Port Arthur: The Siege That Showed the Future

Port Arthur lies at the tip of the Liaotung peninsula, where Manchuria reaches into the Yellow Sea. China began fortifying it in 1880, and by 1894 a fishing village had become, in the words of the British official history, "the best military port in China", with a dock, an arsenal and strong batteries facing the sea. On 21 November 1894, in the war between China and Japan, the Japanese Second Army stormed it in a morning, at a cost of eighteen men killed. In the days that followed its soldiers killed hundreds of the town's people, perhaps thousands; no count was ever made, and the American correspondent James Creelman, who saw it, wrote that unarmed men "kneeling in the streets and begging for life, were shot, bayoneted, or beheaded."

The Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed on 17 April 1895, gave the peninsula to Japan, and within a week Russia, Germany and France advised Japan to give it back. Japan accepted their advice, for an indemnity of thirty million taels, and on 27 March 1898 Russia leased Port Arthur and the bay of Talienwan from China for twenty-five years. It brought the Chinese Eastern Railway down from Harbin, built a commercial port called Dalny on the bay, and made Port Arthur the base of its Pacific Squadron.

The sea front was strong. The land front was not. A ring of permanent forts was planned soon after the lease, but when war came in February 1904, five years later, only one was nearly finished, others were "fairly well advanced" and one had not even been traced; for lack of money the heights to the west, among them a hill marked on the maps as 203 metres high, had not been fortified at all. When war broke out, General Stoessel, who commanded there, later said, the forts were only half finished and the garrison numbered some three thousand men.

On 6 February 1904 Japan broke off relations with Russia. Two nights later the Russian squadron lay in the outer roadstead of Port Arthur with its torpedo nets in, its heavy guns unloaded and, in some ships, the crews asleep in their hammocks; the Viceroy, Admiral Alexeiev, had answered a request to put the fleet on a war footing with "This is premature." At seven in the evening of the 8th Admiral Togo, with his fleet sixty miles to the east, sent in his destroyers. Just after midnight the first flotilla ran along the Russian line, guided by the searchlight of the cruiser Pallada, and fired its torpedoes. Three hit: the battleships Retvizan and Tsesarevich and the Pallada. All three stayed afloat, and by two in the morning the destroyers had gone without the loss of a boat.

Togo's battleships came up the next morning and exchanged fire with the squadron and the shore batteries for about forty minutes. Russia and Japan declared war on 10 February, nearly two days after the first shots.

On 8 March a new commander arrived: Vice-Admiral Stepan Makarov, a man of humble birth and, in the words of the British official history, "the man upon whom all hope was centred." He took the squadron to sea for exercises and gave it back its confidence. On the night of 12 April a Japanese minelayer sowed mines off the entrance in sight of the Russians, and Makarov, taking the ships for his own destroyers, ordered them left alone. At 9.40 the next morning Makarov's flagship, the battleship Petropavlovsk, struck one; "the first explosion was followed by a second, and that again by a third," and she was gone. Seven officers and seventy-three men were picked up. Makarov was not among them, nor the painter Vereshchagin.

On 5 May the Japanese Second Army under General Oku began to land on the mud flats at the mouth of the Ta-sha River, near Pitzuwo, where Japan had landed ten years before. The railway to Port Arthur was cut, and on 12 May the fortress was isolated by land. Between Oku and the fortress the peninsula narrows to an isthmus about two miles wide, and on its one hill, Nanshan, the Russians had dug in: lines of trenches, barbed-wire entanglements seventeen to twenty-one feet wide, electrically fired mines, searchlights, some fifty guns and machine guns.

On 26 May, having taken the walled town of Kinchou at dawn, Oku's three divisions attacked. About three thousand Russian riflemen under Colonel Nikolai Tretyakov held the hill all day. Assault after assault stopped at the wire, against which, the British official history noted, "the high explosive shell had no effect," and the Russian guns ran short of ammunition. Toward six in the evening the Japanese Fourth Division waded breast-deep through the sea at low tide round the Russian left, and at 7.20 the Japanese flag stood on the summit. "The battle had lasted fourteen hours." The Japanese had fired more than 34,000 shells and lost 4,885 men, among them General Nogi's elder son.

Three days later they occupied Dalny, which the Russians left with its wharves and docks intact. On 5 June General Nogi Maresuke, who had commanded a brigade at Port Arthur in 1894, arrived to take command of a new Third Army whose task was to take the fortress. Ian Hamilton, the British observer with the Japanese First Army, who walked the field the next winter, thought that the Japanese had won Nanshan "too cheaply": they "began to imagine there were no limits to what their prowess could accomplish."

Through June and July Nogi's army fought its way down the peninsula over the hills, and by the end of July the Russians had fallen back to the fortress itself. On 7 August the first Japanese shell from the landward side fell in Port Arthur. It struck the flagship's wireless house and slightly wounded the admiral now in command of the squadron, Wilgelm Vitgeft. The Tsar ordered the squadron to break out for Vladivostok.

It sailed on the morning of 10 August: six battleships, four cruisers and fourteen destroyers. Togo met it in the Yellow Sea that afternoon. At 5.45, as the two lines closed, two twelve-inch shells struck the flagship Tsesarevich in quick succession; one burst against the foremast and killed Vitgeft and men of his staff, the other burst on the conning tower and killed or stunned everyone inside, and her steering jammed. The Russian line fell into confusion and turned back. Five battleships regained Port Arthur that night; the Tsesarevich limped into the German port of Tsingtao and was interned there, and other ships reached Shanghai and Saigon.

On 16 August Nogi summoned the fortress to surrender. The next day he had his answer, in the official history's words "a curt reply." The fortress held about 47,000 men under arms, sailors from the ships among them. Its commander was Lieutenant-General Anatoly Stoessel; its ablest defender was Major-General Roman Kondratenko, who commanded the 7th East Siberian Rifle Division and the defence of the land front.

Nogi's first general assault began on 19 August against the north-eastern front: the old Chinese wall and the redoubts on the spurs between the forts of Sungshu and Chikuan, with the height of Wangtai above them. For six days the Japanese attacked by day and by night, under searchlights and the glare of magnesium rockets, into machine-gun fire and showers of improvised grenades. The ravines below the forts became, in the official history's words, "a morass of blood and filth in which the living slipped and stumbled over the bodies of the dead." Two battalions of the 7th Regiment went in eighteen hundred strong and came out two hundred. When the assault ended on the 24th, more than 15,000 Japanese had been killed or wounded, for two small redoubts.

Nogi turned to siege methods. His engineers dug saps forward from the ravines toward each work, building a parapet of sandbags five yards at a time under cover of steel shields; at a hundred yards from the enemy a party could build fifteen yards of trench in a night. The Russians answered with machine guns and small quick-firers, with sorties and grenades, and with mines rolled down the glacis or thrown from torpedo tubes set up in the forts. Where the saps could go no further, the Japanese tunnelled under the forts to blow them up.

The heavy guns came in the autumn: eleven-inch howitzers taken from the coast defences of Japan, each needing a bed of concrete that took a fortnight to set. Six opened fire on 1 October and twelve more were in place by the end of the month, throwing shells of some five hundred pounds onto the forts and into the town, corrected by observers on the hills with telephones. Until then, a Russian mining officer said, the garrison had "dwelt in a fool's paradise." After the surrender Stoessel was asked what had troubled him most: "The 28-centimetre howitzers; after their arrival our fortifications were useless." Yet the forts held. A second general assault in late October cost 3,735 men; a third, on 26 November, more than 4,000, with "absolutely nothing to show."

West of the town, outside the ring of forts, rose a double-peaked hill 203 metres high. From its summit an observer could see the harbour and every ship in it. In the summer it had been weakly held, and the Japanese had not seen what it offered; after a first attempt in September failed they sapped toward it slowly. By November they could wait no longer. The Baltic Fleet was on its way round the world, and the squadron in the harbour had to be destroyed before it arrived. Two generals came down from Marshal Oyama's headquarters in the north, Kodama Gentaro and Fukushima Yasumasa, and after the failure of 26 November the order went out for 203 Metre Hill.

The assault began at 8.30 on the morning of 28 November and went on for eight days. The Russians, never more than about 1,500 on the hill at any one time, fought from a deep trench with overhead cover of timber, steel plate and sandbags, and Kondratenko fed in his reserves from the eastern front. The Japanese took the crest and lost it again; by the 29th the slopes were covered with dead "right up to the breastworks." On 5 December, after a morning of fire from the eleven-inch howitzers, they found the western face held by no one alive, and before five in the afternoon the whole summit was theirs. Between ten and twelve thousand Japanese had been killed or wounded on the hill, and about 3,000 Russians. Nogi's younger son was among the dead.

Within hours a naval officer with a telephone was directing the howitzers onto the harbour. The battleship Poltava sank that day; the Retvizan on the 6th; the Pobeda, the Peresvet and the cruiser Pallada on the 7th; the Bayan on the 9th. Only the Sevastopol, taken out into the roadstead by Captain Nikolai von Essen, held out against weeks of torpedo attacks, until her crew sank her on the day of the surrender. Visiting the hill in January, Hamilton wrote that the corpses "do not so much appear to be escaping from the ground as to be the ground itself."

At nine on the evening of 15 December an eleven-inch shell broke through the casemate of Fort Chikuan, where Kondratenko was holding a conference; he and seven other officers were killed. Japanese miners had now reached the forts of the north-eastern front. Fort Chikuan fell on the night of the 18th, after mines were fired under its parapet; Erhlung on the 28th; Sungshu on the 31st, when the explosion buried its commandant and more than a hundred of his men. On the afternoon of 1 January 1905 the Japanese stormed the height of Wangtai, and that evening Stoessel, without telling the fortress commandant, General Smirnov, sent a letter to Nogi proposing to negotiate.

The capitulation was signed at the village of Shuishiying on the evening of 2 January. The officers might keep their swords and go home on parole; the men became prisoners. When the garrison marched out there were 878 officers and 23,491 men, many thousands more than the Japanese had expected, and 15,000 sick and wounded in the hospitals, with flour for forty days and two and a half million cartridges. On 5 January Nogi and Stoessel met at Shuishiying. Stoessel offered Nogi his grey Arab horse; Nogi answered that it belonged to the army, but that he would see great care was taken of it. He told Stoessel: "One of my sons was killed at Nanshan, the other on 203 Metre Hill."

The siege had cost the Japanese about 57,780 killed, wounded and missing, and another 33,769 sick, two-thirds of them with beriberi. In Russia Stoessel was court-martialled and convicted, and sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted, and he was pardoned in 1909. In Japan Nogi asked the Emperor's leave to atone for his losses by taking his own life, and was refused while the Emperor lived. On 13 September 1912, as the Emperor Meiji's funeral procession left the palace, Nogi and his wife Shizuko killed themselves.

With Port Arthur taken, Nogi's Third Army went north. Ordered away in mid-January, it had reached its place by 19 February, hidden on the far left of the Japanese line south of Mukden, where General Kuropatkin's armies faced Marshal Oyama's along the Sha River. There were five Japanese armies and three Russian ones, more than half a million men on a front of nearly ninety miles: the largest battle yet fought.

The battle began in the eastern hills, where from 19 February the Japanese Yalu Army attacked the Russian left. Then, from 27 February, Nogi's army swung round the Russian right, marching north behind the Russian flank toward the railway that was Kuropatkin's lifeline. "The turning movement of the Third Army," a British observer with it reported, "was undoubtedly a surprise." Kuropatkin shifted his reserves west, the Japanese pressed in from every side across the frozen Hun River, and at 6.45 on the evening of 9 March he ordered a retreat. Japanese patrols entered Mukden the next morning, and the main columns that afternoon. Russia had lost, by the usual count, close to 90,000 men, Japan about 70,000.

Mukden cost Kuropatkin his command, but it did not destroy his army, which fell back north along the railway; the Japanese followed it to Tieling, some forty miles on, and there they stopped. Eleven weeks later the Baltic Fleet was destroyed at Tsushima, and on 5 September 1905 the two empires signed the Treaty of Portsmouth, which gave Port Arthur and the Liaotung lease to Japan.

Few wars have been watched so closely. With the Japanese and Russian armies went dozens of foreign officers: Ian Hamilton of Britain, who walked 203 Metre Hill in January 1905; Aylmer Haldane, who reported on the Japanese infantry; the German captain Max Hoffmann, who shared a house with Hamilton at Kuroki's headquarters that Christmas; Americans such as Peyton March, John Morrison and the medical officer Colonel Havard, who was with the Russians and was taken prisoner at Mukden; and the British correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, who followed the siege from Nogi's headquarters. Their reports filled volumes.

They agreed on what they had seen. Men in trenches with modern rifles, machine guns and wire could hold off attackers many times their number; barbed wire stood up to high-explosive shell; heavy howitzers firing at targets they could not see, corrected by telephone, could smash concrete and sink a fleet; the infantry fought with hand grenades and bomb-throwing mortars, by searchlight, with mines dug under the enemy's works. They did not agree on what it meant. The American government printed Captain Morrison's conclusion that "a frontal attack against an intrenched position can be successfully made," by well-trained troops, in the same volume as Havard's that frontal attacks were all but impossible and that armies must go round. Ashmead-Bartlett thought the lives lost in the great assaults "thrown away to absolutely no purpose": given time, the engineer would always beat numbers and bravery. A French general, writing in 1906, saw the war as a "striking demonstration of the power of moral forces," and many officers drew the same conclusion: that troops with the will to attack, ready to accept the cost, would carry any position.

Ten years later the lessons were tested. The German army went to war with heavy mortars for siege and trench fighting, the Minenwerfer, and Japan besieged the German port of Tsingtao in 1914 with eleven-inch howitzers and lines of parallel trenches, as it had at Port Arthur. Hamilton commanded at Gallipoli; Hoffmann was a staff officer of the German army that won at Tannenberg; Ashmead-Bartlett went ashore at Anzac Cove. And on the Western Front, from the winter of 1914, armies dug in, wired their trenches and attacked them, again and again, as the Japanese had done before Port Arthur.