Russo-Japanese War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Russo-Japanese War began on the night of the 8th of February 1904, when Japanese torpedo boats struck the Russian Far East Fleet at Port Arthur. The blow landed three hours before Japan's declaration of war reached the Russian government. In Saint Petersburg, Tsar Nicholas II was stunned. His ministers had assured him that Japan would not fight. He could not believe that any nation would open hostilities without a formal declaration. Cecil Spring Rice, a first secretary at the British Embassy, said the news left the Tsar "almost incredulous." How did a quarrel over Korea and Manchuria bring a European empire and an Asian one to this moment? Why were so many Russian leaders certain that Japan would back down? And how did the outcome upend what observers around the world had taken for granted?

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• 2. Japan's Hunger for Empire

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  After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan's new government set out to absorb Western ideas, technology, and ways of making war. By the late 19th century the country had become a modern industrial state. Its leaders wanted the Western powers to treat them as equals. The restoration had aimed at a modern Japan, not a Westernized one, and Japan itself looked overseas as an imperial power.

  In the autumn of 1872, Charles DeLong, the American minister to Japan, told General Charles LeGendre that he had been urging Tokyo to occupy Taiwan. He wanted Japan to "civilize" its indigenous people, just as the United States had done to Native Americans. LeGendre went further and urged the Japanese to declare a sphere of influence modeled on the Monroe Doctrine. It would have been the first such policy ever adopted by a non-White state.

  Between 1869 and 1873, a dispute called the Seikanron, or "Conquer Korea Argument," bitterly divided the Japanese elite. One faction wanted to conquer Korea immediately. The other wanted to wait until Japan was more modern. Nobody in the elite accepted that Koreans had a right to be independent. Only the timing was in dispute.

  Much of the pressure for aggression came from below. The British Japanologist Richard Storry argued that the West wrongly pictured the Japanese as docile instruments of their rulers. In his account, ordinary people demanded a tough foreign policy from 1894 to 1941 and turned to riots and assassination when they sensed weakness. The "people's rights" movement, which campaigned for an elected parliament, also leaned ultra-nationalist. Heavy taxes bred resentment, and many wanted an overseas colony as a reward. Schools taught Bushidō, the code of the samurai, so a generation grew up treating diplomacy as weakness. The historian Masao Maruyama called this a "transfer psychology," in which a country pressured by great powers pressures weaker ones in turn.

  Korea became the proving ground. In 1884, Japan encouraged a coup by a pro-Japanese reformist faction at the Korean court. Chinese troops put it down, and Chinese and Japanese soldiers clashed in Seoul. Tokyo did not feel ready for war with China, so the Convention of Tientsin ended the crisis. It left Korea more firmly in the Chinese sphere but gave Japan the right to intervene.

  A peasant rebellion led by the Tonghak religious movement then gave Japan its chance. Korea asked the Qing dynasty for troops, and Japan answered by sending its own force and installing a puppet government in Seoul. War with China followed in 1894. Japanese ground troops routed the Chinese on the Liaodong Peninsula, and the Chinese Beiyang Fleet was nearly destroyed at the Battle of the Yalu River. The Treaty of Shimonoseki handed Japan the Liaodong Peninsula and Taiwan. Russia, Germany, and France then forced Japan to give up the peninsula, and Tokyo, lacking the strength to resist all three, gave in.

  Japan did not give up on Korea. On the 8th of October 1895, Japanese agents murdered Queen Min, who led the anti-Japanese faction, inside the Gyeongbokgung palace. The killing backfired and turned Korean public opinion against Japan. In early 1896, King Gojong fled to the Russian legation in Seoul, fearing for his life. A popular uprising toppled the pro-Japanese government, and several cabinet ministers were lynched in the streets.

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• 3. Russia's Eastern Reach

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  In December 1897, a Russian fleet appeared off Port Arthur. After three months of talks in 1898, China leased Port Arthur, Talienwan, and the surrounding waters to Russia. The convention could be extended by mutual agreement, and the Russians clearly expected that. They moved in quickly and fortified Port Arthur, their only warm-water port on the Pacific coast. The move was aimed mainly at countering the British occupation of Wei-hai-Wei, but Japan read it as aimed at Japan. Germany, meanwhile, occupied Jiaozhou Bay, built the Tsingtao fortress, and stationed its East Asia Squadron there.

  Between 1897 and 1903, Russia built the Chinese Eastern Railway across Manchuria. The Russian and Chinese governments jointly owned it, but the management was entirely Russian. The line followed the Russian gauge, and Russian troops guarded it against bandits. Its headquarters sat in Harbin, a new Russian-built city nicknamed the "Moscow of the Orient." Manchuria was still nominally part of the Qing Empire, yet it looked more and more like a Russian province. A year after the lease, Russia began another line, the South Manchurian Railroad, running from Harbin through Mukden to Port Arthur. Boxer forces burned its stations during the Boxer Rebellion.

  The empire behind these projects was enormous. By the 1890s it stretched from Poland to the Kamchatka Peninsula, and its reach across Central Asia had swallowed local states as far as Afghanistan. The ambitions were not new to Japan either, since an 1861 episode known as the Tsushima incident had already seen Russia assault Japanese territory.

  Korea drew Russian attention too. In 1901, Tsar Nicholas II told Prince Henry of Prussia that he did not want to seize Korea, but "under no circumstances can I allow Japan to become firmly established there." He added, "That will be a casus belli." By 1898 Russia held mining and forestry concessions near the Yalu and Tumen rivers, which caused the Japanese much anxiety.

  The Boxer crisis of 1900 put even more Russian soldiers in place. Russia had already sent 177,000 troops into Manchuria, nominally to protect its railways, and it joined the Eight-Nation Alliance that relieved the besieged legations in Beijing. The Qing army and the Boxers united against the invasion but were quickly overrun and ejected from Manchuria. Afterward, 100,000 Russian soldiers stayed behind. They had promised to leave once the crisis ended, but by 1903 Russia had set no timetable for withdrawal and had strengthened its position. Japan concluded that it should strike before the Trans-Siberian Railway was finished.

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• 4. The Kaiser's Letters

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  On the 1st of November 1902, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany wrote to his cousin Nicholas that Japan was becoming "a rather restless customer." He added that "it is evident to every unbiased mind that Korea must and will be Russian." The letter closed with a vision of Chinese masses led by Japanese officers, which Wilhelm called the realization of the "yellow peril." He signed it "Willy, Admiral of the Atlantic."

  The flattery had a long history. From November 1894 on, Wilhelm had praised Nicholas as Europe's defender against Asia, and he insisted that God Himself had chosen Russia for the task. He called Nicholas the "saviour of the white race." He also promised that once Russia beat Japan, the two emperors, the "Admiral of the Atlantic" and the "Admiral of the Pacific," would rule Eurasia together. The resources of that landmass, he argued, would make them immune to a British blockade and let them divide up the best of the British colonies in Asia.

  The motive was European, not Asian. Neither Wilhelm nor his Chancellor, Prince Bernhard von Bülow, cared much about East Asia. France, Russia's ally since 1894, disapproved of Nicholas's forward policy, and Premier Maurice Rouvier declared that the alliance applied only in Europe. Berlin hoped that a Russia tangled up with Japan would turn away from France and toward Germany. Wilhelm also wanted Russia distracted from the Balkans, the main source of friction with Germany's ally Austria-Hungary. And since Britain was allied to Japan, a Russo-Japanese war might serve Germany's wider challenge to British power.

  The effect on Nicholas was real. When he showed signs of wanting a compromise, Wilhelm attacked him as a coward. Nicholas replied that he still wanted peace. Wilhelm wrote back "You innocent angel!" and told his advisors that this was not the language of a "White Tsar." Wilhelm also wrote a marginal note in December 1903 claiming Germany had assured Russia that it would cover her back in Europe. Many decision-makers in Saint Petersburg came to believe that Russia's weaknesses in the Far East did not matter, because the Reich would come to help.

  President Theodore Roosevelt, who tried to mediate the dispute, complained that this propaganda stiffened Russian resistance. On the 24th of July 1905, he wrote to the British diplomat Cecil Spring Rice that Wilhelm "has done all he could to bring it about." During the war, Nicholas hoped for German intervention and more than once chose to fight on because of that hope.

  British and Japanese intelligence services had cooperated against Russia even before the war began. During the fighting, Indian Army stations in Malaya and China intercepted wireless and telegraph traffic and shared it with Japan. One British official wrote of the "perfect quality" of Japanese intelligence in return. Together they gathered much evidence that Germany was backing Russia, which led British officials to see Germany increasingly as a threat to the international order.

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• 5. Talks That Failed

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  Itō Hirobumi, one of the five Genrō who made up the Meiji oligarchy, tried to avoid war with a trade. He thought Japan too weak to evict the Russians by force, so he proposed that Russia control Manchuria while Japan controlled northern Korea. He and Count Inoue Kaoru opposed war with Russia on financial grounds. Katsura Tarō, Komura Jutarō, and Field Marshal Yamagata Aritomo favored it.

  The Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 changed the calculation. Britain wanted to keep Russia from making full use of its Pacific ports at Vladivostok and Port Arthur. Under the treaty, if any nation allied itself with Russia in a war against Japan, Britain would join Japan's side. Russia could therefore no longer count on Germany or France without risking British involvement, and Japan felt free to fight if it had to.

  By the 8th of April 1903, Russia had promised to pull out of Manchuria the forces sent to crush the Boxers. That day passed with no reduction in Russian troops. In Japan, university students demonstrated both against Russia and against their own government for failing to act.

  On the 3rd of August 1903, Japan's minister in Saint Petersburg, Kurino Shin'ichirō, handed over a draft agreement. It offered mutual respect for the independence of the Chinese and Korean empires, recognition of Japan's preponderating interests in Korea, and recognition of Russia's special interests in Manchurian railways. On the 3rd of October, Russia's minister to Japan, Roman Rosen, answered with a counter-proposal. It would have made northern Korea, above the 39th parallel, a neutral zone closed to troops from either side. It also demanded that Japan treat Manchuria and its coast as outside its sphere of interest. The Japanese historian Hirono Yoshihiko observed that as talks went on, Russia gave ground on Korea bit by bit, in concessions Japan saw as serious compromises.

  The two issues might never have become one war had Korea and Manchuria not been linked. Prime Minister Katsura Tarō reasoned that Britain and the United States would more likely sympathize with Japan if the struggle were framed as free trade against a protectionist Russia. Manchuria was the larger market, so it served that framing better. Japanese propaganda then cast Japan as the civilized power and Russia as the uncivilized one.

  Other governments watched from the sidelines. Emperor Gojong of Korea, believing that Manchuria was the real issue, pursued neutrality to preserve Korean independence. In reports to Beijing, the Chinese ambassador in Saint Petersburg, Hu Weide, argued that a Japanese victory offered China the better chance to regain Manchuria. Even so, China decided in December 1903 to stay neutral, because Japan's ambitions in Manchuria were not clear.

  On the 21st of December 1903, the Katsura cabinet voted to go to war. Japan still proposed, on the 13th of January 1904, a formula that would keep Manchuria outside the Japanese sphere and Korea outside the Russian one. By the 4th of February, no formal reply had come from Saint Petersburg. Japan had concluded that Russia only wanted time to build up its forces, and on the 6th of February Kurino was recalled and diplomatic relations were cut.

  Historians place much of the blame on Nicholas II. His advisors did not want a war, since they foresaw trouble moving troops and supplies from European Russia. Nicholas repeatedly delayed negotiations, believing that God and the autocracy would protect him. He held the Japanese in contempt as "yellow monkeys" and assumed they would yield. Some scholars suggest he provoked the war to revive Russian patriotism, but no evidence supports this, and he told Wilhelm he did not wish for war. Komura had already complained in a telegram that four months of talks had produced no clear outcome, and that the delays were largely Russia's doing.

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• 6. Armies and Railways

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  Japan entered the war with maps that Russia's generals might have envied. Its officers had studied the Russian Far East and Manchuria in detail before the fighting, and every officer was required to speak a foreign language. The army ran on conscription, introduced in 1873. The active army and first-line reserve totaled 380,000 men, and the total of trained troops reached 850,000. Another 4,250,000 men sat in the untrained reserve. When war was declared, 257,000 infantry, 11,000 cavalry, and 894 artillery pieces were immediately available. Casualties later forced Tokyo to shorten reserve training from a full year to six months.

  A regular Japanese division held 11,400 infantry, 430 cavalry, and 36 guns. Unlike the Europeans, the Japanese did not form corps, so divisions answered directly to armies. Their cavalry was not the elite arm it was in Russia. It served mainly as scouts and often fought dismounted. Estimates of Japanese strength vary between sources, and one account puts the total trained force at 1,200,000 men.

  Nobody agrees on how many Russian troops stood in the Far East when the war started. One estimate gives 60,000 infantry, 3,000 cavalry, and 164 guns, mostly around Vladivostok and Port Arthur. By mid-February that had grown to 95,000. The whole Russian army in 1904 numbered 1,200,000 men in 29 corps. Yet only 24,000 potential reinforcements stood east of Lake Baikal. The plan expected 35,000 more after four months and 60,000 more after ten, at which point Russia would take the offensive.

  That plan rested on a bad guess. Russian planners believed Japan could mobilize only 400,000 men, with no more than 250,000 operational, and that securing supply lines would eat up many of those. They expected only 150,000 to 170,000 Japanese soldiers in the field. They dismissed the possibility that Port Arthur might fall.

  Russian forces were also organized unevenly. A Siberian division held only 3,400 men and 20 guns, while a European corps held 28,000 soldiers and 112 guns. Russia had only two Siberian corps at the start, both unprepared, though the number later rose to seven. Six European corps went to the Far East, and three more were sent but arrived too late. Tactics lagged behind too. Infantry still followed the maxim of Suvorov, who had died over a century earlier. Commanders used Crimean War methods, attacking in closed formations across a wide front. Higher command sometimes skipped intermediate officers and issued orders straight to battalions, which created confusion in battle.

  Everything depended on a single railway. The Trans-Siberian line was not yet connected at Lake Baikal, and one train needed anywhere from 15 to 40 days to cross it, with 40 the usual figure. Moving a single battalion from Moscow to Shenyang took a month. After the line was finally completed, 20 trains ran daily. By the war's end it had carried some 410,000 soldiers, 93,000 horses, and 1,000 guns.

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• 7. Fire Over Port Arthur

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  The morning of the 9th of February 1904 brought the Battle of Port Arthur, and it settled little. Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō's first strike had badly damaged the two heaviest battleships in Russia's Far Eastern theater, along with a 6,600 ton protected cruiser. But the Russian ships sheltered under shore batteries, and Tōgō could not finish them. The Russians were reluctant to leave harbour, especially after Admiral Stepan Makarov died from a naval mine on the 13th of April 1904. Even so, the first attacks had a devastating psychological effect on a Russia that had been confident of winning.

  The fighting covered Japan's landings in Korea. Troops came ashore near Incheon, took Hanseong, and then occupied the rest of the country. By the end of April, the Japanese army under Kuroki Tamemoto was ready to cross the Yalu River into Manchuria. On the 1st of May 1904, it stormed a Russian position led by General Mikhail Zasulich in the first major land battle of the war. The defeat ended the idea that Japan would be an easy enemy or that the war would be short. It was also the first battle in decades in which an Asian army beat a European power. At Nanshan on the 25th of May, Japanese attacks on entrenched positions brought heavy losses.

  Japan tried to bottle up Port Arthur. On the night of the 13th and the 14th of February, it sank concrete-filled steamers in the deep channel, but they sank too deep to block it. Another attempt on the 3rd and the 4th of May also failed. Makarov, a charismatic vice admiral, had taken command of the Russian squadron in March and wanted to break the blockade. Two Russian battleships left port in April and struck Japanese mines. The Petropavlovsk sank almost immediately, and the Pobeda had to be towed back for repairs.

  The Russians quickly learned to lay mines offensively too. On the 15th of May, they lured two Japanese battleships into a fresh minefield, and each struck at least two mines. The Hatsuse sank within minutes with 450 sailors, and the Yashima went down while under tow toward Korea. On the 23rd of June, a breakout attempt under Admiral Wilgelm Vitgeft failed.

  Vitgeft tried again on the 10th of August, leading six battleships, four cruisers, and 14 destroyers into the Yellow Sea. Tōgō waited with four battleships, 10 cruisers, and 18 destroyers. The big guns opened fire at about eight miles, the longest range ever used in a battleship duel up to that time. At 18:30, a shell hit the flagship's bridge and killed Vitgeft instantly. The helm of the flagship Tsesarevich jammed, and its turn out of line threw the Russian fleet into confusion. Tōgō chose not to chase the fleet back into harbour, since Russian battleship reinforcements were on their way from the Baltic.

  The siege of Port Arthur had started in April 1904. Frontal assaults on the fortified hilltops cost Japan casualties in the thousands. In December 1904, with the help of 11-inch howitzers, Japanese troops finally captured the key hilltop. A spotter with a telephone line there directed long-range artillery onto the Russian fleet. The ships could not hit back at guns hidden behind the ridge. Four battleships and two cruisers were sunk in succession, and the fifth and last battleship was scuttled weeks later. Every capital ship of the Russian Pacific fleet was gone, probably the only time in military history that land-based artillery has wrecked major warships on that scale.

  Major General Anatoly Stessel, commander of the garrison, decided the defense had lost its purpose once the fleet was destroyed. Large underground mines exploded in late December added to the toll. On the 2nd of January 1905, Stessel surrendered without consulting his staff, the Tsar, or the high command, all of whom disagreed. A court-martial in 1908 convicted him of incompetent defense and disobeying orders and sentenced him to death. He was later pardoned.

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• 8. Mukden, Tsushima, Portsmouth

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  Winter shut down the Manchurian front after the Battle of Shaho in 1904. The two armies camped along 60 to 70 miles of lines south of Mukden. Between the 25th and the 29th of January 1905, General Oskar Gripenberg's Russian Second Army attacked the Japanese left flank near Sandepu and nearly broke through. General Kuropatkin ordered him to halt, and the battle ended without a decision.

  The Battle of Mukden opened on the 20th of February 1905. Approximately half a million men fought along a 50-mile front, well entrenched and backed by hundreds of guns. Japanese pressure bent both ends of the Russian line backward. Fearing encirclement, the Russians began a retreat that dissolved into confusion. On the 10th of March, after three weeks, Kuropatkin withdrew north of Mukden, with an estimated 90,000 Russian casualties. The Japanese were too battered to pursue. It was the most decisive land battle Japan had ever fought, though final victory still hinged on the navy.

  Civilians paid dearly in Manchuria. Liaoyang was sacked three times within three days, first by the Russians, then by Chinese police, and finally by the Japanese. Russian troops looted and burned Chinese villages, assaulted women, and often killed those who resisted. They treated Chinese villagers as enemies, since they feared the "Yellow Peril" and assumed all Asians helped the Japanese. The Cossacks were feared most. Japanese troops looted too, though less brutally, and executed suspected spies. The Japanese hired Chinese bandits called honghuzi to raid Russian supply columns, and Zhang Zuolin, a future warlord of Manchuria, worked for them. Japan's civil governors improved roads and sanitation, partly to help their own logistics and protect their troops from disease. Many Chinese came to see the Japanese as the lesser evil.

  The Russian Baltic Fleet, under Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky, sailed on the 15th of October 1904 after a false start with engine problems. On the 21st of October, at Dogger Bank, it fired on British fishing boats it mistook for Japanese torpedo boats and nearly started a war with Britain. London then pressured France and Portugal to deny the fleet their colonial ports, so the ships had to coal at sea. Food rotted, mail was irregular, and there was no shore leave. After leaving Tangiers on the 3rd of November, the fleet split in two over fears that the new battleships were too deep for the Suez Canal, and the halves met at Madagascar. The squadron needed about 500,000 tons of coal to complete the trip. It sailed 18,000 nautical miles, or 33,000 kilometres, only to learn at Madagascar that Port Arthur had already fallen.

  Vladivostok was now Rozhestvensky's only hope, and he chose the shortest, most dangerous route through Tsushima Strait. His Second Pacific Squadron numbered 38 ships, including eight battleships. Tōgō's Combined Fleet had shrunk to four battleships and one second-class battleship after losing two to mines. In late May, the Russians steamed through at night, but two trailing hospital ships kept their lights on, as the rules of war allowed. The armed merchant cruiser Shinano Maru spotted them and radioed Tōgō's headquarters. On the 27th and the 28th of May 1905, Tōgō crossed the Russian T and virtually annihilated the fleet. Russia lost eight battleships, numerous smaller vessels, and more than 5,000 men. Japan lost three torpedo boats and 116 men. Only three Russian vessels reached Vladivostok, and six were interned in neutral ports.

  After Tsushima, a joint army and navy force under Admiral Kataoka Shichirō occupied Sakhalin Island to push Russia toward peace. Kuropatkin had been relieved after Mukden, and his replacement, Linevich, planned an offensive. By the summer of 1905, almost one million well-equipped Russian soldiers faced an exhausted Japanese army. But the navy's defeat, a collapsing economy, and the unimportance of the disputed land to most Russians made the war deeply unpopular. Revolution was rocking the empire all through 1905.

  Both sides accepted President Theodore Roosevelt's offer to mediate. Sergei Witte led the Russian delegation and Baron Komura led the Japanese one at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The Treaty of Portsmouth was signed on the 5th of September 1905 at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. It recognized Japanese interests in Korea and gave Japan Russia's lease on the Liaodong Peninsula, control of the South Manchuria Railway, and the southern half of Sakhalin, known as Karafuto. Observers were stunned that an Asian, non-Western nation had won so complete a military victory over a European power. Japan emerged as a great power, and Russia lost prestige among its European peers. At home, the cost of a humiliating defeat helped fuel the 1905 Russian Revolution, in which the autocracy was forced to make concessions.

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