Sarah Paine: uncertainty

Transcript context

…ected port where you want to put naval vessels. You can see it takes the Japanese two months to work their way down the Liaodong Peninsula to get themselves in position to blow away the ships in port. Meanwhile, the Japanese armies are having a hard time while this is going on. It could be argued that maybe they even reached their culminating point of attack in the Battle of Liaoyang. Who knows? Liaoyang takes place less than halfway through the war. It's in early September 1904. And Japanese munitions, numbers of officers, numbers of horses… It all goes critical. They don't have enough. They get away with it. They win the battle but the Russians have an organized retreat northward. At the Battle of Shaho, which happens next in October, the Japanese supply system almost collapses but they get away with it. So bad things are going on at land. Japan doesn't have an infinite supply of soldiers. They also don't have an infinite supply of artillery, howitzers and things. Here are their gun emplacements. Notice the green ones are army gun emplacements around Port Arthur. That makes sense. What's all the purple? They have so few guns, they're pulling them off ships in order to reduce Port Arthur. All these things they really need up in Manchuria. They need General Nogi who's running all of this, and his army, up in Manchuria. There you can see the circle is where 203 Meter Hill is that they need to take as well. General Nogi, who is commanding the 3rd Army which is in charge of the siege, is really desperate to reduce the fortress as soon as possible. He runs four different really costly infantry assaults on a fortress where you're killing lots of young Japanese men. The first two occur right prior to major battles, Liaoyang and Shaho respectively. Because he wants to win those battles, win Port Arthur, so then he can take his guns and troops to fight at Liaoyang and Shaho. Well, it's not to be because he loses both of them. The assaults are insufficient. It's only after the second one that he realizes the importance of 203 Meter Hill. The problem is Nogi gets 45,000 Japanese soldiers killed doing this. 45,000 soldiers in that day is an entire army. I've already pointed out that Japan only had four armies until the very end of the war when it tried to cobble together a fifth one. Here's what 203 Meter Hill looks like from down below. Here's what it looks like from up top, the kind of view you get. When there was a truce in early December 1904, and there was some talking between Japanese and Russian officers, Russian officers said, “You will never capture 203 Meter Hill.” To which the Japanese officer replied, “We'll purchase it in blood.” And they did. Their gamble paid off because all these ships, you'll notice they're listing. It's because they ain't sailing anywhere. You can see the 203 Meter Hill. They take it at the end of November and within the week, they are now sinking all of these battleships. They're gone within a few days. The Russians give up at Port Arthur and the 3rd Army is up and heading into Manchuria where it'll be there for the Battle of Mukden, which is a huge battle. It's got what, 500,000 troops? a few days. The Russians give up at Port Arthur and the 3rd Army is up and heading into Manchuria where it'll be there for the Battle of Mukden, which is a huge battle. It's got what, 500,000 troops? Even so, Russia can muster 125,000 more troops than Japan can. Japan in this battle is just taking anybody, young boys, old people. Whoever they can put into that army, they're putting into it. You could argue that they're well beyond their culminating point of attack, but for incompetent Russian strategy. If the Russians had run one more battle against the Japanese, the Japanese supply lines would have collapsed. It's unclear how far down the Liaodong Peninsula they would have had to retreat. strategy. If the Russians had run one more battle against the Japanese, the Japanese supply lines would have collapsed. It's unclear how far down the Liaodong Peninsula they would have had to retreat. So this is when Japan's war termination plan goes into effect. The Japanese realized from the very beginning that they had a high-risk, high-reward strategy. In contrast to World War II, they had a really carefully prepared exit strategy. When Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi is convening the cabinet and they're going to make the decision to fire the first shots in this war, he is already lining up a Harvard grad, Viscount Kaneko, who was an acquaintance of the President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States. What they want is to have Viscount Kaneko work on getting Roosevelt ready to do mediation at the end of this war. The negotiations are going to be held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, negotiated by another Harvard alumnus, Baron Komura, who's going to do all of that. Meanwhile, Ito sends his son-in-law, who's a Diet member but also a graduate of Cambridge University, off to Britain to keep the Anglo-Japanese Alliance solid. So the Japanese are very aware that you have to have a way out of this thing. So it's in the Battle of Mukden that Field Marshal Yamagata decides it's time to call the American card at this moment. He said, “Look, the enemy is never going to request peace unless we have invaded Moscow or St. Petersburg” something he knows to be impossible. He said, “Look, the enemy still has powerful forces in its home country. We have already exhausted ours. Second, while the enemy still does not run out of officers, we have lost a great number since the opening of the war and cannot easily replace them.” At this moment, the Russian army was three times the size of the Japanese army. That army in theater was increasingly comprised of crack soldiers, not the colonial kind of soldiers they'd started out with. So here's Field Marshal Yamagata. In the first Sino-Japanese War, the government in Tokyo was afraid he was going to march on Beijing and do regime change. They pulled him out of the theater and gave him a sinecure to make sure he didn't do that this time. This time, he's a wiser man. He goes, “We must now be prudent.” Here are other members of this brilliant Meiji generation. The Chief of Staff of the Manchurian army said, “Look, if you start a fire, you’ve got to put it out.” And here is Field Marshal Ōyama, who is the commander of Manchurian forces. Before he sets out to take command, he tells the navy minister, “I will care for fighting in Manchuria, but I'm counting you as the man to tell me when to quit.” So the navy's going to be the fire department, apparently. To tell you what the navy was up to, they took Elliott Island to turn it into a cruiser base. That's how they're running the blockade operations on Port Arthur, keeping the Russian fleet in until they can eventually sink it there. In addition, the Imperial Japanese Navy is busy laying mines. A lot of ships go down to mines. This is an interesting story. Nicholas II, tsar of Russia, doesn't like it that his fleet is just sitting in port, not doing anything.…

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