This article is to examine the art of war that Admiral Yi Sun Sin used to overcome the difficulties. The author studied Admiral Yi’s art of war by placing the emphasis on his principles of victorious battle, strategy and tactic.
Firstly, there are ...
This article is to examine the art of war that Admiral Yi Sun Sin used to overcome the difficulties. The author studied Admiral Yi’s art of war by placing the emphasis on his principles of victorious battle, strategy and tactic.
Firstly, there are two principles that led Admiral Yi to a victory: ‘concentration of military power’ and ‘securing initiative’. Admiral Yi always fought in the battles with superiority on his hands through concentrating his military power, and seized the initiatives by choosing the battle fields and time himself.
Basically, Admiral Yi’s naval strategy is ‘offensive fleet-being strategy’. ‘The strategy of fleet-being(현존함대전략)’ means maintaining the number of battleships to interfere enemy’s further attack. The reason why Admiral Yi’s fleet could not use offensive ‘decisive strategy(결전전략)’ was because of numerical inferiority. However with qualitative superiority, Yi Sun Sin sometimes performed ‘decisive strategy(결전전략)’ if needed. This is the reason why Admiral Yi’s strategy is named ‘offensive fleet-being strategy(공세적 현존함대전략)’. In this article, 3 strategies are being discussed, which are ‘southern seaway interference strategy’, ‘land and sea parallel attack strategy’, and ‘western seaway interference strategy’.
Admiral Yi’s naval tactics are ‘Dang-Pa(撞破) tactic’, turtle ship assault tactic, and Hakik-jin tactic. ‘Dang-Pa(撞破)’ tactic is not a tactic that a battleship collides with other battleships but it is to destroy an enemy vessel by shooting a steel ordnance. Also, turtle ship assault tactic is not a crashing tactic that the turtle ship crashes with enemy ship, but it is to approach closely to an enemy vessel and shoot a cannon artillery for higher accuracy. Thus, it means that the turtle ship was not a battleship for collision but was for short-ranged shooting battleship. Hakik-jin tactic is a tactic which surrounds enemy vessels in a semi-circular formation like wings of a crane and barrage fire enemy vessels, resulting in an enhancement of accuracy rate.
There are 4 stages of Admiral Yi’s naval tactics where the turtle ship participated in the battle. First stage is destroying enemy command ship by assaulting the turtle ship. Second stage is defeating enemy vessel one by one using Panokseon and the turtle ship. Third stage is arrow shooting. Last stage is incinerating enemy by attacking with fire. Admiral Yi effectively combined 1st, 2nd stage, which were advanced shooting strategy, and 3rd, 4th stage, which were conventional strategy, to raise their combat power to the highest level.