Authors: Samuel Hawley
Konishi Yukinaga’s group led the Japanese assault. Kwon Yul waited until they were within range, then beat his commander’s drum three times to signal the attack. Every Korean weapon was fired at once, bows, chongtong, hwacha, and rock cannons, raking Konishi’s ranks and driving his men back. Ishida Mitsunari was the next to the attack. His force too was driven back, and Ishida himself was injured. Next up was Kuroda Nagamasa, the Christian commander of the third contingent, otherwise known by his baptismal name Damien. He had been thwarted once before by Koreans fighting behind walls, at the Battle of Yonan the previous year. This time he took a more cautious approach, positioning musketeers atop makeshift towers so that they could fire into the fortress while the rest of his force held back. A fierce exchange of fire ensued; then Kuroda’s men too were forced to retreat.
The Japanese had now attacked Haengju three times and had failed even to penetrate the fortress’s outer palisade of stakes. Young Ukita Hideie, determined to make a breakthrough in his, the fourth charge, managed to smash a hole in the obstacle and got near the inner wall. Then he was wounded and had to fall back, leaving a trail of casualties behind. The next unit to attack, Kikkawa Hiroie’s, poured through the gap Ukita’s forces had opened and was soon attacking Haengju’s inner wall, the last line of defense between the Japanese and Kwon Yul’s troops. The fighting now was at arm’s length, with masked warriors attempting to slash their way past the defenders lining the barricades, while the Koreans fought back with everything they had—swords, spears, arrows, stones, boiling water, even handfuls of ashes thrown into the attackers’ eyes. As the fighting reached its peak no sound came from Kwon Yul’s drum. The Korean commander had abandoned drumstick and tradition in favor of his sword and was now fighting alongside his men. At one point the Japanese heaped dried grass along the base of Haengju’s log walls and tried to set them ablaze. The Koreans doused the flames with water before they could take hold. In the seventh attack led by Kobayakawa Takakage, the Japanese knocked down some of the log pilings and opened a hole in the fortress’s inner wall. The Koreans managed to hold them back long enough for the logs to be repositioned.
As the afternoon wore on the Korean defenders grew exhausted and their supply of arrows dwindled dangerously low. The women within the fort are said to have gathered stones in their wide skirts to supply the men along the walls. This traditional type of skirt is still known as a
Haengju chima
(Haengju skirt) in remembrance of this day. But stones alone were not enough to repel the Japanese for long. Then, when all seemed lost, Korean naval commander Yi Bun arrived on the Han River at the rear of the fortress with two ships laden with ten thousand arrows. With these the defenders of Haengju were able to continue the fight until sundown, successfully repelling an eighth attack, then a ninth.
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Finally, as the sun dipped below the horizon out beyond the
Yellow Sea, the fighting petered out and did not resume. The Japanese had suffered too many casualties to continue. Their dead numbered into the many hundreds, and their wounded, including three important commanders, Ukita Hideie, Ishida Mitsunari, and Kikkawa Hiroie, were many times more. They had in fact been dealt a terrible defeat, the most serious loss on land so far at the hands of the Koreans. Throughout the evening the survivors gathered what bodies they could, heaped them into piles, and set them alight. Then they turned around and walked back to Seoul. One Japanese officer in the disheartened assembly would later liken the scene beside the Han River that day to the
sanzu no kawa
, the “river of hell.”
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When they were gone, Kwon Yul and his men came out and recov
ered those bodies that the Japanese had been unable to retrieve, cut them into pieces, and hung them from the log palings of their fort. These grisly trophies were an indication of how much had changed for the Koreans since the beginning of the war, of how the previous ten months had transformed them from shell-shocked, indecisive “long sleeves” into bloodthirsty warriors, bent on revenge. The Japanese would not be able to hold their ground for long against such grim determination, not with their dwindling numbers and growing problems with supplies. Hemmed in by a foe of evidently growing strength, willing to endure enormous hardship and loss to drive them out, the withdrawal of the Japanese from Seoul became certain, with or without the intervention of the Ming Chinese.
Sooner or later, Hideyoshi’s troops would have to march south.
Spring—arguably the most beautiful season in Korea. After a harsh winter of ice and snow and cold north winds, the warming weather and first green shoots come as a welcome relief. Clusters of cosmos rise up long-stemmed from the earth, painting country lanes across the land in pastel shades of lavender and pink. The forsythia bloom, and the magnolia trees too, their white flowers so smooth and creamy they look good enough to eat. The farmers head back to their fields to begin another cycle of planting and promise, while yangban gentlemen look on with pen in hand from their shaded stoops, trying to encapsulate in a few choice lines the sublimity of it all.
The spring of 1593 was different.
Korea was now into its second year of war, and for many of its citizens the world as they knew it had come to an end. Cities and towns lay in ruins from Pusan to Pyongyang. Families were scattered, children abandoned, the weak and the elderly left behind. Refugees, driven either by the loss of their homes or terror of the Japanese, wandered from place to place in search of food. But there was little for them to find, for fields had been abandoned throughout the land, and cultivation had almost ceased. Starvation gripped the peninsula, and soon a full-fledged famine.
The Japanese army was suffering as well. The long, cold winter, so much harsher than anything the men of Kyushu, Shikoku, and western
Honshu had experienced before, had taken its toll through exposure, frostbite, and fatigue. Garrisons throughout the country were chronically short of food. Little could be sent from Japan due to the blockade of the Korean navy, while guerrilla activity made it increasingly dangerous for foraging parties to venture into the countryside in search of food. At garrisons from Pusan to Seoul, Japanese soldiers were hungry and disheartened, and wanted to go home.
The situation was nowhere worse than in the capital of
Seoul, now the most northerly point on the peninsula occupied by the Japanese, connected to the south by a tenuously held corridor of territory along the main road. No fewer than 53,000 men were encamped there, no fewer than 53,000 mouths to feed. But food was running short. The situation became critical when a small unit of Chinese and Korean commandos launched a covert operation against the large warehouse complex at Yongsan, just south of the city wall on the banks of the Han River, and succeeded in burning it to the ground. The loss of grain suffered in this raid left the Japanese with food for less than a month and little choice but to commandeer grain from local citizens to keep themselves alive.
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In addition to the prospect of starvation, the Japanese in
Seoul were also faced with a pestilence that was beginning to decimate their already depleted ranks, the spread of which was no doubt encouraged by the bloated corpses of civilians and livestock that had come to litter the streets. The Buddhist monk Zetaku, a member of second contingent daimyo Nabeshima Naoshige’s entourage, recorded the following passage in his diary from these desperate days: “Although corpses of men, women, oxen and horses were piled up in the same place, no one bothered to bury them. The odor filled the heaven and the earth. We Japanese were obliged to stay under these circumstances from March to April [i.e., the third and fourth months of the lunar calendar]. The air became stale with the odor as the heat of the weather increased. Consequently, a great number of men came to be attacked by fever and died.”
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At invasion headquarters at
Nagoya, Toyotomi Hideyoshi received news of the stalled offensive with dissatisfaction. Not fully appreciating the difficulties facing his armies, he ascribed the lack of progress to lack of enthusiasm on the part of his commanders, and wrote urging them to shake off their inertia. In any event he himself would soon be crossing over to Korea to “take charge of everything personally, and then make a triumphal return.”
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Since postponing in July of 1592 his planned departure for the mainland, Hideyoshi had consistently spoken of the third month of 1593—April by the Western calendar—as the time when he would set sail, for he had been told that the seas between Kyushu and Pusan would be calm then and safe to cross. In early 1593 he sent two representatives ahead to
Seoul to remind his field commanders of this, assuring them that he would soon be on his way with 200,000 reinforcements under such daimyo luminaries as Tokugawa Ieyasu, Asano Nagamasa, Gamo Ujisato, and Maeda Toshiie.
The arrival of Hideyoshi at the head of a 200,000-man army, so eagerly anticipated in the opening weeks of the war, was viewed with apprehension by the Japanese high command in March of 1593. On the twenty-ninth of the month Supreme Commander Ukita Hideie called a meeting of all the daimyo in
Seoul to discuss their concerns. It was generally agreed that the dispatch of additional troops to Korea at this time would only exacerbate an already bad situation, for if they were unable to feed the men currently serving there, how could they accommodate an additional 200,000 mouths? A letter to the taiko was accordingly drafted and signed by all the daimyo present, asking him to delay his planned April crossing in light of the critical shortage of supplies. In Seoul, Hideyoshi was informed, troops were subsisting on gruel made from scraps of anything that could be found. They could hold out there at best until the middle of May. Supplies were also short in Pusan, where Hideyoshi proposed to land, and the prospects for obtaining more looked poor until the Korean harvest, such as it was, had ripened and could be commandeered some time later in the year.
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The back of the Korean invasion was now well and truly broken. Even Kobayakawa Takakage, one of the most hawkish daimyo in
Korea, knew this, and signed his name on the letter to Hideyoshi. Kato Kiyomasa was persuaded to do likewise when he arrived in Seoul a few days later from his retreat out of the north. But what came next? They could not remain in Seoul indefinitely and wait for the situation to change. If they attempted to do so they would starve. There was only one practical course of action: they had to retreat to the south. First contingent commander Konishi Yukinaga accordingly sent a message north to Commander in Chief Li Rusong expressing a desire to negotiate a settlement. Li, who wanted exactly the same thing, replied with the demand that the Japanese evacuate Seoul and move their armies to the south. He would send envoy Shen Weijing down from Pyongyang to meet with them and work out the details.
Ukita, Konishi, Ishida, and the other daimyo in
Seoul were forthcoming in their reports to Hideyoshi about the difficulties they were facing. As usual, however, the “facts” were reported in a way that would not upset the taiko. While the bad news of food shortages and stubborn local resistance was not kept from him, the overall situation was made to appear somewhat rosy by placing Ming China’s willingness to negotiate at the fore. As Hideyoshi was led to understand it, the Chinese had been dealt a severe blow in the Battle of Pyokje and now were ready to negotiate a settlement and make concessions. But first the Japanese would have to pull their forces back toward Pusan as a show of good faith. Hideyoshi, ever willing to avoid a fight if his ends could be achieved by less costly means, thus gave his written authorization for the withdrawal, while still continuing to believe that some semblance of victory could be achieved in Korea and that China might yet be coerced into bowing to him.
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King Sonjo and his Korean government in exile had by this time left Uiju on the Chinese border to begin what would turn out to be a six-month journey back to Seoul. In the middle of May they would arrive at Sukchon, fifty kilometers to the north of
Pyongyang. In July they would move farther south to Kangso, a short distance to the west of the city, and in September on to Hwangju and then Haeju, halfway between Pyongyang and Seoul.
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Having now been relegated to the role of minor players in their own war, Sonjo and his ministers were kept in the dark by supreme Ming commander Li Rusong as to his true intentions. Most important, they were not informed that Li had decided after the debacle at Pyokje to avoid further battles and spare his troops, and that he was now intent on achieving the withdrawal of the Japanese from
Korea through negotiation alone. The Koreans were certainly aware that Pyokje had shaken the Ming commander, and they could not help but notice as he retreated from Seoul all the way back to Pyongyang that he was reticent to meet the enemy in battle. The stakes were too high, however, for the Koreans to give up on this savior sent by the Celestial Throne. During the coming weeks and months they would continue to hope and to expect that Li would rouse himself again to action and lead his Chinese army in a renewed thrust south, dislodging the Japanese first from Seoul, then driving them back to Pusan and into the sea.
In anticipation of this coming rout, King Sonjo dispatched orders south to Cholla Left Navy Commander Yi Sun-sin to “intercept passage of the enemy retreating by sea and annihilate his...transports and war vessels.”
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If Yi could ambush and destroy the ships attempting to ferry the retreating Japanese back home from Pusan, the Koreans could still snatch the total victory that they so craved, the total destruction of every hated “robber” and “dwarf” who had had the temerity to set foot on their soil.
Yi Sun-sin received these orders on March 7. He put to sea the very next day, leading his battleships east into the channel between Koje Island and the coast, where he had beaten the Japanese navy in the Battle of Hansan-do in August of the previous year. Here he rendezvoused with the Kyongsang Right Navy under Won Kyun, a man that Yi was coming thoroughly to despise for his incompetence, cowardice, and love of drink. Soon after Yi arrived, Won launched into a tirade against Yi Ok-ki, the absent commander of the Cholla Right Navy. Where was Yi Ok-ki? Won wanted to know. Why was he late for the rendezvous? If he didn’t appear soon Won would go ahead and lead his ships east to fight the Japanese by himself. Yi Sun-sin tried to calm his volatile colleague with assurances that Yi Ok-ki had farther to come than either of them, and that he would soon arrive. And sure enough, at noon the next day, the Cholla Right Navy hove into view—although Yi Sun-sin was disappointed to count fewer than forty ships.
For the next two days heavy rains kept the hundred-odd vessels of the combined Korean fleet riding at anchor in the sheltered channel off
Koje Island. Then, as the weather cleared on March 12, they continued east to the waters between Kadok Island and the mainland where the Japanese, Kato Yoshiaki and Wakizaka Yasuharu among them, had established defenses and stationed ships to protect the approaches to Pusan. Here, Yi wrote in his dispatch to the throne, “we waited for the evacuation of the Japanese major units before the big drive of the Ming Chinese army.”
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For the next several days he sent small groups of vessels back and forth in full view of the enemy positions overlooking the channel at Ungchon, hoping to lure their ships into open water, near to where the bulk of the Korean navy, including at least two turtle ships, lay waiting. On the twentieth they had some luck: ten Japanese vessels took the bait and charged out of the neck of the inlet to attack, and were soon surrounded by the Korean navy. Yi’s men “poured down arrows on the shrieking Japanese, who fell dead in countless numbers and had their heads cut off by the score.”
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After that the Japanese at Ungchon became more cautious. They kept their ships moored close to shore at the head of the narrow inlet and their men ensconced in fortifications along the beach and in caves in the surrounding hills. Yi Sun-sin therefore decided to replace his tra
ditional “lure into ambush” strategy with something more aggressive: a coordinated attack from both the sea and the land. He first contacted Kim Song-il, now high commissioner for Kyongsang Province, urging him to send government troops against enemy shore positions so that they would be driven onto their boats and out to sea, where Yi and his battleships could destroy them. (Kim, it will be recalled, was the vice-envoy of the Korean mission who came back from Japan in early 1592 assuring everyone that war would never come. He would become infected with plague and die in a little more than a month.) Kim replied that he was unable to oblige; he was too busy preparing for the arrival of the Chinese army and had few troops to spare. He instead offered the services of “Red Coat General” Kwak Jae-u and his small guerrilla army. This did not suit Yi’s plans, so he instead went ahead and organized a combined land and sea operation with his own forces, replacing the idea of a land-based assault with an amphibious landing by groups of monk-soldiers and uibyong civilian volunteers under his command.
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For the next three days strong winds lashed the southern coast, forcing the Korean navy to shelter in a cove. Then, on the twenty-fourth, Commander Yi led his navy once again to the waters off Ungchon and put his planned operation into effect. Two groups of vessels filled with warrior-monks and civilian volunteers separated from the main fleet, one to the east and the other to the west, to make landings on either side of the Japanese positions. As expected, this threw the Japanese shore defenses into confusion and drew out a number of enemy ships from their inaccessible inlet anchorages to repel the invaders. Soon a large portion of the Japanese fleet lay exposed in open water, presenting Yi with the opportunity he had been waiting for. The order went out to lean to the oars and the Korean navy raced to the attack. While the bulk of Yi’s battleships concentrated on the Japanese vessels milling about in the bay, blasting away with cannons and “giving them a terrible beating with wholesale slaughter,” fifteen other ships made a run against those enemy vessels still riding at their moor
ings, burning them where they lay with showers of fire arrows. The land assault, meanwhile, came off without a hitch. “[O]ur valiant monk-soldiers jumped up with brandishing swords and thrusting spears and charged into the enemy positions, shooting guns and arrows from morning till night until the enemy fell back, leaving behind countless war dead and wounded.” This land attack resulted in the release of five Korean prisoners of war, who reported that for the past month some sort of contagion had been sweeping through the Japanese camp—one more piece of good news to cap an already successful day.
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