce guerrilla warfare, comprehended the taking of the tip of the peninsula, called Liaotishan.