The War in the East: Japan, China, and Corea

by Trumbull White

The plan pursued by Field-Marshal Count Yamagata was to occupy a long stretch of the Yalu River, so that his point of passage would remain to the last uncertain, and any flanking movement on the east by the cavalry, of which the enemy possessed a large force, was rendered impossible. Having rested his troops and completed his arrangement for a final advance, he threw a battalion across the river under Colonel Sato, at Shai-ken-chau, a place ten miles up stream from Wi-ju. The passage was made by wading and was unopposed. The detachment was composed entirely of riflemen, no cavalry[cavalry] or artillery accompanying them. A Chinese earthwork had been thrown up at this point to oppose a landing, but a slight deviation enabled the detachment to cross without interference. An attack was immediately opened on the Chinese position, which was garrisoned only by a few artillerymen and infantry. They fled after the first two or three rounds had been fired, and the Japanese captured the works with a rush. A regiment of Manchoorian cavalry arrived as the little garrison fled, and covered their retreat. The Chinese made for the batteries constructed lower down the river, the infantry throwing away their arms in their flight. The Chinese loss was about twenty killed and wounded, while on the Japanese side not a man was hit. The Japanese force now moved down the river and captured the Chinese fortifications at the Suckochi ferry, where they passed the night. The Japanese engineers had pontoons in readiness for passage across the river.

JAPANESE ARMY CROSSING THE YALU, ON A PONTOON BRIDGE.

During the night of the 24th, the Japanese pontoon men threw a bridge across the Yalu at the ferry, and at dawn the main body of the army, having passed over unopposed, commenced an attack against Hu-shan, Colonel Sato’s brigade coming into action simultaneously from the other side. The battle began at 6:30 A.M., and lasted until a few minutes past 10. At first the Chinese held their ground with tolerable firmness, but presently, finding their position swept by rifle and artillery fire from a hill on their right flank, of which possession had been taken by a brigade under Major-General Osako, they broke and fled across the Ai to Chiu-lien. The reserves, however, did not join the rout. Posted advantageously, they preserved their formation and maintained a resolute fire, until thrown into confusion by a flanking movement, which placed a large force under Major-General Tachimi to the rear of their left. Then they too gave way, and retreated in confusion across the Ai, so hotly pursued that they had to abandon ten pieces of artillery. The Japanese had lost twenty killed and eighty-three wounded; the Chinese two hundred and fifty killed and a somewhat large number of wounded. Two divisions of the army then crossed the Ai and encamped on the east of Chiu-lien, the brigades of Major-General Tachimi and Colonel Sato posting themselves on the same side of the Ai, but further north, so as to menace the same road from Chiu-lien northward to Feng-hwang. Field Marshal Yamagata and Lieutenant-General Nodzu took up their quarters in a farmer’s house to the northeast of Hu-shan. Thus with all the advantages of elevated ground, a position fortified at leisure, and a force ample for defensive purposes, the feebleness and faulty strategy of the Chinese converted into a mere skirmish what ought to have been a sanguinary battle.

The following morning, October, 26, before dawn, a general advance was commenced against Chiu-lien. It was supposed that the enemy would make an obstinate stand there, since after Feng-hwang the fortified town of Chiu-lien ranks as a position of eminent importance in the defense of southwestern Manchooria. Moreover, throughout the night a cannonade had been kept up from the town against the Japanese camp, and though the invading columns were posted so that the enemy’s missiles passed harmlessly over them, this resolute service of guns seemed to promise stout fighting on the following day. But in truth the artillery was employed merely in the vain hope of intimidating the assailants, or in order to cover the flight of the garrison. The Japanese encountered no resistance whatever. At eight o’clock in the morning they entered Chiu-lien. The enemy had decamped in the direction of Feng-hwang before dawn, leaving behind him almost everything, twenty-two guns, three hundred tents, large stores of ammunition and quantities of grain and forage.

The series of defeats following the crossing of the Yulu River by the Japanese seemed to complete the Chinese demoralization in that vicinity. The defeated forces probably numbered more than twenty thousand men, the victorious army was considerably inferior in numbers, the batteries were well built, and the position was a strong one. The continuous loss of artillery, and throwing away of muskets and rifles wherever the Chinese made retreat, was gradually depleting the stores of arms possessed by the forces in Manchooria, leaving them unable to fight even if they had desired to. A little fighting evidently went a long way with them. Did they carry away their artillery and stores, these precipitate retreats might possess some strategical character, but they simply saved their own lives, leaving all their material of war behind them. The troops at Chiu-lien were not ill-disciplined or badly armed from a Chinese point of view. Coming from Port Arthur, from Taku, and from Lu-tai, they ranked among the best soldiers China could put into the field. If such men proved themselves so conspicuously invertebrate, it was to be questioned whether or not the addition to their number of a few thousand Tartars would make them stand more stiffly in a subsequent conflict. It seemed even to the friends of China that her capacity for resisting the invasion of Manchooria in the face of well-organized and resolute attack, was simply contemptible.

THE JAPANESE AT PORT ARTHUR.

The second invasion of Chinese territory was made by the second Japanese army corps, twenty-two thousand strong, under the command of General Count Oyama. These forces sailed in transports from Hiroshima, and on October 24 commenced landing in a little cove northeast of Talien-wan Bay and protected by the Elliot islands from the open sea. Talien-wan Bay was avoided because the Chinese were known to have made some preparations to resist a landing there. The peninsula which juts out southwestward between the Gulf of Liao-Tung and Corea Bay is known variously as the Liao-Tung peninsula and the Kwang Tung peninsula. Every yard of it was familiar to the Japanese military staff, and had been included in their system of minute cartography, so that whatever point they selected was well chosen. Up to the last moment it had been supposed by the general public that Port Adams, on the west of the peninsula, would be the port of debarkation, but as that would have involved the passing of a great flotilla of transports into Pechili Gulf, it was considered too hazardous an operation. The last of the flotilla of fifty transports left Hiroshima October 18, and the fleet having assembled at Shimonoseki, steamed westward on the morning of the 19th. A distance of eight hundred miles had to be traversed, and in this case as in all previous operations everything worked with smoothness and success. On the evening of the 23rd the great flotilla reached its destination, and on the following morning the landing was commenced.

There was no resistance. The Pei-yang squadron did not show. Had there been any ordinary exercise of vigilance on the part of Admiral Ting’s war ships they must have sighted the Japanese flotilla in ample time to strike at it. That they would have effected nothing in the face of the convoying squadron may be taken for granted, but if the prospect of failure deterred them from making any effort to protect their own headquarters, China’s only dockyard and really important naval station in the north, they certainly deserved the indifference with which the Japanese treated them. From the time of the naval battle of September 17, the Pei-yang squadron played no part in the war. Many attempts were made to prove that it had not been vitally hurt in the encounter, and that a few days would suffice to put it in a thorough state of repair. But whether repaired or not it disappeared from the scene, and the Japanese cruisers thenceforth roamed at will along the Chinese coasts.