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

Mukden was, in John Rickard's words, the largest and final major land battle of the Russo-Japanese War, and at the time the largest modern land battle ever fought. 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.²

After Port Arthur

The war had begun in February 1904 with a Japanese surprise attack on the Russian squadron at Port Arthur, the Russian base on the Chinese coast. Through 1904 the Japanese besieged the fortress and pushed the main Russian army north up the South Manchurian Railroad toward Mukden, the old Manchu capital and the key rail center of the region.³ › Battle of Liaoyang, 1904

Port Arthur surrendered at the start of 1905. That freed the Japanese Third Army under General Nogi Maresuke, which marched north to join Oyama. Rickard, reviewing John Valitutto's study of the campaign, points to the Russian failing here: after their costly and unsuccessful attack at Sandepu in January, the Russians still had more men, but they planned their next offensive so slowly that the Japanese struck first.⁴

Two armies on a long front

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. The EBSCO account by Kenneth Czech puts each side at about 310,000. The Russian line ran east to west for about 150 kilometers (93 miles), cut in two by the railroad just south of Mukden, and in places the entrenchments were 15 kilometers deep.⁵

Oyama's plan was a double envelopment on the model of the Prussian victory at Sedan in 1870. The new Fifth Army under Kawamura Kageaki 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 would meet north of Mukden and close the ring. Rickard notes that the Japanese even left their flanks lightly fortified so that the attack could start faster.⁶

The trap

Kuropatkin took the bait. On 25 February he sent most of his reserve east against Kawamura, and two days later learned that Nogi was moving around his right flank in the west. On 1 March he turned his reserves back westward, but repeated counterattacks on 2 and 3 March failed to stop Nogi's advance toward the railroad north of the city. A Russian counteroffensive against General Oku Yasutaka's Second Army also failed, while the Japanese Fourth and First Armies under Nozu Michitsura and Kuroki Tametomo pressed the Russian center.⁷

From 6 to 8 March the heaviest fighting fell on the Russian right, and on 6 March Kuropatkin fell back to the Hun River. Then Kawamura broke through in the east. With both flanks threatened and his line of communications in danger, Kuropatkin ordered a general withdrawal rather than risk encirclement. Japanese troops entered Mukden on 10 March.⁸

A retreat up one railroad

The retreat was confused. Menning writes that some Russian units fought to the last while others simply fled. Yet the ring never closed: 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. The rout ended only at Xipingkai, about 175 kilometers north of Mukden.⁹

The losses are given differently. Menning counts nearly 89,000 Russian losses, 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. Kuropatkin lost nearly all his stores and heavy equipment and was soon replaced by General Nikolai Linevich.¹⁰

Victory without annihilation

Mukden was a clear Japanese victory, but not the crushing one Oyama had wanted. With the two sides close to equal in numbers, mobility and firepower, Menning concludes, the outcome was not strategically decisive: 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. Rickard sees in it the problems soon to be faced on the Western Front, with armies spread along such long fronts that no single local success could settle the battle.¹¹

Its weight was political. The Times in London, in a report of 25 March preserved in the Japanese national archives, compared it to Austerlitz and Waterloo. The defeat fed the revolution already shaking Russia, and after the Russian fleet was destroyed at Tsushima in May, both exhausted powers turned to the peace talks that ended the war. For Japan, Rickard notes, the victory meant a foothold on the Chinese mainland, the start of a road that led to its later wars in China.¹²