Who won the Battle of Hansan Island?
Joseon Korea won. On the 8th day of the 7th lunar month of 1592 (14 August by the KASI conversion), Admiral Yi Sun-sin lured Wakisaka Yasuharu's 73 ships out of the narrow Gyeonnaeryang strait and surrounded them off Hansan Island in a crane-wing formation. Korean records count 59 Japanese ships burned or captured, and no Korean ship lost.1
In the summer of 1592, less than three months into Toyotomi Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea, the Joseon navy met the strongest Japanese squadron yet sent against it in the waters off Hansan Island, south of today's Tongyeong. Admiral Yi Sun-sin drew it out of a narrow strait, closed around it in open sea and destroyed most of it, and two days later a second squadron was beaten at Angolpo. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture counts Hansan among the three great Korean victories of the Imjin War.2
Part of Battles of Korea · Next: Myeongnyang, 1597
Background: an invasion by land and sea
Hideyoshi's armies landed at Busan in the fourth lunar month of 1592, late May in the Western calendar. Hardened by the long civil wars, in which massed arquebus fire had already decided battles such as Nagashino, and carrying firearms the Korean army lacked, they took Seoul within weeks and Pyongyang by the sixth lunar month. The Korean account describes a Japanese plan to advance by land and sea together, the fleet pushing west along the coast in step with the armies.3
At sea it went differently. From the fifth lunar month Yi Sun-sin, commander of the Left Navy of Jeolla Province, attacked Japanese ships at Okpo, his first battle, and then at Sacheon, Dangpo and Danghangpo. At Sacheon, at the end of the fifth month (8 July 1592), the turtle ship went into battle for the first time.4
The fleets and their commanders
After these losses the Japanese reinforced their fleet. Wakisaka Yasuharu was one of the daimyo who led Hideyoshi's naval contingents, which were also busy ferrying men, horses and rice from Japan. According to Korean records he sailed with 73 ships, 36 large, 24 medium and 13 small. Kuki Yoshitaka and Kato Yoshiaki, who were meant to operate with him, followed with 42 more ships by the Korean encyclopedia's count.5
Yi Sun-sin joined forces with Yi Eok-gi, commander of the Right Navy of Jeolla. The two drilled 48 warships off Yi's base at Yeosu, sailed on the 6th day of the seventh month and met Won Gyun, commander of the Right Navy of Gyeongsang, with 7 more ships at Noryang. That gives 55 warships in the Korean encyclopedia's count. Their main ship was the panokseon, a heavy oared warship with a raised fighting deck and cannon.6
The lure out of Gyeonnaeryang
On the evening of the 7th, according to the Korean encyclopedia, a herdsman named Kim Cheon-son told the commanders that about 70 Japanese ships lay in the Gyeonnaeryang strait, between the mainland and Geoje Island. The strait was narrow and full of reefs, poor water for the big panokseon, so Yi chose to fight in the wider sea off Hansan.7
Five or six panokseon went in, attacked and then fell back, and the Japanese came out after them. The Japanese record of Wakisaka's career, the Wakisaka-ki, remembers four or five Korean ships that gave way and were chased.8
The crane wing closes
In open water Yi ordered the whole fleet into the hagikjin, the crane-wing formation, a wide arc whose wings closed around the pursuing Japanese ships. His captains charged in firing their heavy guns. Japanese naval tactics relied on closing in and boarding, which is exactly what Korean gunnery at a distance was meant to deny them.9
Why did Wakisaka lose the Battle of Hansan Island?
Wakisaka lost because he took the bait. Chasing a handful of retreating Korean ships out of the cramped Gyeonnaeryang strait, his fleet sailed into open water where the whole Korean fleet waited and closed around it in a crane-wing arc. Ships built to board could not reach Korean warships pounding them with cannon.
Losses
The Korean report, as the encyclopedia gives it, counts 47 Japanese ships burned or wrecked and 12 captured, among them a large towered ship taken by the officer Gwon Jun; the total of 59 recurs in other Korean accounts. According to the Korean encyclopedia some 400 Japanese survivors abandoned their ships and fled ashore. The Korean fleet suffered casualties but, the encyclopedia says, lost no ships.10
The follow-up at Angolpo
Kuki and Kato, hearing that Wakisaka's fleet had been destroyed, stayed at anchor in Angolpo, a shallow harbor on the coast of today's Changwon. Yi attacked there on the 10th day of the seventh month (16 August 1592), two days after Hansan, although the encyclopedia's Hansan article says one day. The Japanese would not come out to fight. Yi's captains took turns rowing into the harbor to bombard them through the day, and most of the large ships were destroyed while their crews escaped ashore. The Korean encyclopedia puts the Japanese dead there at about 250.11
Turtle ships: fact and legend
The turtle ship was a panokseon with a covered top. The court annals described a plank roof shaped like a turtle's back and studded with knives and spikes, a dragon's head at the bow used as a gun port and guns on every side. The idea was older: the Korean encyclopedia notes a turtle ship in the annals of King Taejong in 1413.12
Were they the first ironclads? The claim was popularized by Yu Gil-jun in his book Seoyu gyeonmun, but the encyclopedia says iron plating has never been confirmed, and some scholars doubt it because of the extra weight and the corrosion it would have brought. C. Adam Volle, writing in Gwangju News, argues that the 1592 ships had wooden roofs with iron spikes. Only a few turtle ships were built, and the open-decked panokseon, better suited to pursuit, remained the main warship of the fleet.13
The Joseon side
Yi Sun-sin was promoted to senior second rank, Yi Eok-gi and Won Gyun to junior second rank. In 1593 Yi moved his headquarters to Hansan Island and became the first supreme commander of the navies of the three southern provinces.14
The Japanese side
Wakisaka went into action before Kuki and Kato had joined him, and his fleet was largely destroyed before they arrived. His side of the story survives in the Wakisaka-ki, a Japanese record of his career, quoted in Korean in Kim Si-deok's translation. Today's Japanese reference works call the naval fighting of the seventh month of 1592 a heavy defeat for the Japanese navy.15
Aftermath and consequences
Korean historians argue that Hansan broke the main Japanese fleet, wrecked the plan to advance by land and sea together and gave Korea command of the southern coast. Japanese reference works agree that from the seventh month of 1592 Japanese supply routes by sea were under threat; Kitajima Manji writes that Yi's navy cut them. Yuhan Kim, in an Osprey campaign study reviewed in The Naval Review, judges that Hansando and Angolpo gave Yi supremacy over Korean waters for the time being.16
The sea was not the whole story: the same Japanese works stress that Righteous Army guerrillas on land and the arrival of Ming troops also cut Japanese supply lines. Miki Seiichiro argues that the vast mobilization for the war in the end helped bring down Hideyoshi's own regime, whose collapse was sealed at Sekigahara.17
Memory and historiography
In Korea Hansan is a national symbol. The historian Homer Hulbert, in his History of Korea (1905), called it the Salamis of Korea, and the Japanese Heibonsha encyclopedia notes that in Korea the war remains a warning against Japanese aggression and Yi a symbol of national resistance. Tongyeong's Hansan Battle Festival commemorates it with a memorial rite, a reenactment of the battle at sea and a turtle ship rowing competition.18
In Japan the war itself has changed names. Kitajima Manji notes that the Edo period called it a conquest of Korea, the 20th century the Bunroku and Keicho campaigns, and that today that name and Hideyoshi's dispatch of troops to Korea are both usual; he argues that invasion is the more accurate word. Prints still honored Wakisaka among the warriors of feudal Japan.19
The battlefield today
The site of Yi's headquarters there is a protected historic site where the first Three-Province Naval Command once stood. The exact place of the fighting is disputed. Yi's report to the court said only that it was fought in the open sea off Hansan, and at least four locations have been proposed; the researcher Park Jong-pyeong, using Won Jung-geo's 18th-century Hwagukji, which he finds consistent with the Wakisaka-ki, places it in the sea north of the island.20
