Battle of Mukden, 1905: the largest land battle of its age

Mukden was the largest land battle of the Russo-Japanese War and one of the largest fought anywhere before World War I, with more than half a million men engaged. Bruce Menning, writing in the Encyclopedia of Modern Europe, calls it a battle that presaged the world wars: half a million men in continuous combat over vast distances for three weeks, assaulting entrenchments and barbed wire under the fire of modern rifles, machine guns and quick-firing artillery.²

Background: from Port Arthur to Mukden

The war began on the night of 8 to 9 February 1904, when the Japanese fleet attacked the Russian squadron at Port Arthur, the Russian naval base on the Chinese coast, without a declaration of war. Japan wanted Korea and southern Manchuria, and Russia, building its railway across Manchuria to Port Arthur, stood in the way.³

Through 1904 the Japanese landed army after army on the mainland, laid siege to Port Arthur and pushed the main Russian army north along the South Manchurian Railroad. Kuropatkin lost the great battle of Liaoyang at the end of August, withdrew in good order toward Mukden, the old Manchu capital and the key rail center of the region, and then tried two offensives of his own, on the Sha River in October and at Sandepu in January 1905. Both failed.⁴ › Battle of Liaoyang, 1904

Port Arthur surrendered on 2 January 1905. That freed the Japanese Third Army under General Nogi Maresuke, which marched north to join Oyama. The Russians knew Nogi was coming but could not find him: the British official history describes a Russian command that for nearly a month did not know where the Third Army was. Kuropatkin meanwhile spent three weeks debating his next attack, and in the end the Japanese moved first.⁵

Armies and commanders

Kuropatkin had been Russia's minister of war before he took command in Manchuria. Britannica calls him a competent minister who proved sadly irresolute and passive in the field, always seeking to avoid action until he had a clear superiority in numbers. At Mukden he had three armies in line, from right to left the Second under General Alexander von Kaulbars, the Third under General Alexander Bilderling and the First under General Nikolai Linevich.⁶

Against him Field Marshal Oyama Iwao commanded every army Japan had in the field: from west to east the Third under Nogi, the Second under Oku Yasutaka, the Fourth under Nozu Michitsura, the First under Kuroki Tamemoto, and the newly formed Fifth, also called the Yalu Army, under Kawamura Kageaki. Britannica notes that with this the entire land forces of Japan were committed.⁷

The numbers vary by source. Menning gives Kuropatkin 300,000 men, 1,386 field guns and 56 machine guns, against Oyama's 270,000 men, 1,062 guns and 200 machine guns. Britannica gives the Russians some 330,000 men and 1,475 guns, against the same 270,000 Japanese and 1,062 guns. Either way the two armies were close to equal, a fact Menning sees as decisive for how the battle ended.⁸

The Russian line ran east to west for about 150 kilometers by Menning's measure, cut in two by the railroad just south of Mukden, and in places the entrenchments, protected by barbed wire, were 15 kilometers deep. West of the railway the ground along the Hun and Liao rivers was flat and open; to the east it grew more and more rugged.⁹

The battle in phases

The feint in the east

Oyama's plan, in Menning's description, was a double envelopment on the model of the Prussian victory at Sedan in 1870. Kawamura's Fifth Army would open the attack in the hills on the east. Once Kuropatkin moved his reserves there, Nogi's Third Army would swing wide around the open western flank, and the two arms would meet north of Mukden and close the ring. Rickard notes that the Japanese even left their own flanks lightly fortified so that the attack could start faster.¹⁰

Kawamura struck first, several days before the date in Oyama's orders, and his attack in the east forestalled a Russian offensive against Sandepu that Kuropatkin had planned for 25 February. Kuropatkin took the bait. On 25 February he sent most of his general reserve east against Kawamura, believing that this was Oyama's main blow, perhaps with Nogi's army behind it.¹¹

Nogi's wide hook

On 27 February Nogi's Third Army began its march around the Russian right, far out on the flat country to the west. Kuropatkin learned of it only after he had committed his reserve in the east. On 1 March he reversed course and began pulling troops back westward, forming new detachments to meet Nogi, but repeated Russian counterattacks on 2 and 3 March failed to stop the Japanese advance toward the railroad north of the city.¹²

The Japanese paid heavily for every gain. Britannica describes their attacks on both flanks taking massive casualties from machine gun and artillery fire, and the fighting in the center, where the Fourth and First Armies under Nozu and Kuroki pressed the Russian trenches, settled into deadlock for days.¹³

The ring nearly closes

On 7 March he ordered troops across from his left to shore up his threatened right; the British official history records that the same day he ordered his Third and First Armies to fall back to the Hun River after dark, while Menning dates the withdrawal to the Hun from 6 March. Moving so many men across so wide a front caused chaos, and Oyama, aware of it, ordered his armies to redouble the offensive.¹⁴

Then Kawamura broke through in the east. With his rear threatened from both right and left and his line of communications in danger, Kuropatkin ordered a general retreat on 9 March, north to Tieling, rather than risk complete encirclement. Japanese troops entered Mukden on 10 March.¹⁵

Turning point

The battle turned on the moment Kuropatkin sent his reserves east. Menning argues that he lacked intelligence on the Japanese order of battle and mistook Kawamura's steady progress for Oyama's main blow; by the time he learned that Nogi was enveloping his right, his reserves were in the wrong place, and he spent the rest of the battle marching them back and forth. Rickard, summing up John Valitutto's study, sees the deeper failing in the Russian planning: after Sandepu they still had more men, but they planned so slowly that the Japanese struck first.¹⁶

Yet the Japanese never quite closed the ring. As Rickard sums up Valitutto's account, the Russians were dogged defenders but poor attackers, and even after their line broke they managed to pull back up a single railway between two converging Japanese forces. Most of Kuropatkin's army got away, and in Menning's words a battle of annihilation had eluded Oyama.¹⁷

Aftermath

The retreat was confused. Menning writes that some Russian units fought to the last while others simply fled, and the British official history describes roads and railway choked with columns of men and wagons and units so disorganized that their commanders did not know where their regiments were. The Japanese, worn out by three weeks of fighting and short of cavalry, could not press the pursuit. The rout ended only at Xipingkai, about 175 kilometers north of Mukden.¹⁸

The losses are given differently. Menning and Britannica count nearly 89,000 Russian losses, Menning including 30,000 prisoners, and about 71,000 Japanese. EBSCO puts the Russian loss at some 100,000 killed, wounded or captured and the Japanese at nearly 70,000 killed and wounded, and the British official history gives about 70,000 Japanese and 90,000 Russian casualties. Kuropatkin lost nearly all his stores and heavy equipment, and within days he was replaced as commander in chief by General Nikolai Linevich.¹⁹

Mukden settled nothing on land. Menning points out that Linevich still had an army that could be reinforced from European Russia, while Oyama was short of men and at the end of his supply lines. Britannica judges that Japan was now exhausted and could not hope to win the land war outright. It was the last major land battle of the war.²⁰

Legacy and memory

Its weight was political. The defeat fed the revolution already shaking Russia. After the Russian fleet was destroyed at Tsushima in May, both exhausted powers accepted the mediation of President Theodore Roosevelt, and the Treaty of Portsmouth, signed on 5 September 1905, gave Japan the Liaodong Peninsula, the South Manchurian Railway, the southern half of Sakhalin and a free hand in Korea.²¹ › Battle of Tsushima, 1905

Britannica calls Mukden the first time a comparatively small Asian nation had defeated a major European power, and notes that the victory encouraged the rise of an Imperial Japan led by a militant officer class. Rickard adds that it gave Japan a foothold on the Chinese mainland, the start of a road that led to its later wars in China.²²

Military observers from Europe and the United States watched the fighting in Manchuria at first hand. Menning sees in Mukden the shape of the battles to come: fronts too long for any single local success to decide them, entrenchments in depth and fire from smokeless-powder weapons that made frontal attack ruinous. Britannica notes that the lessons of the war went largely unheeded by European commanders, who would repeat the same costly assaults on the Western Front ten years later.²³