How to fire "after submit" trigger on 350 records

Folks,

I have about 350 records whose workflows need to transition to the next state, but the trigger on that transition is 'after submit'. Is there any way to mass submit a bunch of records? I thought a mass update would do it, so I defined a custom field (check box) and used a mass update to set the check box to checked on all 350 records, but the workflow did not transition. After this failed, I manually edited/saved several of the 350 without changing the transaction details, and the workflow transitioned as desired.

My conclusion is that mass updates don't seem to fire after submit triggers. Am I missing something here? If not, is there any other way to get 350 records to submit other than writing some suitescript that fires a saves search, iterates through the results and explicitly opens and submits each record?