Sarah Paine

Here's how it works.

They have to get a bunch of these 11-inch howitzers in place.

Japan didn't own many of these.

They're really heavy.

It's really hard to transport them with horses and things.

They've got to put them behind the hills in Port Arthur, and then they've got to take the high point, which takes them a while to figure out that they need to do this, a 203-meter hill.

You put a spotter on 203-meter hill, this thing starts firing shots, and the spotter starts radioing in how you have to adjust the line of fire in order to hit the ships and harbor.

So that's

what's going on here.

Here, you can see the narrow neck there above Dalny.

You can see it's a big port where you put a lot of ships, but not a very protected port.

The star is where Port Arthur is, and that is a protected port where you want to put naval vessels.

And you can see it takes the Japanese two months to work their way down the Liaodong Peninsula to get themselves in position to blow away the ships in port.

Meanwhile, Japanese armies are having a hard time while this is going on.

It could be argued that maybe they even reached their culminating point in the battle of Liaoyang.

Who knows?

Liaoyang takes place less than halfway through the war.

It's in early September, 1904.

And Japanese munitions, numbers of officers, numbers of horses, it all goes critical.

They don't have enough.