Siege of Port Arthur (1904-1905): Trench Warfare in Manchuria

The Siege of Port Arthur was the long Japanese campaign to capture Russia’s fortified naval base at the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War. Lasting from August 1904 to the Russian surrender on 2 January 1905, it saw Japanese infantry make repeated mass assaults on concrete forts, barbed wire and machine guns. The siege destroyed the Russian Pacific Squadron and, with its trenches, mines and enormous casualties, foreshadowed the battles of the First World War.

Background: Russia’s warm-water port

Port Arthur, known in Chinese as Lüshun, had changed hands before. Japan captured it from China in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894, but was forced to return the Liaodong Peninsula in 1895. Russia then leased it in 1898, linked it by railway to the Trans-Siberian line, and built it into its main ice-free naval base in the Pacific.

Russian engineers began a ring of modern forts, batteries and trenches in the hills around the town, though the work was incomplete when war broke out. The defences relied on concrete casemates, deep ditches, belts of barbed wire and carefully sited guns, and the steep, rocky hills gave the defenders excellent fields of fire. The harbour itself had a narrow entrance, which made it easy to defend but also easy to blockade, as Japanese attempts to block it with sunken ships in early 1904 showed. The war opened on the night of 8-9 February 1904 with a Japanese torpedo attack on the Russian squadron outside the harbour.

The siege begins

Japanese victory at Nanshan in May 1904 cut the fortress off by land. General Nogi Maresuke’s Third Army, formed for the task, pushed the Russians back into the main defences, and by 1 August 1904 the fortress was closely invested. Inside were roughly 40,000-50,000 Russian troops under General Anatoly Stessel, with the energetic General Roman Kondratenko directing much of the land defence.

On 10 August the Russian squadron tried to break out to Vladivostok. In the Battle of the Yellow Sea its commander, Admiral Wilgelm Vitgeft, was killed and the ships were scattered, most returning to Port Arthur.

The general assaults

Japan was under pressure to take the fortress quickly, before Russia’s Baltic Fleet could arrive and reinforce the squadron in harbour. Nogi launched the first general assault on 19-24 August 1904. Waves of infantry attacked across open ground into machine-gun, rifle and artillery fire, and about 15,000-16,000 Japanese became casualties for very small gains.

From October the Japanese brought up 28 cm howitzers taken from coastal defences in Japan, firing shells weighing over 200 kilograms. They dug saps and tunnels to approach the forts and placed mines beneath them, while the Russians counter-mined, threw improvised hand grenades and used searchlights and electrified wire. Further general assaults in September, October and late November cost thousands more lives.

The fighting was among the most intense of the era. Attackers and defenders often fought within a few metres of each other in trenches and fort ditches, and bodies lay unburied between the lines for days; short truces were sometimes arranged to collect the dead. Japanese commanders formed volunteer assault units, such as the white-sashed force (Shirodasuki-tai) of late November, which suffered very heavy losses in a night attack.

Life inside the fortress grew steadily harder. Fresh food ran short, scurvy and dysentery spread among the troops, and the hospitals overflowed with wounded. Civilians in the town, including Russian families and Chinese residents, were exposed to shelling. Disputes among the Russian commanders, especially between Stessel and the fortress commandant, General Konstantin Smirnov, weakened coordination of the defence.

203 Metre Hill

Japanese commanders gradually focused on 203 Metre Hill, a summit north-west of the town from which observers could see the whole harbour. The final assault began on 27 November 1904, and after more than a week of fighting at close quarters, with trenches repeatedly lost and retaken, the Japanese captured the hill on 5 December. Nogi’s younger son was among those killed in the fighting for it.

From the summit, spotters directed howitzer fire onto the Russian warships. Within days the battleships and cruisers of the Pacific Squadron in the harbour were sunk or wrecked. On 15 December General Kondratenko was killed by a shell in Fort Chikuan, a blow to Russian morale.

Surrender

After losing further forts in late December, Stessel opened negotiations, without the full agreement of his officers, and the capitulation was signed on 2 January 1905. Over 20,000 Russian soldiers and sailors went into captivity, many of them sick or wounded.

The surrender released Nogi’s army to join the decisive Battle of Mukden in February-March 1905. In Russia it caused outrage and fed the unrest that broke out as the Revolution of 1905. Stessel was court-martialled and sentenced to death in 1908; the sentence was commuted and he was released in 1909.

On 5 January 1905 Nogi and Stessel met at the village of Shuishiying near the fortress to complete the formalities. The meeting, at which Nogi allowed the Russian officers to keep their swords, became famous in Japan as an example of chivalry towards a defeated enemy and was later celebrated in a popular song.

By the numbers

Key people

• Nogi Maresuke (1849-1912): commander of the Japanese Third Army, who lost both sons in the war and was criticised for costly frontal attacks; he took his own life after the death of Emperor Meiji.
• Kodama Gentarō (1852-1906): chief of staff of the Manchurian armies, who visited the siege lines and is credited by many historians with helping concentrate the effort on 203 Metre Hill.
• Anatoly Stessel (1848-1915): commander of the Russian forces, later court-martialled for the surrender.
• Roman Kondratenko (1857-1904): Russian engineer general and the soul of the defence, killed in December 1904.

Legacy

Foreign observers saw at Port Arthur many of the features of later warfare: entrenched lines, barbed wire, machine guns, heavy artillery, mining and huge losses for little ground. Many European armies concluded that determined infantry could still carry fortified positions, a lesson that proved disastrous in 1914-1918.

After the war the Treaty of Portsmouth gave Japan Russia’s lease of the Liaodong Peninsula, and Port Arthur became a Japanese base until 1945. Memorials and preserved forts, including the summit of 203 Metre Hill, can still be visited at Lüshun.

Timeline

• 1898, March: Russia leases Port Arthur from China.
• 1904, 8-9 February: Japanese torpedo boats attack the Russian squadron.
• 1904, 26 May: Japanese victory at Nanshan cuts off the peninsula.
• 1904, 1 August: the Japanese close in on the fortress.
• 1904, 10 August: Battle of the Yellow Sea.
• 1904, 19-24 August: first general assault fails with heavy losses.
• 1904, 5 December: Japanese troops capture 203 Metre Hill.
• 1904, 15 December: General Kondratenko is killed.
• 1905, 2 January: Port Arthur surrenders.

Why it matters

The fall of Port Arthur removed Russia’s naval power in the Pacific and was a major step towards Japanese victory. Its terrible cost in human lives made it one of the clearest previews of the industrialised trench warfare that would devastate Europe a decade later.