Prologue
It was an unenviable position that Thomas Ryder Galsworthy found himself in on the morning of 25th July 1894. The captain of the Kowshing, a British-flagged steamship operated by the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company (ICSNC), was closing in on the Korean port of Asan under secret orders to deliver 1,200 Chinese troop reinforcements to a Chinese expeditionary army that had been sent to oppose a similar expatriate troop deployment by Japan.
Surprised by a squadron of Japanese warships, Galsworthy was ordered to surrender his ship and cargo, even though the two Asian countries were not yet technically at war. Recognising British neutrality, the Japanese commander offered the English captain and his crew safe passage by having them transferred to his own ships. However, the Chinese officers aboard refused to allow Galsworthy to surrender, fearing that without the British crewmen aboard, they and their men would all swiftly be despatched to the bottom of the Yellow Sea. The situation facing Galsworthy was simple. If he surrendered, he would likely be shot by the Chinese mutineers; if he didn’t, his ship would be sunk by the Japanese warships.
After a four-hour stand-off, the cruiser Naniwa, captained by Heihachiro Togo, who a decade later would lead the Japanese to victory over the Russians at the Battle of Tsushima, opened fire. The sudden onslaught distracted the Chinese troops sufficiently to enable Galsworthy and his crew to jump overboard. Luckily for the British captain, he was rescued by the Japanese, but more than 800 Chinese troops and most of the ship’s crew were not so lucky and drowned.
The sinking of the Kowshing caused a diplomatic furore, with Jardine Matheson, the parent company of the ICSNC, petitioning the British government for retaliatory measures. However, British legal experts stunned public opinion by declaring the Japanese action lawful. In truth, the British government quietly recognised its own hypocrisy. On the one hand, it had been advising, training, and in effect arming the Japanese navy for several years; the Naniwa itself was a British-built ship, and its captain had received comprehensive naval schooling in England. On the other hand, the British government had long-standing ties with the Qing government, and had turned a conveniently blind eye to British-flagged merchant ships being used in Chinese military logistics operations. Galsworthy had been a victim of his own government’s duplicity. Unwittingly, he’d also sparked off the opening naval encounter of the First Sino-Japanese War.[1]
Also aboard the Kowshing at the time of its sinking was Prussian artillery officer, Major von Hannecken, on route to advise the Chinese expeditionary army in Korea. Like Galsworthy, he was able to swim to safety after the ship came under fire. Von Hannecken would come under fire a second time at sea two months later at the decisive Battle of Yalu, and receive a medal for ‘meritorious conduct’.
The Germans were not only supplying China with military expertise. Most of the major units of the China’s Northern (Beiyang) Fleet were of German design and construction, including its two battleships, the Ting Yuen and Chen Yuen, while the remainder were from British yards. Indeed, nearly all the ships that took part in the First Sino-Japanese War were of foreign provenance; the Japanese fleet being roughly half and half French and British origin.
The Battle of Yalu was fought in front of an audience of foreign observers; some combatants, others stationed close by on neutral ships, or on land in the treaty ports of China and Japan; all eager to see the outcome of battles fought with new technologies such as quick-firing (QF) guns and torpedoes. Such technologies underpinned the French naval strategy of the ‘Jeune Ecole’, which advocated the use of smaller, faster, less-armoured warships against the traditional big-gunned, heavily-armoured ‘Mastodons’ of the earlier ironclad era. The chief proponent of the ‘old school’, the Royal Navy, was as keen as anyone to see how such a strategy fared in practice.
Initially, as the dust settled after the Battle of the Yalu, some observers were unsure as to which side had won. Hilary Herbert, then US Secretary of the Navy judged it ‘nearly a draw’. Before being engaged by the Japanese, the Chinese fleet had successfully covered the disembarkation of new reinforcements for the Korean land campaign, albeit in the wrong location. However, the numbers told a different story. The Japanese fleet had sunk five Chinese warships and seriously damaged four more. In reply, the Chinese had managed only to heavily damage the enemy flagship and three minor units of the Japanese fleet, including the transport Saikyo Maru.[2] On the other hand, the Chinese battleships had proved almost impregnable to enemy naval artillery and had managed to withdraw with other units to the relative safety of Port Arthur.
In reality, neither the Ting Yuen nor Chen Yuan would never fight at sea again under a Chinese flag. The Japanese blockaded the Chinese coast, while their superior land forces swiftly advanced through the Korean Peninsula, crossed the Yalu River, and swept south into Manchuria. The remnants of the Chinese Beiyang fleet were either sunk by Japanese torpedo boats or captured after the Battle of Weihaiwei.
Although ostensibly a war between traditional enemies for control of the Korean Peninsula, both China and Japan had been armed, trained and advised militarily, and incited politically and diplomatically for this war by the Great Powers of Britain, France and Germany. These pages examine such involvement from the naval perspective. As historian Alfred Thayer Mahan had correctly predicted just prior to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, control of the seas was to prove a critical factor in its outcome.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 