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Updated: May 28, 2025
In the following May Mischenko made another raid, this time round General Nogi's flank. He had with him fifty squadrons, a horse artillery battery, and a battery of machine guns.
These several successes, comparatively unimportant though they were, coupled with the practical destruction of the Port Arthur and Vladivostock fleets, put new heart into the Japanese for a time; but with the arrival and passage of the month of September, during which no appreciable progress was made in the operations before Port Arthur, even the unexampled patience and superb stoicism thus far displayed by the Japanese as a people showed signs of the wear and tear to which they had so long been subjected, and murmurings at General Nogi's apparent non-success began to make themselves heard.
Strategists are agreed that, had Kuropatkin's plans found competent agents to execute them, the Japanese advance would have been at least checked at Liaoyang. In fact, the Japanese, in drafting their original programme, had always expected that Nogi's army would be in a position on the left flank in the field long before there was any question of fighting at Liaoyang.
The exaltation of Nogi's career, set forth so strikingly in Stanley Washburn's little volume on the great Japanese warrior, contains much that is especially needed for us of America, prone as we are to regard the exigencies of a purely commercial and industrial civilization as excusing us from the need of admiring and practicing the heroic and warlike virtues. Our people are not military.
The Japanese programme was to hold the Russian centre; to attack their left flank with Kawamura's army, and to sweep round their right flank with Nogi's forces. The latter were therefore kept in the rear until Kawamura's attack had developed fully on the east and until the two centres were hotly engaged.
General Nogi's force had marched up from Port Arthur, but General Kawamura's was a new army formed of special reservists and now put in the field for the first time. The Russians occupied a front forty-four miles in extent and from five to six miles in depth. They did not know, apparently, that General Kawamura's army had joined Oyama's forces, nor did they know where Nogi's army was operating.
Of course, all these events did not move exactly as planned, but the main feature of the great fight was that Kuropatkin, deceived by Kawamura's movement, detached a large force to oppose him, and then recalled these troops too late for the purpose of checking General Nogi's flanking operation.
But what was the good of this reckless advance, of this bold rush, which built bridges of human bodies across the enemy's trenches and formed living ladders composed of whole companies before the enemy's earthworks what was the good of all this heroic courage in the face of Marshal Nogi's relentless calculations?
It meant, also, that General Nogi's army would now be free to join their comrades beyond the Liao River, and that Kuropatkin would find his opponents' strength increased by four divisions. It became, therefore, important to ascertain how soon this transfer was likely to be effected, and, if possible, to interrupt it by tearing up the railway.
While the American Army of the North was advancing on Nogi's forces in the Blue Mountains, the Army of the South was to attack the Japanese position in Arizona by way of Texas. For this purpose the three brigades stationed in the mountains of New Mexico were to be reënforced by the troops from Cuba and Porto Rico and the two Florida regiments.
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