Part 5

Summary: In the first four episodes of this series we reviewed the causes of the 1903 Russo-Japanese War; the circumstances leading up to the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Japan; the initial Russian thrust into Korea and the Japanese counterattack; the costly Russian victory at Chongjin; the beginning of the Russian drive on Wonsan and the assassination attempt on Japan’s Emperor Meiji-tenno; the Japanese victory at Sanpo; the Imperial Russian Navy’s campaign to choke off the shipping lanes between Japan’s home islands and the Japanese forces on the Korean Peninsula; and the Potemkin mutiny. In this chapter, we’ll look back at how the tide of the ground war turned against the Japanese in the late spring and early summer of 1903 and examine how the Russians finally succeed in capturing Wonsan.

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The Russian naval blockade of Japanese maritime supply routes to the Emperor’s troops on the Korean Peninsula may not have been fully successful in its original objective of isolating those troops from the Japanese home islands, but it was certainly accomplishing a good deal by reducing the flow of fuel, food, and munitions between Japan and Korea to a trickle. One of the inevitable consequences of  this interdiction was that the initiative in the ground war began to turn back in favor of Russia, whose armies had largely been on the defensive since the Japanese victory at Sinpo. In the wake of that  battle, the Imperial Russian Army had cashiered several of its less competent officers and re-deployed its cavalry regiments in Korea to make more effective use of those regiments against the weaker points of the Japanese battle lines.

Japanese commercial interests were also being seriously hurt by the blockade; much of Japan’s economy at that time depended on the  importation of goods and raw materials from Korea, and the harder it was to get such imports to the businesses which relied on them the less able they were to make money. This in turn weakened the overall economic health of the Japanese Empire, and as the blockade wore on Japan’s most prominent business leaders expressed growing concern in regard to their country’s financial future. By May of 1903, things had gotten sufficiently grim for Japan on the economic front to prompt  Emperor Meiji to summon a number of the country’s top industrialists to the Imperial Palace for a meeting to discuss what if anything could be done to rescue their country from the financial abyss the blockade was threatening to push it into.

The quest for a way out of Japan’s wartime economic troubles took on added urgency in late May and early June of 1903; around that time, the Russian army’s expeditionary force in Korea broke through one of the weaker sections of the eastern flank of the Japanese front lines and began its second attempt to capture Sinpo. This time, the Japanese army, which had successfully turned back the first Russian assault on Sinpo, found itself at a disadvantage; by June 9, Russian  advance detachments were within artillery range of the outskirts of the city. Two days after that the first Russian infantry units, backed by heavy artillery and machine gun fire along with diversionary raids from local Korean guerrilla cells, entered the outer neighborhoods of the city en masse and began systematically neutralizing Japanese army defensive outposts in those sectors.

By June 12^th most of Sinpo was under Russian control and Japanese troops in the rest of the city were fighting a valiant but ultimately fruitless holding in an effort to stem the Russian tide. A new wave of artillery strikes soon neutralized what was left of Sinpo’s Japanese garrison, and on June 14^th the chief of staff for the Russian Imperial expeditionary force jubilantly telegraphed Czar Nicholas II the city was completely and firmly in Russian hands. The news was greeted with euphoria in Russia and with horror in Japan-- it meant Russian ground forces once again had a clear shot at seizing Wonsan. And they would take full advantage of it...

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After a temporary pause to consolidate their hold on Sinpo and regroup their first-line units, the Russians resumed their push up the Korean Peninsula and by the second week of July had advanced to within fifteen miles of the outskirts of Wonsan. To soften up the city’s defenses in preparation for the impending attack by the Czar’s ground forces, Russian naval warships repeatedly bombarded Wonsan’s fortifications until many of those fortifications had been pounded to rubble.

On July 18^th Russian troops encircled Wonsan, trapping a regiment of Japanese army infantry and at least two full battalions of Japanese marines within the city limits. Those civilians who could still get out of harm’s way fled Wonsan as fast as they could; those unable to escape sought shelter and nervously awaited the beginning of what on both sides of the front line was regarded as the most critical land battle to be fought since the war had begun. At 6:00 AM local time on the morning of July 20^th, 1903 the commander of the main Russian troop contingent at Wonsan gave his artillery units the signal to commence firing.

Within seconds cannon shells had torn the center of the Japanese lines to pieces and Russian machine gunners were raking the left and right flanks. Determined not to lose control of Wonsan, the Japanese forces immediately returned fire; those foot soldiers lucky enough to be in possession of hand grenades lobbed them in the direction of the nearest convenient Russian. By 12 noon the center of the city was in flames and nearly half of the Japanese troop contingent at Wonsan had been killed as Russian ground forces relentlessly pressed home their advantage.

But the Czar’s armies weren’t getting off lightly either; in fact, Wonsan holds the grim distinction of being the second-bloodiest land battle in the modern annals of the Russian army, surpassed only by the Kerenskigrad campaign of the Second World War¹. Wonsan saw the Russian Imperial Army sustain its highest-ranking casualty of the war when a brigadier from the artillery corps was fatally wounded by a piece of shrapnel while directing the bombardment of an entrenched Japanese mortar position. Even now you can still occasionally find scraps of a uniform or fragments of bone from the body of a Russian soldier who fell in the battle for Wonsan.

Early on the afternoon of July 22^nd Russian infantry and cavalry troops, backed up by Korean partisans, stormed the main Japanese command post at Wonsan and captured three key defensive positions on the western edge of the city. From that point on the  battle was effectively over; although sporadic firefights would continue in and around the city for the next two days and the last Japanese artillery position north of Wonsan held out until July 26^th, any hope Japan might have still had of retaining control of the Korean seaport was for all practical purposes gone. On July 27^th the last Japanese holdouts were overrun by a squadron of Cossack cavalry.

That same evening Czar Nicholas II appeared on the steps of the Winter Palace to formally declare victory for Russia in the fight  for Wonsan. His words inspired jubilation among his fellow countrymen and stark terror among the Japanese, and for the same reason: with Wonsan now completely in Russian hands, the Russian army finally had a genuine opportunity to make a serious bid to capture Seoul. As the ancient capital of the Korean kingdom and the wartime nerve center for the Japanese colonial administration in Korea, Seoul represented the ripest plum on the tree as far as the combatants were concerned. Its fall would, at the very least, put the remaining Japanese land forces on the Korean Peninsula in a dangerously awkward strategic position as the war approached its sixth month...