The Imjin War (62 page)

Finally, when Won’s men were thoroughly exhausted, the Japanese fleet turned one last time and attacked in earnest. In the fero
cious charge that followed, thirty Korean ships were boarded and burned or otherwise lost. Those vessels surviving the assault were soon scattered across the water in a disorganized rout, their terrified crews sculling through the darkness on adrenaline alone.

For the Koreans the disaster was only beginning to unfold. Upon reaching
Kadok Island, Won’s captains put in to allow their parched crews to run ashore and fetch water. The Koreans knew that a large Japanese garrison was on this island. Won’s men evidently assumed they could drink and get away before the enemy had time to respond. They were mistaken. They leaped off their ships and rushed ashore in search of water, and ran straight into an attack by three thousand of Shimazu Yoshihiro’s men. An additional four hundred of Won’s men were killed in this engagement and several more vessels destroyed.

From Kadok-do the by now demoralized remnants of the Korean navy continued to retreat west, around the north end of Koje Island and south into Chilchonnyang, the strait between Koje and the small island of Chilchon. It was not a safe place to stop. The channel was too narrow to allow the heavy Korean battleships room to maneu
ver should the Japanese attack. Commander Won nevertheless would remain immobile here with his fleet for an entire week, incapacitated by feelings of depression and rage. Upon reaching Koje-do, Won received a severe dressing-down from his superior Kwon Yul, who had come out to meet him from his nearby headquarters at Kosong. The commander in chief was so livid over news of the defeat and losses Won had suffered at Pusan and Kadok-do that at one point in the encounter he struck the commander—common enough in the Korean military when reprimanding a soldier, but a rare insult when inflicted upon an officer of Won’s high rank. Won was so incensed by the blow that he retired to his flagship, took out his bottle, and refused to see anyone, even his own captains. The Korean navy thus sat idle in Chilchon Strait until August 27, deprived of its leader, waiting for the end.

The Japanese navy, meanwhile, was not resting on its laurels. Shortly after the first clash in the waters off
Pusan, squadrons of Japanese ships began moving west in pursuit of the Koreans. These units, under naval commanders Todo Takatora, Wakizaka Yasuharu, Shimazu Toyohisa, Kato Yoshiaki, and Konishi Yukinaga, met on August 22 at the port of Angolpo to plan joint action against the remainder of the Korean fleet, which they had ascertained was now holed up in Chilchon Strait fifteen kilometers southwest. At the same time Shimazu Yoshihiro was ferrying two thousand of his men from their base on Kadok-do to the neighboring island of Koje. Once ashore he marched them across the neck of the island and arrayed them along the northwest coast, overlooking the Korean navy at anchor in the channel below. The Koreans would now be hemmed in when the final attack came, by Japanese ships before them and a Japanese army behind.

In the
strait of Chilchonnyang Won Kyun and his commanders knew nothing of this. Won, his confidence shaken by the Japanese and his pride deeply wounded by the blow from Kwon Yul, remained in seclusion aboard his flagship, lost in a stupor of anger and drink. As the days passed he made little attempt to draw up a plan or rally his men. He also neglected to gather intelligence on enemy movements from the farmers and fishermen residing along the coast. As the hours ticked by the Korean navy sat placidly at anchor, paralyzed, leaderless, blind to the gathering storm.

That storm broke in the early hours of August 28. The Japanese fleet at Angolpo under Konishi, Todo, Wakizaka, Kato Yoshiaki, and Shimazu Toyohisa, numbering as many as five hundred ships, sculled under a full moon the short distance to the north end of Chilchonnyang where the Korean navy lay. Shortly after midnight three guns were fired to signal the attack. With that the lead ships of the armada moved into the strait. The Koreans, unaccustomed to night warfare and badly demoralized from their earlier mauling, were soon overwhelmed. One ship after another was closed with and boarded, the terrified men aboard being shot with muskets and arrows or cut down by sword and the vessel set alight. Those ships that escaped destruction by beaching on
Koje Island were similarly destroyed by the Japanese troops lying in ambush there, as were the hundreds of survivors who managed to leap into the water and swim to shore. Only a few vessels made it to the south end of the strait and the open water beyond, but even these were soon chased down and destroyed. Nabeshima Naoshige’s son Katsushige would later describe the sight of all these burning Korean ships as even finer than the view of cherry blossoms at Yoshino.
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By dawn almost the entire Korean fleet had been burned or sunk, and Commander Won Kyun was dead. After a desperate struggle, he retreated south down
Chilchon Strait and then west toward the mainland with the Japanese in pursuit. When they reached land Won’s crew beached his flagship and raced into the hills to save their lives. According to one of his men who survived to make a report, Won was too old to keep up to the rest of his fleeing crew and soon sat down to rest under a pine tree, sword in hand. When this witness last looked back, five or six Japanese soldiers were nearing the commander, their swords drawn. It is assumed that Won Kyun’s head was cut off—although his body was never recovered so just how he was killed remains unknown. Also killed in action was Cholla Right Navy Commander Yi Ok-ki, Yi Sun-sin’s stalwart right hand from the first days of the war. He had hung on in Chilchon Strait to the bitter end. Then, with the annihilation of the fleet certain, he is said to have jumped into the sea and drowned himself rather than allow the Japanese to take his head. Chungchong Naval Commander Choi Ho met a similar end.
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The only senior officer to escape the battle was Kyong
sang Right Navy Commander Bae Sol. During the week of idleness leading up to the end, Bae had approached his superior Won Kyun and urged him to move the fleet to a safer location. When Won refused, Bae quietly shifted the twelve ships under his command to a secluded inlet farther down the strait, and when the Japanese attacked he fled.
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This act of cowardice would earn Bae the enmity of many, including Yi Sun-sin. It would also serve as a counterpoint in subsequent appraisals of Won Kyun, it being pointed out by at least one chronicler that while Won was of course responsible for the defeat at Chilchonnyang, he at least had died in battle, unlike others who ran away.
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After fleeing Chilchonnyang, Bae Sol raced south to the Korean navy’s home port on
Hansan Island to burn the camps, destroy weapons and supplies, and move everyone left there off the island before the Japanese arrived. He then shepherded his small squadron of vessels further west to safety. This tiny force, a total of just twelve ships, was nearly all that was left of the Korean navy—all that was left to block the Japanese armada from entering the Yellow Sea.

*
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News of the destruction of the Korean navy was greeted with enthusi
asm back in Japan. In the letters of congratulation he wrote to the commanders involved, Toyotomi Hideyoshi thanked them for “doing the nation a great service.”
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Todo Takatoro was singled out as deserv
ing particular praise, his squadron having reportedly destroyed some sixty enemy vessels. Shimazu Toyohisa claimed to have bagged an additional one hundred and sixty smaller craft, a figure he probably achieved by including small civilian junks and fishing boats that had been rounded up and burned.
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The news was received with dismay in
Seoul. Just hours after the first reports of the disaster arrived on September 3, King Sonjo summoned his ministers and representatives from the Border Defense Council to discuss the situation and decide how best to respond. Sonjo began by expressing his dissatisfaction with the course of action the navy had pursued. “We should have concentrated only on protecting our naval base at Hansan-do,” he said. “This disaster occurred because Won Kyun was pushed to attack too soon.” At first Sonjo was careful not to mention from where this pressure to attack had come, but eventually his true feelings came out: “This happened because the commander in chief [Kwon Yul] put so much pressure on Won to attack.”

But recriminations were useless now, as Sonjo himself acknowl
edged. “This is in the past,” he said. “Now we have to select a new supreme naval commander and collect whatever ships are still left in the area. And we have to report this to China.” The representatives of the Border Defense Council remained silent, evidently unwilling to confront this central issue of whom to choose to replace Won Kyun. Finally Minister of Punishments Kim Myong-won and Minister of War Yi Hang-bok said what everyone else knew must be done. They recommended that Yi Sun-sin be rehabilitated and returned to his former command. King Sonjo readily complied. The order reappointing Yi Sun-sin supreme naval commander was drawn up that same day and dispatched immediately to the south.
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*
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Yi Sun-sin, counting the days in his mountain hut at Chogye near the south
western coast of Kyongsang Province, received first word of the fate of the Korean navy as night was falling on August 28. The news was brought to him by an exhausted sailor, naked and bleeding, who told of “a thousand Japanese vessels” in the waters off Pusan and of the subsequent scattering and retreat of Won Kyun’s navy. Subsequent reports revealed that the battle had been a rout. According to one, “Won Kyun hardly saw the enemy before he ran away to land first, followed by other commanders and chief officers, deserting their ships and crews.”
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Water. Thunder. Great disaster. The signs in the Book of Divination had been correct.

On August 30 Commander in Chief Kwon Yul rode up from his nearby headquarters to visit Yi and discuss possible courses of action. With the limited information they had, they were unable to reach any decision as to how best to meet the Japanese thrust into Cholla that they both knew now was coming. Finally Yi proposed that he embark westward on an unofficial inspection tour along the coast to determine the state of the region’s defenses and in turn how best to proceed. Kwon agreed. Yi gathered his small entourage of loyal followers and set off that same day on a journey that would cover more than seven hundred kilometers and last thirty days.
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Two weeks later, during a stop on the border between Kyongsang and Cholla, Yi Sun-sin had a dream. In it he saw portents that an august command would soon arrive from the king. He was thus not surprised when an emissary arrived from
Seoul the next day, bearing a royal order reappointing him to the post of supreme naval commander of the three provinces of Kyongsang, Cholla, and Chungchong. “I prostrated myself before the written royal orders,” Yi wrote in his diary, “and presented...my sealed and waxed acknowledgement of their receipt.

“I then started on my journey without delay, taking the road to Tuch’i.”
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It was now September 1597. The Korean navy under Won Kyun had been destroyed the previous month, leaving the sea route clear around Korea’s southwestern tip and into the Yellow Sea. The rice fields of southern Korea were also ready to harvest, offering the prospect of plenty of food. It was therefore time for Hideyoshi’s army to begin its land offensive, the big push north from Pusan.

Hideyoshi planned this second offensive in a very different manner from the first. In 1592 he had envisioned co-opting the Koreans into his empire with as little violence as possible, and so ordered his commanders to treat the locals with as much kindness as circumstances allowed. Hideyoshi harbored no such illusions in 1597. The Koreans, he now knew, were too stubbornly independent to be eased into his polity with a restrained approach. The only way to deal with them was with an iron fist. His orders this time were to “mow down everyone universally, without discriminating between young and old, men and women, the clergy and the laity—high-ranking soldiers on the battlefield, that goes without saying, but also the hill folk, down to the poorest and meanest—and send the heads to Japan.”
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This request for heads, the usual trophies of war, was not meant to be taken literally. They were much too bulky to be shipped to Japan considering the numbers and the distance involved. But Hideyoshi did want evidence of the accomplishments of his army, proof that it was doing what he had told it to do. His troops were accordingly ordered to cut off the noses of the people they killed and to submit them at one of the designated collection points that would be set up. Here they were to be counted by specially appointed inspectors, then salted and packed in casks and shipped to Japan.

The land offensive of 1597 thus was to be undertaken with a degree of ruthlessness that went beyond anything seen in 1592. As a prelude, the commanders of Hideyoshi’s armies issued proclamations to the Koreans in the regions they were about to invade stating that farmers who did not return to their fields would be hunted down and killed. Public officials would be executed as a matter of course, together with their wives and children, and their houses would be burned. Rewards were promised to anyone betraying an official attempting to hide. The common people, then, were to be allowed to live only if they did exactly as told. Everyone else was to be “wiped out.”
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It would be a campaign of terror and extermination similar to that launched by the Nazis in occupied
Europe in 1939. The armies of both Hitler and Hideyoshi, observes historian Jurgis Elisonas, “suffered under the delusion that they could keep a resistance movement from forming by terrorizing the populace into collaboration.”
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The plan was to move inland in two main thrusts meeting in northern
Cholla Province, one veering toward the right, the second to the left. Two great armies were organized for the purpose: a 65,300-man Right Army under the overall command of Mori Hidemoto and a 49,600-man Left Army under Ukita Hideie—a combined invasion force of 114,900 men. 

Ukita’s Left Army was the first to embark. Its objective: Namwon, held by allied Chinese and Korean forces. Troop movements began on September 11, Ukita marching west from
Pusan as far as the Cholla border, then northwest toward the city. Other units followed by ship from camps at Pusan, Angolpo, Kadok Island, and points between, among them forces under Konishi Yukinaga, So Yoshitoshi, Shimazu Yoshihiro, and Hachizuka Iemasa. They made their way to Koje Island, then proceeded farther west into previously Korean-held territory, past Namhae Island and into Kwangyang Bay and finally up the Somjin River as far as their ships could go. When these forces stepped ashore the men were still fresh and only ten kilometers from Namwon. The one concern was the horses. The close confinement aboard the ships had left a large number of mounts unfit for immediate use. Konishi and his fellow commanders pastured the animals in nearby fields and camped beside the river to wait for them to recover their strength.

Figure 8: Japanese Invasion Forces, September 159
7
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* Commander in Chief

Not long into this period of convalescence, a report was received from a local priest that twenty thousand enemy troops were garrisoned inside Namwon, with twenty thousand reinforcements on the way. Konishi and his comrades held a meeting to consider their options in light of this information and decided that they should attack Namwon immediately, before these supposed reinforcements arrived, even though a number of their horses remained lame and unfit.
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They broke camp and marched the short distance to the city on September 23, where they joined Ukita Hideie in surrounding the fortress.

Fifty thousand Japanese soldiers now stood poised to attack Namwon. They were not faced by twenty thousand defenders as the priest had claimed. Gathered inside the fortress were only three thousand Ming troops led by General Yang Yuan, a thousand Koreans under Cholla Army Commander Yi Bok-nam, plus a number of civilians. The fortifications that the allied Chinese and Korean forces defended nevertheless demanded respect. The first obstacle the Japanese had to face was a deep trench encircling the fort. The bottom of the trench was lined with spiky-limbed tree trunks, making it doubly difficult to cross. Then there were the defenses of the fort itself, stout stone walls nowhere less than four meters high interspersed with towered gates rising higher still. To overcome these obstacles and take Namwon would require skill and guile in addition to force. Otherwise casualties would be unacceptably high.

The tentative opening moves of the battle were made that same day, September 23. A small force of one hundred Japanese soldiers were the first to approach the fortress. They spread out in a wide arc and began peppering the walls with musket balls, drawing fire from the defenders within so that the daimyo commanders observing from the rear could determine the enemy’s positioning and strength.

The Japanese began to attack in earnest the following day. The first obstacle to clear was the trench. Working under heavy cannon and arrow and musket fire from the fortress, units of Japanese began filling in the trench at several locations with straw and earth. When these crossing points were complete, large numbers of troops began streaming across to take cover among the remains of the houses clustered outside the fortress itself. General Yang Yuan had previously ordered these structures burned, but the smoking ruins still provided adequate protection.

Figure 9: The Second Invasion, 1597-98

A lull occurred in the fighting the next day, September 25, the day of the lunar equinox and the harvest festival of Chusok. Perhaps seeking to take advantage of the occasion, the Japanese raised a shout that they wished to talk. Yang Yuan sent out a man to see what they wanted. He returned, as Yang undoubtedly had expected he would, with a letter demanding the fortress’s surrender. Yang refused. With that the Japanese resumed their attack, stronger this time than before, and continuing on into the night despite a heavy rain.

Throughout these days of fighting the Japanese commanders outside the fortress continued to scrutinize the walls and assess the strength and disposition of the forces within. Chinese troops were posi
tioned at the east, west, and south of the enclosure; Korean forces guarded the north. They were growing exhausted by now, their arrows were running low, and the determination of some was beginning to wear thin. Ukita, Konishi, and their comrades correctly surmised that General Yang would expect an attack to come at those places where the walls were lowest and that he had accordingly stationed his men most thickly at these points. It was therefore decided to attack the wall at its highest point, by the fortress’s south gate, where few soldiers were likely to be. To prepare for this assault, the Japanese commanders sent their men into the nearby fields to cut and bundle up the rice stalks that were still green and wet from the previous day’s rain. The allies within Namwon noted these bundles being stockpiled outside but could not fathom what they were for. They found out the next day. When darkness had fallen on September 26, and before the moon was up, the Japanese unleashed a two-hour barrage of musket and cannon fire against Namwon, forcing the defenders to keep their heads down and deafening them with the noise. Under cover of this distraction, parties of men stole up to the wall and quietly began to erect a massive pile of straw, heaping it up against the stones until a spongy ramp led straight to the top. When the barrage finally stopped and the Chinese and Koreans were able to peek out, the ramp was complete and Japanese troops were storming over the walls, samurai Matsuura Shigenobu reportedly leading the way. The allies fought back as best they could, but were unable to drive the Japanese back or set fire to the pile of moist rice stalks they were using as a ladder. Soon the fortress was filled with thousands of Japanese attackers, samurai warriors at the lead, eager for the glory of hand-to-hand combat.
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Okochi Hidemoto, author of the
Chosen ki
, was among them. After cutting off the heads of two men, he recalled that this was “the day dedicated to his tutelary kami (Hachiman) dai Bosatsu, [so] he put down his bloodstained blade and, pressing together his crimson-stained palms, bowed in veneration toward far-off Japan. He cut off the noses and placed them inside a paper handkerchief which he put into his armour.” Shortly thereafter Okochi brought down a third enemy warrior on a horse, this one with a thrust of his blade to the groin. The man fell off the far side of his mount into a group of nearby samurai, who promptly began to hack at his neck. Okochi instantly intervened, explaining his groin thrust and claiming the head for himself.
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By this time Ming commander Yang Yuan was gone. When he saw that Namwon was about to fall, he led three hundred men in a retreat out the for
tress’s west gate. They had to fight their way out through strong Japanese resistance. Yang himself was wounded twice by musket fire, and only one hundred of his men survived. Placing their commander on a stretcher, this small band managed to get clear of the battle and raced north. They reached Chonju to find it deserted. The Ming general assigned to hold the city, Chen Yuzhong, had not only ignored the call for help that Yang had sent him on the eve of the battle, he had fled north upon hearing of the fall of Namwon. Yang and his party thus continued on to Seoul. They arrived in the capital the following week.