Authors: Samuel Hawley
The Japanese tried to take the upper hand at dawn, advancing against the Chinese in crane-wing formation, attempting to crush them within two enveloping wings. They failed. The Chinese, although hard pressed by musket fire, eventually drove Kuroda’s men back with arrows and light cannons and muskets of their own, then charged and sent them scattering in retreat back toward the south. An additional force of two thousand cavalrymen sent from
Seoul by Yang Hao arrived on the scene just in time to swing the balance and join in the chase. While Ma’s exhausted men sat down to rest, these fresh cavalrymen galloped down the road after the retreating Japanese, adding a few more enemy heads to the tally before finally turning back. When it was all over the total number of Japanese dead was estimated at between five and six hundred. Chinese casualties likely ran into the hundreds as well.
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The Battle of Chiksan had not been a crushing defeat for the Japanese. They lost no more than six hundred men and inflicted significant casualties in return upon the Ming Chinese. The battle nevertheless marked the turning point in Hideyoshi’s second invasion of
Korea, the point of his army’s farthest northern advance before turning back toward the south. It was not a rout, but rather a carefully considered strategic retreat. The Japanese fell back at their own pace, taking time as they went to inflict still more death and destruction on the Korean people as neither the Choson nor the Ming army made a serious attempt to pursue. They were prompted to turn back mainly by the now-certain knowledge that a large Ming army was assembling in the north and would soon be moving their way. To take on this expeditionary force in their present situation, the Japanese knew, would be foolhardy, spread out as they were in towns and cities all across the provinces of Kyongsang, Cholla, and Chungchong. There was also the approaching Korean winter to consider and the attendant difficulty of obtaining supplies, a difficulty that would be further exacerbated by the Korean navy under a reinstated Yi Sun-sin, which was about to deny Japanese ships access to the supply route north through the Yellow Sea. Taking these considerations together, there was only one sensible course of action for the Japanese army to take: they had to fall back toward the south.
Yi Sun-sin was halfway through his tour of inspection of Korea’s southern coastal defenses when the messenger from Seoul caught up with him, bearing the royal order reappointing him supreme naval commander of Kyongsang, Cholla, and Chungchong Provinces. The date was September 13, 1597. At the time of Yi’s removal from office, Korea’s navy had consisted of at least two hundred warships manned by disciplined crews. In the course of his inspection tour Yi now found that nothing of this force remained. Thanks mainly to the poor leadership of his replacement, Won Kyun, almost the entire navy had been destroyed in the Battle of Chilchon Strait on August 28, leaving the sea route west entirely unguarded.
Yi could easily have given up at this point without too much loss of face. After all, with no fleet to command or men to lead what good could he possibly do? A great deal, as it turned out. The next six weeks would be in fact the finest hour in this Korean naval hero’s already illustrious career. Equipped with just thirteen ships and armed with little more than a fierce reputation and unshakable courage, Yi Sun-sin would take on a Japanese armada of two hundred ships, and stop it in its tracks.
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When Yi Sun-sin arrived in southern
Cholla Province from Kyongsang he found the region in panic and turmoil. The roads were filled with refugees. When they saw Yi passing they greeted him like a savoir, crying out, “Our Admiral is come again! Now we can be safe!” Local officials everywhere were in hiding or had fled into the hills, desperate to escape what the Japanese proclamations promised would be certain death for them. Near Sunchon Yi found three officials cowering in a warehouse. Sunchon itself was completely deserted. The local army commander there had run off as well, leaving behind an unguarded armory full of weapons. Yi hastily organized a squad of monk-soldiers to bury the weapons. Elsewhere Yi was angered to find that fleeing officers and officials had burnt armories, food stores, and government offices—the latter presumably to prevent any evidence of who they were from falling into enemy hands—and was particularly astonished to hear of an army garrison that had knocked down the walls of its own mountain fortress rather than risk inflaming the ire of the advancing Japanese.
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As he made his circuitous way west, Yi attempted to restore order by posting guards at armories and warehouses that had not already been destroyed, reprimanding officials for cowardice, flogging officers and men guilty of dereliction of duty, and punishing civilians for any crime. One staff officer received eighty blows for failing to obey an order to ship weapons west to safety from the naval port of Yosu; a provisions inspector was beaten for stealing the grain in his care; two abalone divers had their heads cut off and publicly displayed for attempting to make off with some cattle by first creating a panic with shouts of,
“The Japanese thieves have come! The Japanese thieves have come!”
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In this way Yi Sun-sin reestablished what classical Chinese military doctrine termed his “awesomeness,” that combination of fear and respect that a leader needed to instill in his people if he were to effectively govern or command. “If by executing one man the entire army will quake, kill him,” advised the fourth-century
B.C.
treatise
T’ai Kung’s Six Secret Teachings
. “If by rewarding one man the masses will be pleased, reward him.... When punishments reach the pinnacle and rewards penetrate to the lowest, then your awesomeness has been effected.”
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It was the conduct of Kyongsang Navy Commander Bae Sol that Yi Sun-sin found most reprehensible and deserving of punishment. Bae, it will be remembered, had fled at the start of the Battle of Chilchonnyang when the Korean navy had been destroyed, thus saving himself and the twelve ships under his command. “Being told of the terror-stricken flight of Bae Sol,” Yi wrote in his dairy on September 22, “I was thoroughly indignant and disgusted. Having flattered the clique in power he was promoted...beyond his capacity, thus gravely threaten
ing the national defense. Yet the Royal Court does not look into the matter. What a mistake!”
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On September 28 Yi Sun-sin arrived at the
port of Hoeryongpo on the southwestern corner of Korea, where he had previously arranged to meet Bae Sol and resume command of the fleet. Bae was late to the rendezvous, and then behaved badly when he finally arrived, absenting himself from the ceremony where the royal decree restoring Yi Sun-sin to command was displayed for all the captains to bow to, formally acknowledging his authority. Outraged by this impertinence, but unable to punish the Kyongsang commander directly because of his lofty rank, Yi resorted to the customary practice of indirect punishment: one of Bae’s officers was tied down and beaten in his place, receiving a total of twenty strokes. This set the tone for future relations between Yi and Bae. Two weeks later the disgraced Kyongsang commander sent a message to Yi stating that he was ill and requesting that he be excused from office to recuperate on land. After receiving Yi’s approval, Bae left the fleet and ran away. He would not serve in the navy again.
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The Korean fleet of which Yi Sun-sin resumed command was a sorry force indeed. Bae Sol brought just ten ships to Hoeryongpo; he had escaped the Chilchonnyang battle with twelve ships, but two of these had somehow gone astray by the time he joined up with Yi. Two more vessels, both of them in poor condition and undermanned, arrived a week later under newly appointed Cholla Right Navy Commander Kim Ok-chu, then a third was produced from some other quarter, giving Yi a total of just thirteen warships with which to hold back the Japanese.
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As for manpower, Yi started the month of October with some one hundred and twenty men, most of them demoralized after their recent defeat and apt to flee at the first sight of the Japanese. To make the most of this modest force, Yi is said to have ordered that all his vessels be fitted out like turtle ships, with stout timber sides and spiked roofs to protect the crews within. Considering the limited time and resources available, this construction work must have left his ships looking like rough-hewn floating forts. Yi also set to work bolstering the courage of his shaken men. He knew that the only way to withstand the coming Japanese onslaught would be for each man to fight like a cornered tiger—and the only way to get a man to fight like that was first to talk him out of his fear. “We are under orders of the King,” Yi said in one of many stirring talks to his men. “Since the situation has reached this extremity we must resolve to die together. Why should we hesitate to repay the royal bounty with our glorious deaths? There is only one choice for us now to make: victory or death!” After stirring up the fighting spirit of his men, Yi led them in swear
ing a solemn oath: they would meet and defeat the Japanese or die in the attempt.
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Shortly after arriving at Hoeryongpo, Yi decided that the harbor there was too confined and thus led his tiny fleet forty kilometers farther west to the port of Oranpo. Here he received word that Japanese ships had already advanced into the waters off Cholla Province and would soon be drawing near. On October 8 an advance party of eight enemy vessels appeared at Oranpo and very nearly spooked the Koreans into a panicked retreat. Yi aboard his flagship did not move as the enemy approached. Then, when they had drawn near, he gave the order to attack and plunged straight at them. This display of courage and bravado threw the Japanese into a headlong retreat back toward the east, carrying news to the main fleet that the Korean navy was not yet completely destroyed. It also restored in Yi’s own captains some of that confidence that they had known when they had served under him before.
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Twenty kilometers to the west of Oranpo was the
island of Chin-do. Just past Chin-do lay the Yellow Sea. On October 8 the Japanese fleet was thus on the verge of achieving its objective of securing a sea route north, and the Koreans were backed up almost as far as they could go. With it now clear that a decisive battle would soon be fought, Yi Sun-sin fell back with his little squadron into the channel between Chin-do and the mainland, establishing a temporary base here on Korea’s extreme southwestern tip while he scouted the terrain and made plans for the fight. He did not have long. On October 17 a report arrived that Japanese ships had returned to Oranpo, just a few hours away from the new Korean base on Chin-do. Thirteen of their ships were already anchored there. A week later enemy strength at Oranpo had risen to fifty-five ships. A few days after that it stood at two hundred, possibly more.
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The Japanese armada that was now advancing west had accomplished a great deal during the previous two months. After decimating the Korean navy at
Chilchon Strait, it had helped ferry troops along the coast and up the Somjin River to Namwon in preparation for the assault on the Chinese and Korean forces there, thus playing a part in another significant victory. With this task complete it then turned its attention to establishing a safe and reliable sea route from Pusan to the Yellow Sea. By the end of September this naval force of several hundred ships had secured the entire coastal region of Kyongsang Province and islands offshore, including the former Korean naval base on Hansan-do, and was poised to enter Cholla Province. It was under the command of Todo Takatora, Kato Yoshiaki, and Wakizaka Yasuharu, the same men who had engineered the destruction of the Korean navy the month before. They were joined by Kurushima Michifusa, whose brother Michiyuki had been killed by Yi Sun-sin’s forces at the Battle of Tangpo in 1592. From their base on the Kyongsang-Cholla border, Todo and his fellow commanders first sent small scouting parties westward to map the route to the Yellow Sea and identify any points of resistance. It was one of these units that was met and chased off by Yi Sun-sin at Oranpo on October 8. It hurried back east to report the engagement, the first indication since the Battle of Chilchon Strait that the Korean navy had some fight left in it still. Only a handful of vessels had been sighted, however—nothing the Japanese could not handle with their vast preponderance of ships. The main body of the Japanese navy thus continued its cautious advance west, anticipating one final encounter with the remnants of the Choson navy, one more chance to destroy the few ships the Koreans had left.
An advance squadron of thirteen Japanese ships was once again off Oranpo on October 17. This time they encountered no resistance and took possession of the harbor. They then continued west toward the
island of Chin-do in search of the retreating Korean navy. Yi Sun-sin had received warning of the approach of this enemy force and thus had his fleet on alert and in battle formation when the Japanese ships appeared at their Chin-do base at four o’clock that afternoon. This time the Koreans had no difficulty in repelling the attack, but high winds and the strong tidal flow through the channel made it impossible for them to give chase. Instead they returned to their base and prepared for a second attack. Yi suspected that the Japanese would launch a surprise assault after dark, much as they had done so successfully at the Battle of Chilchonnyang. He thus ordered his captains to remain alert, adding that anyone failing to do his duty in the coming fight would be harshly punished.
Yi Sun-sin was right. At ten o’clock that evening the thirteen Japanese vessels crept up to the Koreans and opened fire with the cannons that their ships were now equipped with. The Koreans, unnerved at the prospect of fighting in the dark, wavered for a time before Yi was able to prod them into moving to attack. Finally, after a running battle that lasted two hours, the Japanese once again were driven back toward Oranpo. This time they did not return.
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Things remained quiet for the next several days as the Japanese built up their forces at Oranpo in preparation for a final assault. Yi spent the time continuing his careful observations of the surrounding waters and of the time and speed of the tides. He was particularly interested in Myongnyang Channel, the narrow passage between
Chin Island and the mainland, just 250 meters across at its narrowest point, through which the Japanese would have to pass to gain access to the Yellow Sea. To Yi’s experienced eye this stretch of water presented distinct tactical possibilities. To begin with, the gap was so narrow that the Japanese would not be able to pass through in battle formation. They would have to break their fleet into smaller squadrons in order to advance. Myongnyang’s immensely strong tidal flow also caught Yi’s attention. The current here was among the fastest in Korea, ripping through the strait “like a cataract” at a top speed of 9.5 knots, as fast or faster than a Japanese warship could travel, even over short distances.
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If Yi were to meet the Japanese fleet as it was passing through the neck of Myongnyang, therefore, he would reduce the odds against him, for only a portion of the enemy force would be able to take him on while the remainder lay trapped to the rear. By timing his attack with the flow of the tide, moreover, he could meet the enemy with more than just his handful of ships. He would have on his side the full force of the sea.
On October 24 Yi received intelligence that two hundred Japanese ships were at or nearing Oranpo. It was time to prepare to fight. The next day he fell back with his fleet further to the west, passing all the way through Myongnyang Channel and into the open water beyond. His plan was to attack the Japanese at the mouth of the channel as they attempted to clear the narrow passage and its formidable tidal flow. Yi anchored his fleet in a little bay just beyond the mouth of the channel, out of sight of the Japanese. In the open water beyond he arrayed a long line of fishing boats, filled with refugees who had been drawn to Yi’s base over the past few weeks in the hope that the Korean navy would keep them safe. By arranging these small unarmed craft in something approximating a battle line, but too distant to be clearly seen, Yi hoped the Japanese would mistake them for a large Korean fleet and assume his own thirteen battleships to be only a vanguard squadron.