Authors: Samuel Hawley
Kato Kiyomasa by this time had resumed command inside the fort. He had arrived from Sosaengpo by boat during the night, summoned by an urgent call for help from twenty-one-year-old Asano Yukinaga, who he had left in charge at Tosan. Kato managed to slip up the
Taehwa River and into the fortress from the south before the Chinese and Koreans could seal off that side. The defensive situation inside the fortress, he soon discovered, was less than ideal, for construction was not yet complete. The enemy had arrived too soon. Of greatest immediate concern were the three gates that pierced the outer wall. At least one of these was unfinished and off its hinges, leaving a hole in the fortress’s defenses. It was a weakness the allies quickly discovered and exploited when they began their attack on the following day. After a deafening dawn cannon barrage that started many fires within Tosan, Ming and Korean troops charged at the gap in the wall and began flooding into the fortress, forcing Kato and his men to fall back into the inner enclosure, abandoning their outer camp and a good deal of their supplies. The loss of much of their food, which had been scanty to begin with, would prove a severe hardship for the Japanese. For the moment, however, it bought them enough time to close and bar the gates of the inner fortress and array men along the walls, while the enemy troops outside paused to lay claim to the loot.
After this lull in the battle, the Chinese turned their attention to Tosan’s more formidable inner citadel. They rushed at the walls in such numbers that, despite heavy losses, it seemed certain that they would clear the parapets and flood inside, using the bodies of their fallen com
rades as a ramp. At one point, a Japanese account tells us, Ming forces managed to secure a large hook to the top of the wall, “and fifty or even a hundred men [took] hold of the attached rope to pull the wall down. When this happened we fired on them from the side, but out of fifty men five or ten still hung on and pulled to the end. It has to be said that they are extremely brave warriors.” Cannon fire, meanwhile, raked the top of the walls. A ball hit one of Kato’s bodyguards, cutting him in two at the waist, leaving only his legs behind.
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Somewhere inside, the priest Keinen huddled together with one of his companions, struggling to prepare himself for what seemed imminent death. “[C]lusters of Chinamen were clinging to the walls,” he wrote in his diary, “climbing up them and into the fortress. As they burst inside, [my com
panion, the priest] Ryoshin said to me: ‘Today is the Saint’s Memorial Day. How happy we should be! We shall surely go to paradise on this blessed day.’ He laughed in his joyful prayer, and his words gave me strength.... But my time had apparently not come yet; or was it that Japan’s fate had not yet been sealed? The Chinamen withdrew.”
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With Chinese and Korean losses approaching alarming proportions, the assault on the inner fortress was eventually called off and cannons dragged forward to batter down the walls. It was soon dis
covered, however, that even the largest guns could not touch the place. Since the citadel was built on high ground, the best the Chinese could do from their position lower down the hill was to level head-on shots straight into the impenetrable stone foundation or glancing blows off the more vulnerable upper walls, neither of which had any significant effect. After a steady barrage that lasted throughout the rest of the day, the effort was abandoned, and the two opposing armies settled down for the night.
All the fighting up to this point took place before Yang Hao and Ma Gui arrived on the scene. They were still in the rear, working together with Prime Minister Yu Song-nyong and Left Minister Yi Dok-hyong to secure supplies for their huge expeditionary force. When they finally arrived outside Tosan on or about February 1, they decided to place the fortress under siege rather than expend any more men in repeated frontal assaults. If they could keep their troops fed and their lines strong, the Japanese would starve and weaken and eventu
ally submit. Ming commander Gao Ze was accordingly ordered to spread his Central Army along the east side of the fortress, and Li Fangchun and his Right Army were sent to the hold the west. The Left Army under Li Rumei moved to the south of Tosan to the banks of the Taehwa River to block reinforcements from arriving by sea. General Po Gui, finally, guarded the road from Pusan, which the Japanese garrisons farther south would have to use in any attempted counterattack by land.
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It was a sensible plan, this besieging of Tosan, for the Japanese inside the fortress were already desperately short of food. No longer able to receive supplies from outside, Kato and his men were forced to kill and eat their horses. When this source of nourishment was gone they probed the soil for roots and picked through old cooking fires for burnt grains of rice. Then they stripped the mud off the walls and ate it. Some are said to have even resorted to cannibalism. Water was also in very short supply. Whatever there was on hand at the start of the siege was issued mainly to the musketeers, who would be most needed to repel any coming attack. The rest were left to fend for themselves. According to Japanese commander Okochi Hidemoto’s account of the siege, an enterprising water seller, evidently aware of the growing desperation of the Japanese inside the fortress, approached the wall one day offering water at the astronomical price of fifteen silver coins per cup. Those few men with any money bought as much water as they could afford. The others drank the urine that these lucky few later passed.
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And then there was the cold. On February 3 a stiff wind blew up and the temperature fell. The Japanese defenders, already weakened by starvation and thirst, now began to freeze. With little fuel on hand to use for fires, the men suffered terribly from frostbite, their hands and feet blackening and swelling to such a size that the flesh burst open and fluid leaked out. Many would lose fingers and toes before the ordeal was over. Some froze to death where they sat.
As the siege progressed, the allied troops stationed outside Tosan began to kill or capture a growing number of Japanese soldiers who were driven in their desperation to steal out of the fortress at night in search of water and food. Some were cut down as they picked through the possessions of the dead that lay unburied outside the walls. Others were ambushed at neighboring streams and wells. Commander Kim Ung-so reportedly rounded up as many as one hundred enemy soldiers a night at the well he was ordered to guard. All of these men were thin and weak and unable to fight, and most only too glad to surrender.
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By the fourth of February the siege of Tosan seemed well on the way to achieving success. According to Japanese soldiers who were captured or surrendered, the defenders inside the fortress were now so weakened by hunger and disease that of the original ten thousand-man force only a thousand were in any condition to fight.
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Kato Kiyomasa and his first contingent, it seemed, were now beyond being able to help them
selves. Their only hope lay with their comrades to the south.
Since the beginning of the siege the other garrisons in the Japanese fortress chain had in fact been attempting to come to the aid of the defenders at Tosan. The most aggressive approaches were made from seaward by squadrons of Japanese ships that ventured up the
Taehwa River to the south side of the fort. The forays were small at first, just twenty or so ships from nearby Sosaengpo that Li Rumei and his Left Army were able to drive off with cannon fire. As the days passed, however, more ships began to arrive from other Japanese strongholds further along the coast, notably a fleet with two thousand fighting men aboard sent by Konishi Yukinaga all the way from Sunchon. They advanced up the Taehwa River daily with the tide, putting increasing strain on Li Rumei and his men and raising concerns that an amphibious counterattack might not be far off. Army units from other strongholds in the Japanese fortress belt, meanwhile, were marching north to apply pressure from inland. Kuroda Nagamasa sent a force up from his fortress at Yangsan. So did Hachizuka Iemasa, Ukita Hideie, and Mori Hidemoto from their own respective camps. These gathering reinforce-ments did not attack the numerically superior Chinese-Korean army surrounding Tosan, but instead made a great show of their presence by planting banners and flags on nearby hilltops in the hope that the allies would grow nervous and lift their siege.
This application of pressure eventually had its intended effect. Yang Hao began to fear that if the Japanese forces advancing on
Ulsan launched a coordinated counterattack from both the land and the sea, his own forces would at the very least suffer heavy losses before fighting them off, and might even be defeated. Yang had not come to Ulsan for that. He had come expecting to win a relatively easy victory with minimal loss, after which they would move on down the enemy’s fortress belt to claim a second prize. The prospects for maintaining the siege, moreover, were now looking grim. To begin with, his own men were suffering from the bitter cold almost as badly as were the Japanese. Feeding the fifty thousand Chinese and Korean soldiers camped outside the fortress was also proving difficult, particularly in the depths of winter with nothing growing in the fields. Obtaining fodder for his horses was yet another concern. During just the first week of the siege a thousand of the animals collapsed and died.
With the threat of a Japanese counterattack now looming large, and with it becoming increasingly difficult to maintain his own army in the field, Yang Hao decided that action rather than waiting was the most prudent course. He either had to take Tosan at once or lift his seige and fall back to Kyongju. He accordingly launched one final, all-out assault on February 19, beginning at dawn. Inside the fortress most of the defenders who were not yet dead huddled together in a collective stupor, too weakened by starvation and thirst and disease to pick up their arms and move to the walls. The one exception was the corps of musketeers. At the start of the siege Kato Kiyomasa had ordered that these crucially important soldiers be allotted most of the available food and water, a brutal but prescient decision that would now save the garrison from annihilation. When the Ming soldiers outside began their charge these musketeers still had the energy to put up a strong defense, driving back wave after wave with a withering hail of lead. Yang kept up the attack for three hours, until five hundred of his men lay dead or dying in heaps at the base of the wall.
By midmorning the desire to fight had drained out of Yang Hao. Discouraged by his inability to take the fort and increasingly worried by the Japanese reinforcements approaching up the Taehwa River to the front and massing in the hills behind, the Ming commander ordered his men to lift the siege and pull back. The withdrawal did not go well. As the Ming troops began breaking camp, word spread that Japanese troops were storming ashore from ships at the south of the fort. Fears of a Japanese counterattack sent men running north toward Kyongju in an undisciplined retreat.
The Korean troops at Tosan had been told nothing of Yang’s order to withdraw. They were left to deduce the state of affairs from the commotion they could observe in the Chinese camps, the cavalry units riding off, the smoke rising from piles of burning supplies, the cries of the wounded being left behind. The Japanese units camped on the nearby hills saw what was happening as well. Sensing that the advantage was turning their way, they charged after the retreating allied troops, cutting down large numbers of stragglers, particularly among the Koreans, and sending the rest into flight.
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It was a beaten and demoralized allied army that straggled north into Kyongju. Subsequent estimates of the number of Chinese and Korean soldiers killed during the three-week siege would range from eighteen hundred to ten thousand, the lower figure being suggested by those officials eager to support Yang Hao, the higher by those just as eager to bring him down. The truth probably lies somewhere between, in the range of several thousand killed and at least as many injured.
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Whatever the number, the setback left Yang Hao thinking only of retreat. He had lost too many men; maintaining his army in the field in winter was too difficult; the Japanese were too tenacious; and—a favorite excuse among the Chinese—the Korean troops were too unreliable. After holding discussions with his generals, the supreme Ming commander decided to return to
Seoul for the time being and resume the offensive some time later in the year. He set out for the capital toward the end of February, leaving behind a garrison of Ming troops under Ma Gui and Koreans under Kwon Yul at Kyongju to ensure that the Japanese remained on the coast. He would not return.
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* *
Back at Tosan the Japanese were emerging from the shock of their terrible ordeal. Their losses had been horrific. According to one esti
mate, fewer than a thousand men survived from the original garrison of ten thousand. Many had been killed in the fighting; still more had been carried away by hunger, thirst, exposure, and disease. Still, the siege for them had been a triumph. The fact that Tosan’s half-starved defenders could fight off an army many times its size demonstrated once again, and this time in a most unequivocal manner, the fighting spirit of the Japanese warrior and the superiority of the Japanese musket.
Just days after the battle, Asano Yukinaga sent a letter to his father in
Japan saying, “When troops come [to Korea] from the province of Kai, have them bring as many guns as possible, for no other equipment is needed. Give strict orders that all men, even the
samurai
, carry guns.”
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This was a remarkable suggestion, that samurai warriors carry guns. Since the introduction of the musket into Japanese warfare fifty years before, its use had been relegated to the ranks of the ashigaru, the foot soldiers. The higher-ranking samurai class, while not questioning for a moment the value of the weapon, rarely condescended to use it personally, preferring instead the sword and lance and bow. Any country bumpkin, after all, could be taught to fire a musket in just a few days, whereas it took years to master the more traditional weapons of war. A samurai’s skill in the use of these weapons was a great point of pride, which is why in normal circumstances he declined to wield a gun. But of course the siege of Tosan had been anything but normal. It was the most desperate struggle the Japanese had endured in
Korea since the start of the war. That Asano, writing just days after the battle, was urging that samurai now be armed with muskets is an indication of the key role that weapon had played in the victory—and in turn of what a very close thing the siege had been.