The Russo-Japanese War
Japan defeated Russia between 1904 and 1905, and it was the first modern war in which an Asian power beat a European empire. The quarrel was over Manchuria and Korea. Russia had taken a lease on Port Arthur — a warm-water Pacific port, which it lacked — and had not withdrawn its troops from Manchuria after the Boxer Rising as promised. Japan offered to recognise Russian interests in Manchuria in exchange for Korea, and was ignored, largely because the Russian court did not take Japan seriously. Japan attacked Port Arthur without declaring war on the night of 8 February 1904. The land campaign was industrial in a way that prefigured 1914: entrenchments, machine guns, barbed wire, indirect artillery fire and enormous casualties for small gains. The siege of Port Arthur cost some 60,000 Japanese casualties, and Mukden in 1905 was fought by more than half a million men over three weeks. The war was settled at sea. Russia sent its Baltic fleet 18,000 miles round Africa — firing on British trawlers in the North Sea on the way, having convinced itself they were torpedo boats — and Tōgō destroyed it at Tsushima in two days in May 1905, sinking or capturing almost every ship. Roosevelt mediated the peace at Portsmouth and won a Nobel Prize; the terms disappointed a Japanese public that had not been told how near bankruptcy the country was, and produced riots in Tokyo. Russia got the 1905 revolution. The consequences ran far beyond either country. Nationalists from Turkey to India to Vietnam took the result as proof that European power was not a law of nature, and Japan drew the lesson that a surprise attack on a fleet at anchor works, which it applied at Pearl Harbor.
- Year: 1904 CE
- Category: Military
