Books: Sea Dog

TOGO AND THE RlSE OF JAPANESE SEA

POWER — Edwin A. Falk — Longmans, Green ($4). When Wallace Irwin wrote his popular Letters of a Japanese Schoolboy in 1907 he called his hero Hashimura Togo—a name obliquely familiar to most U. S. newspaper readers. But when Count Togo Heihachiro, onetime Admiral of the Imperial Fleet, died in 1934, only Japanese schoolboys still remembered the details of his famed victories. Last week Biographer Falk, himself a onetime sea dog, paid Admiral Togo’s career the meticulous sympathy of one naval officer for another. Author Falk never attempted to penetrate through the uniform, but his comprehensive account of modern Japanese naval history gave Togo Heihachiro a hero’s part. Not by polishing up the handle of the big front door but by hard work, taciturn zeal and plenty of fighting skill did Togo become Admiral of the Son of Heaven’s navy. When he first entered the Japanese Navy there was none, of any account. Togo was born just five years before Commodore Perry sailed into Yedo Bay and opened medieval Japan to western ways. At 16, Togo got his first baptism of fire and his first impressions of European cannon when British battleships bombarded Kagoshima, where Togo served in one of the smoothbore, muzzle-loading batteries. Three years later he joined the Navy, fought all through Japan’s civil war. “At 21 he was a naval veteran of more actual combat experience than many an officer acquires in a lifetime of service.” Early marked as a sound fellow, Togo was one of twelve young officers sent to England to get his training straight from the lion’s mouth. To his British instructors too he seemed sound. “He was not what you would call brilliant, but a great plodder, slow to learn, but very sure when he had learnt; and he wanted to learn everything!” When his mates called him “Johnny Chinaman” he took it in good part, said nothing, plugged ahead. After two years in England Togo got back to Japan to find that his superiors had let no barnacles grow on their keels, either. Before he was 40, Togo was captain in an up-&-coming navy. In the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) it was Togo who fired the salvo that was Japan’s declaration of war. But the first incident that got him international headlines was not pretty. He halted a Chinese troopship, ordered the soldiers to take to the boats, sank the ship when they refused, made no attempt to rescue them. At the Battle of the Yalu, where the Chinese fleet was shattered, Captain Togo won his share of glory, brought his ship through without a single casualty. Before the war was over he had been promoted to Rear Admiral. When Japan was ready for the Russo-Japanese War, so were Togo and his fleet. Once again his guns spread the death-shade declaration, in a night attack on a squadron of the Russian fleet, sleeping at anchor off Port Arthur. After the first on-set Togo never let up; he raided them, hammered them by indirect fire when they hid in the harbor, finally exasperated them into a dash for Vladivostok. Then, in the Battle of the Yellow Sea, Togo gave the Russians a fearful pounding, drove the shattered remnants of the fleet back to Port Arthur, where he potted them at long distance one by one, “like beasts in a pit.” Meanwhile the Russian Baltic Fleet was under way, coming all the long way round the Cape of Good Hope. Nervous about Japanese torpedo-boats before they passed Sweden, the Russians annoyed England by firing on British trawlers in the North Sea, thinking they were the enemy. By the time the Baltic Fleet had limped through the Straits of Malacca they were in sorry shape. Togo had had plenty of time to get ready; his ships were overhauled, his men like fighting cocks. As he lay in wait, he knew the coming battle of Tsushima (he had even picked the place) would be the decisive contest of the war. It was the greatest naval fight since Trafalgar, greatest until Jutland. Turning the Russian fleet from their one chance, a dash to the harbor of Vladivostok. Togo in naval parlance “crossed the T”—led his ships in line across the top of the Russian column, with all his guns free to fire while the Russians were masked by their own ships. From the exposed fighting top of his flagship, the Mikasa, Togo saw the Russian battleships, their formation broken, turn in desperate circles, watched four of them go down. Next day he got the cruisers. Against 10,000 casualties and practically the entire Russian fleet sunk, captured or beached, Togo lost three torpedo-boats, less than 1,000 killed and wounded. Banzai was the word for it. Togo lived a long time after that, but never so fully again. By the time of the World War he was no longer on the active list. His battered old Mikasa, laid up too, was made a national shrine. An unpretentious hero, as Chief of the General Staff he plodded on as he always had. Even naval men thought he had left out something or had taken a lot for granted when he thus gave away the secret of his success: “The great secret of winning a naval engagement is to have the flagship always lead the way.” When he heard of a proposed statue of himself, he demurred. “It does not seem proper to me that expense should be incurred in this manner at the present time. How can you be sure that I always shall live up to the monument that you propose to erect to me? I intend to remain prudent at all times until my death, but who can tell?”