The Imjin War (39 page)

The successful defense of Yonan illustrates a trait of the Koreans in warfare that would be demonstrated on numerous occasions during the war, and indeed throughout the Choson dynasty: a degree of courage and ferocity when defending a wall that went beyond anything they could muster when fighting on open ground. This would be remarked upon in the late nineteenth century by William Griffis, one of the first historians to attempt any sort of extensive chronicling of Korean history in the English language. “The Koreans are poor soldiers in the open field,” Griffis observed in 1892,

and exhibit slight proof of personal valor,...but put the same men behind walls...[and] they are more than brave, their courage is sub
lime, they fight to the last man and fling themselves on the bare steel when the foe clears the parapet. The Japanese of 1592 looked upon the Korean in the field as a kitten, but in the castle as a tiger. The French [who attempted to take Kanghwa Island] in 1866 never found a force that could face rifles, but behind walls the same men were invincible.
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One week after the successful defense of Yonan, a force of Korean government troops scored an important and interesting vic
tory with the retaking of Kyongju far to the south. Kyongju, the capital of the Silla dynasty and during Choson times the administrative center of Kyongsang Province, had been captured by Kato Kiyomasa’s second contingent during the early days of the war, when Kato, Konishi, and Kuroda were all racing to be the first to reach Seoul. A small force of Koreans had attempted to stave off the Japanese at that time, but their hastily assembled defenses had been easily smashed. Three thousand people were put to the sword in the reprisals that followed, and many of the city’s historic buildings were burnt to the ground. In the consolidation of the south that subsequently occurred, the city was garrisoned by troops from the fifth contingent from Shikoku, under a commander named Tagawa Naiki. Tagawa’s men enjoyed several weeks of uneventful occupation. Then, toward the end of September, a large force of Koreans appeared from the west.

This native army consisted of five thousand government troops under the command of recently appointed Kyongsang Left Army Commander Pak Jin. (His predecessor in the position, Yi Kak, who had proved so ineffectual in the face of the initial Japanese assault, had been reas
signed elsewhere.) The first round went to the Japanese. Tagawa, taking the offensive early against the numerically superior Koreans, sent a body of men out of the city from a back gate to circle around and attack from the rear, a bold and entirely successful gambit that sent Pak and his men into a precipitous retreat.
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They soon returned—and this time they brought with them a secret weapon. It was called the
pigyok chincholloe
(flying striking earthquake heaven thunder), translated by one writer as the “flying thunderbolt.”
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In the early hours of October 12, under the cover of darkness, Pak sent a group of soldiers up to the base of the walls of Kyongju where they set up and fired the weapon, hurling a mysterious ball of iron into the midst of the enemy camp. “It fell to earth,” a Japanese chronicler tells us, “and our soldiers gathered about it to look. Suddenly it exploded, emitting a noise that shook heaven and earth, and scattering bits of iron like pulverized stars. Those who were hit dropped dead on the spot. Others were knocked down as if by a powerful wind.”
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Only thirty-odd men were killed in the blast, but it so panicked Tagawa’s garrison that it abandoned the city and fled to Sosaengpo, leaving Kyongju and a large store of rice to the Koreans.
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The pigyok chinchollae would be employed on other occasions in the Imjin War, notably at the First Battle of Chinju in November 1592, and at the Battle of Haengju in March of the following year. It was invented some time earlier in the reign of King Sonjo by Yi Chang-son, head of the government’s firearms department, probably as an adapta
tion of the catapult-fired
pi li hu pao
(heaven-shaking thunder) bomb previously developed in China and used against the Japanese in the failed Mongol invasion in 1274. Unlike the pi li hu pao, however, the pigok chincholloe was shot with gunpowder from a mortar, making it the world’s first mortar- or cannon-fired explosive shell. It was manufactured in various sizes, from a twenty-one-centimeter version fired from the Korean’s largest mortar, the daewangu, down to ten-centimeter models shot from the medium-sized chungwangu. The projectile itself was a hollow cast-iron sphere packed with gunpowder and pieces of shrapnel, with a delayed action fuse inserted through an opening in the top, consisting of a length of cord wound around a screw-like wooden core in turn inserted in a sleeve of bamboo. After the mortar was charged with gunpowder, the sphere was placed in the mouth, the end of the fuse protruding from its top was lit, and then the mortar was fired, hurling the device over a distance of five to six hundred paces. After it landed its fuse would continue to burn, spiraling down through the center of the sphere until it reached the base of the bamboo sleeve, ignited the gunpowder, and exploded the shell.
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The last major battle of 1592 occurred at the city of
Chinju on Korea’s southern coast, west of the Japanese stronghold at Pusan. The fortress here was reputed to be one of the most unassailable in all of southern Korea, a claim that may have been true earlier in the Choson dynasty, when it was still a compact hilltop citadel, the sort of fortification that the Koreans excelled at building and defending. The government’s prewar building program, however, had compromised Chinju’s defenses. By greatly lengthening its walls to accommodate more of the local population, the cardinal rule of fortress-building, “keep it small,” was forgotten, and Chinju rendered more difficult to defend.

Fortunately for the Koreans, the thirty-eight hundred defenders of
Chinju were led by a courageous and able commander named Kim Si-min who had been appointed magistrate of the city the month before. About seventy of Kim’s men were also equipped with muskets, the first batch of such Korean-manufactured weapons to see service in the war. The Japanese were thus in for a surprise.
(The Koreans had known of muskets since at least 1589, when Japanese envoy So Yoshitoshi presented one to the court as a gift. Government minister Yu Song-nyong had urged at the time that it be adopted by the army as a standard weapon, but it was only after the start of the war that production was authorized.)
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The Japanese arrived outside the walls of
Chinju on November 8, a body of 15,570 men from the seventh contingent from western Honshu under the leadership of Kato Mitsuyasu, Hasegawa Hidekazu, Nagaoka Tadaoki, and Kimura Shigeji. They advanced to within firing distance; then the ashigaru gunners leveled a thousand muskets at the walls and let loose with a thunderous volley. Their intention was probably to see if the defenders within could be frightened into retreat by a mere show of force, a gambit that had been successfully employed against the Koreans before. The ploy did not work at Chinju. Inside the city, Kim Si-min had his men under firm control. He had placed them at strategic points all along the walls of the fortress, with strict orders to keep their heads down and to hold their fire until the Japanese had advanced to the walls. The initial Japanese fusillade thus met with no response. The pall of gun smoke slowly cleared, but still nothing came flying over the parapets from the Koreans. All remained quiet, as if the city was deserted. Later that night Kim sent a musician up to the top of the fortress to play his flute, to impress upon the Japanese that he and his men were unafraid and calm.

Having failed to shake the defenders of
Chinju with their initial display of musket fire, the Japanese set to work preparing for an all-out assault on the walls. Erecting an enclosure to hide their activities from the Koreans, the men of the seventh contingent lashed together a three-story-high siege tower, plus scaling ladders of pine and bamboo, high enough to reach the top of the walls and wide enough to accommodate half a dozen men on each rung. The Koreans within the fortress, meanwhile, were making preparations of their own. They added to their stock of arrows and melted lead into musket balls. They placed piles of rocks at convenient intervals around the walls and kept kettles of water on the boil. They bundled straw around packets of gunpowder to make crude incendiary devices. They drove spikes through heavy planks, then sharpened the iron points.

And so the First Battle of Chinju began. The Japanese opened fire from the top of their siege tower, using the height of the construction to lob shots over the wall and into the city, keeping the heads of the Koreans down while the scaling ladders were moved into place. The first wave of assault troops then ran forward and attempted to climb up the walls and storm over the top. There soon were so many warriors jostling to be
ichiban nori
, “first to climb in,” that the ladders nearly collapsed under the weight. Samurai leader Hosokawa Sudaoki was among them, the
Taikoki
tells us, “accompanied by foot soldiers on ladders on his right and left. [He] strictly ordered ‘Until I have personally climbed into the castle this ladder is for one person to climb. If anyone else climbs I will take his head!’ [T]hen he climbed. Because of this the ladder did not break and he got up, and the men who saw him were loud in his praise....[B]ut when he tried to make his entry from within the castle, spears and naginata were thrust at him to try to make him fall, and lamentably he fell to the bottom of the moat.”
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Other warriors followed Hosokawa. Thousands of them. They were driven back by a hail of arrows and musket balls, stones and red-hot chunks of iron. Those who were not killed or knocked to the ground by these projectiles had their upturned faces scalded by showers of boiling water or were impaled with spears or by spiked boards dropped on their heads. Some ashigaru fell to the ground in pairs and small groups, all nailed together on the same heavy plank.

Then flaming bundles of straw came flying over the walls. They landed in the midst of the Japanese clustered at the base of the ladders, waiting to get a foot on the first rung. They seemed innocent enough, harmless little fires providing a bit of warmth on a chilly autumn day. But then the flames reached the packet of gunpowder nestled within and the flaming bundle exploded, killing or maiming anyone nearby.

The Japanese assaulted the walls of
Chinju in wave after wave throughout that day—and the next day, and the next, and the next. The Koreans, under the steady hand of General Kim, held their ground. Eventually bands of civilian volunteers arrived to aid the defenders. One group, too small to attack the Japanese directly, climbed to the top of a nearby hill and beat drums and lit torches so that the enemy would think that they had been flanked by a large Korean force. They were soon joined by a second band of two hundred men, sent by the “Red Coat General,” Kwak Jae-u. Kwak’s men scrambled up the slopes above the Japanese camp and roared, “The Red Coat General is mustering soldiers from all over the south, and will soon be arriving with a huge army!” Then came news that a large group of civilian volunteers, numbering some two thousand, was on its way to relieve Chinju, obliging the Japanese to divert a portion of their force away from the walls to guard the approaches to the city.

The Battle of Chinju raged for five days. The final assault occurred in the early morning hours of November 13. On one side of the city the Japanese extravagantly illuminated their camp with torches and made a show of packing up their gear and preparing to leave, all within full view of the wary Koreans. Then, at a given signal, the torches were extinguished and an all-out attack was launched against the far side of the city, one group of ashigaru laying down a screen of covering fire, forcing the Koreans away from the parapets above, while a second group attempted one last time to storm over the top of the walls. The defenders within by this point were in desperate straits. There was scarcely a stone remaining inside the city to hurl at the attackers, and the wood and thatch roofs of all the buildings had been reduced to ash by Japanese fire arrows, leaving the city a patchwork of blackened and smoldering heaps. But the Koreans stuck to their walls and fought on. At one point in the battle Kim Si-min himself was mortally wounded in the forehead by a musket ball, but this was kept from his men so they would not lose heart. They did not, and the defenses of
Chinju held. In the end Kato Mitsuyasu and his fellow commanders halted the attack, and did not venture another. With their losses growing alarmingly high (by some accounts nearly half their force), and increasingly anxious about counterattack from the rear, it was decided to lift the siege and withdraw.
This was done under the cover of a sudden downpour. The Koreans did not attempt to pursue.
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The Japanese would return to
Chinju the following summer, driven by a fury that would see it burned to the ground and all its inhabitants killed. For the time being, however, the city was saved.

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It was native Korean resistance such as this, both on land and at sea, that brought Hideyoshi’s drive to conquer
Asia grinding to a halt. Because of Korean naval commander Yi Sun-sin, the taiko was denied the supply route through the Yellow Sea that he so desperately needed to transport reinforcements to northern Korea to continue the advance on Beijing. And now, because of a groundswell of native resistance from civilian volunteers, monk-soldiers, and reassembled government troops, simply hanging on to Korea itself was proving a troublesome task. Inevitably, the frustrations that this caused the Japanese in the field would lead them to ignore Hideyoshi’s prewar imperative to treat the Koreans kindly in order to win them over, and to rely instead on violence and terror to beat them down. Fifteen ninety-three, the second year of the war, would thus come to be dominated by atrocities on the part of the Japanese, atrocities that would in turn serve only to deepen the hatred of the Koreans and steel their determination to resist. At any cost.