Authors: Samuel Hawley
Kuroda Nagamasa’s third contingent was the next army in the Japanese invasion force to arrive from Tsushima, very likely aboard some of the same ships that had ferried Konishi Yukinaga’s first contingent across the strait to Pusan. They landed at the
port of Angolpo, twenty kilometers west of Pusan, on May 29, one day behind Kato and six behind Konishi. Kuroda’s troops were recognizable by the black disk on their sashimono banners, a visual representation of their commander’s family name, which means “black field.”
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At twenty-three Kuroda was somewhat younger than both Konishi and Kato, and as such did not participate fully in the rivalry that so shaped the prickly relationship between those two. He came to
Korea fully expecting glory, but not necessarily the largest portion of it.
After completing his landing and taking the nearby fort at Kimhae (his men cut off a thousand heads), Kuroda struck north by his pre-assigned route up the western side of the
Korean Peninsula. It would take him through Changnyong, Songju, Chongju, and Suwon, and then on to the Han River and Seoul beyond.
There were now three Japanese armies en route to the Korean capital.
* * *
On June 2 Korean General Yi Il and his force of sixty cavalrymen from
Seoul passed through Choryong Pass and descended to the town of Sangju in northern Kyongsang Province. He found no soldiers there to reinforce him; they had all been called away to defend the provincial capital of Taegu, eighty kilometers farther south. In a desperate bid to increase his force, Yi used grain from the local government storehouse to hire peasants to serve in his army, bringing his total strength to about eight or nine hundred men. It was an unruly and untrained mob, but Yi figured he would have a week, maybe longer, to whip them into shape before the enemy arrived.
He had scarcely a day. Konishi Yukinaga’s first contingent had already taken
Taegu by this point and was nearing Sosan, a few kilometers to the southeast. When a locally recruited peasant soldier brought this news to Yi, the general refused to believe it, and had the unfortunate man beheaded for spreading malicious rumors. It was simply too fantastic that an army could fight its way all the way from Pusan to Sosan, half the distance to Seoul, in just ten days. The man’s report must have been corroborated, however, for on the following morning, June 3, Yi deployed his force on the slopes behind Sangju and prepared to do battle with the Japanese. He sat on his horse at the front of the army, resplendent in fine armor, his general’s flag raised high. In front of him to the south was a small river and a heavy cover of forest. Beyond that lay Sangju.
Konishi’s first contingent, meanwhile, had split into two groups five kilometers southeast of Sangju. Ten thousand men under Konishi and Matsuura Shigenobu headed straight for the town and took it without a fight. The remaining force of 6,700 under So, Omura, and Goto swung north and then west, bypassing Sangju to strike directly at General Yi’s small force, which they had learned was awaiting them on the hill behind the town.
The Japanese approached the Korean army through the forest. Their scouts led the way, emerging from the trees in full view of the waiting Koreans, but well beyond the range of their bows—which in the hands of untrained farmers would not have been very far. Yi’s officers observed the movement, but remembering the beheading of the man the day before, they held their tongues. They did not want to be accused of spreading malicious rumors.
Then smoke was seen rising from beyond the forest in the direction of Sangju. General Yi did not yet know it, but the town had already fallen. He ordered one of his officers south to investigate. The man apparently was reluctant to go, for as Yu Song-nyong relates in his
Chingbirok
, “The officer mounted his horse, two foot soldiers took the bit, and they went off very slowly.” As they neared the bridge to cross the river, a shot rang out, the officer toppled off his horse, and a Japanese soldier ran out from beneath the bridge and hacked off his head.
Suddenly a mass of enemy soldiers appeared from the forest and proceeded to form up into three groups, a vanguard unit in the center backed by units on the left and the right. It was a standard Japanese battle array, the most effective way for organizing troops to have emerged from a century of civil war. The three units then began to advance in a wide and imposing arc, musketeers to the front, swordsmen and spearmen to the rear. When the distance between the two armies had closed to less than a hundred meters the musketeers began to fire into the crowd of Koreans waiting to meet them on the slopes ahead. A few more paces and the volleys began to tell, felling scores of General Yi’s untrained men as they struggled to return fire with bows they scarcely knew how to use. At fifty meters they were staring straight into the muzzles of the Japanese guns, the air was filled with cries of pain and death was all around. For most of the Koreans, simple farmers and tradesmen who had never seen a battle, it was too much. They cast down their weapons and began a panicked retreat—the signal for the swordsmen and spearmen at the rear of the Japanese formations to rush forward and finish them off. Within minutes
Yi Il’s hastily organized army was reduced to heaps of headless corpses and blood-streaked peasants fleeing in terror through the trees.
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General Yi for his part made good his escape, discarding first his horse and then his armor in his scramble up the mountain behind the killing field. His retreat soon brought him to
Choryong Pass. The county commander sent south from Seoul to defend the pass had either never arrived or had already fled—a monumental error, for Choryong presented all sorts of strategic advantages, a narrow gap in the mountains that even a small band of men could have held if they were determined and well equipped. Nor did General Yi attempt to mount any sort of defense. He raced over the crest of the mountain and down the other side, continuing his flight north to Chungju to join his superior, General Sin Ip, and leaving Choryong behind him entirely unguarded.
General Sin had assembled a sizable force at Chungju, a total of eight thousand men, mainly officers and soldiers who had fled the south in the face of the Japanese advance, augmented by units he had led down from
Seoul. Sin’s original intention had been to march this force up to Choryong Pass to make a stand, where the rocky terrain and the narrowness of the pass would work to their advantage. The unexpected appearance of a bedraggled Yi Il, shorn of his horse, his armor, and his army, caused him to change his mind. With Sangju fallen, Yi’s army annihilated, and the Japanese already marching on Choryong Pass, General Sin decided to remain at Chungju. He would do battle with the Japanese here, in an open field, not in the mountains above the town. One of his lieutenants urged him to abandon this plan and take up a position in the surrounding hills. Sin brushed the advice aside. “Our cavalry is useless in the rough terrain of the hills,” he replied. “So we must make our stand here, in the field.”
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At midday on June 6, as the Japanese were descending the mountain road from Choryong and drawing near Chungju, General Sin Ip accordingly arrayed his forces outside the town on a stretch of flat ground beside a hill called Tangumdae. In hindsight it seems a dreadful choice, a deathtrap offering no chance of retreat, hemmed in by the
South Han River behind and Tangumdae to the right. Sin has been often criticized ever since for choosing to make his stand here. His decision is regarded as a fatal symptom of his overconfidence, and of his misguided determination to use his much-vaunted cavalry units. Perhaps so. There is, however, another dimension to the coming battle that needs to be understood before Sin Ip’s measure can be fairly taken.
Tangumdae was indeed a death trap, affording the Korean army no possibility of retreat. This fact has been clear to every historian who has subsequently written about the battle. It would have been even clearer to General Sin himself. Indeed, this is possibly why he chose it. Placing troops in a hopeless situation with no avenue of escape was a long-established Chinese military strategy that had over the millennia resulted in a number of remarkable victories against seemingly insur
mountable odds. It worked on the principle that a man with no hope of escape will instinctively fight for his life with the desperate ferocity of a cornered animal, and in so doing would become an almost unbeatable warrior. As one of Korea’s few seasoned generals and as a literate man, Sin would have known of this tradition from a reading of the Chinese military classics of Shang Yang, Sun Tzu, and others, and from the histories of the ancient dynasties of Han and Qin and Tang that educated Koreans studied so diligently. He would have known that in certain desperate situations, the Chinese strategy called “fighting with a river to one’s back” was sometimes the only option a general had.
One of the earliest recorded examples of “fighting with a river to one’s back” occurred in the second century
B.C.
, when the Han Chinese commander Han Hsin positioned his troops in the bottom of a gorge with their backs to a river to meet the opposing army of the Chao. With no possibility of retreat, his men were forced to fight for their lives and in the end won a great victory. After the battle, Han’s officers asked him to explain his unusual strategy, observing that in
The Art of War
Sun Tzu clearly stated that battles should be fought with hills behind and water in front.
“This is in
The Art of War
too,” replied Han Hsin. “It is just that you have failed to notice it! Does it not say in
The Art of War
: ‘Drive them into a fatal position and they will come out alive; place them in a hopeless spot and they will survive? Moreover, I did not have at my disposal troops that I had trained and led from past times, but was forced, as the saying goes, to round up men from the market place and use them to fight with. Under such circumstances, if I had not placed them in a desperate situation where each man was obliged to fight for his own life, but had allowed them to remain in a safe place, they would have all run away. Then what good would they have been to me?”
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General Sin Ip’s situation was similar to Han Hsin’s. His force consisted for the most part of green troops and drafted peasants, poorly armed and terrified and apt to run as soon as the fighting began. And yet a victory had to be won. The alternative was unthinkable, for beyond Chungju nothing stood between the Japanese and Seoul. The coming battle would therefore have to be a do-or-die struggle, and General Sin positioned his forces to achieve that end. At Tangumdae. With a river to their backs and no avenue of retreat, they would not be able to break and run as General Yi Il had reported his own men had done from the hills behind Sangju. With the cavalry leading the way and the mass of untrained recruits forced to fight for their lives, Sin’s rabble might possibly be able to stop the Japanese advance. If not they would do the proper thing by their king and die in the attempt.
After eight days and nights of forced marches along the eastern route to Seoul, Kato Kiyomasa’s first contingent caught up to Konishi Yukinaga’s second at Mungyong, north of Sangju, where the eastern route to Seoul merges with the central route to cross the Sobaek moun
tain range. Kato, greatly angered at what he viewed as Konishi’s duplicity in racing ahead from Pusan, insisted that his second contingent now take the lead for the final push to Seoul. Konishi refused. The two contingents, a total of something less than forty thousand men (both Konishi and Kato would have left garrisons at the principal towns they had taken), thus began the stiff climb into the mountains toward Choryong Pass in a spirit of mutual hostility. They traversed the pass without encountering any resistance and were down the other side late in the evening of June 5. The city of Chungju lay straight ahead, and with it, according to a captured Korean, a substantial army consisting of “many generals of valour, six or seven thousand troops, and many archery experts.”
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It was at Chungju that Kato intended to exact his revenge. If Konishi insisted on leading the way to
Seoul, so be it, let him lead. Kato accordingly halted his forces and camped well south of the town, letting his rival forge ahead alone to meet the waiting Koreans. He fully expected that Konishi would get himself into trouble by trying to take on Sin Ip’s army single-handed and would require rescuing, making himself look foolish and incompetent while at the same time handing Kato the chance to earn glory by rushing to his aid. That, anyway, was the plan.
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Konishi was very obliging. He took the opportunity Kato handed him and rushed ahead toward Chungju. His forces approached the city along a valley from the southeast. As at Sangju, they separated into two groups a few kilometers short of the town, So and Konishi breaking left and the others to the right. As they neared Tangumdae they fanned out farther, until they were arrayed in a vast arc facing General Sin and his force of eight thousand.
It was two o’clock in the afternoon of June 6. Konishi divided his force into three main units, 10,000 men under himself and Matsuura forming the vanguard in the center, So Yoshitoshi’s 5,000-man contingent swinging around to the left, and 3,700 men under Arima, Omura, and Goto branching to the right. Then, with musketeers at the front and swordsmen and spearmen bringing up the rear, they advanced on the Koreans crowded in a mass at Tangumdae. General Sin’s forces were soon being torn to pieces by flying lead, men falling everywhere in extraordinary numbers. The Japanese attack was so unexpectedly ferocious that a wave of panic spread through the jostling ranks of the Koreans, driving men to turn and run and leading to a general rout. General Sin managed to lead his cavalry forward in a single desperate charge, but musket fire stopped his mounted warriors before they could break the enemy lines. Soon the ground of Tangumdae was littered with bloodied Koreans, writhing horses, and discarded spears and flails and swords, and the future of warfare was made clear to Sin Ip. Like Yi Il at Sangju, he and several of his commanders spurred their horses away from the scene of the disaster and escaped with their lives. The rest of the Korean army scattered in every direction, thrashing through the waters at the back of Tangumdae, floundering through the rice paddies on either side in a desperate bid to get away. Most did not get far. They were methodically run down and cut to pieces by the Japanese sword and spear corps, which had moved to the fore as soon as the enemy was in full retreat and reduced to an easy target.
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