RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR

The first great-power conflict of the twentieth century, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 to 1905 foreshadowed many of the political, military, and cultural trends of succeeding decades. Its outcome made Japan the undisputed hegemon of East Asia, swung Russian attention back to European issues, and brought the United States and Japan onto a collision course for war.

the background

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russia colonized Siberia, and its interest in the Pacific maritime region eventually brought it into contact with Japan, then ruled by feudal lords, the most powerful of which, the Tokugawa family, set up a government called the shogunate and acted as a national hegemon. Starting in the 1790s, Russian explorers and adventurers began reaching the Japanese isles. Adam Laxman, a Swede in Russian service, encountered a land with tightly controlled foreign relations when he arrived in 1792. Since the 1630s, Japanese had been prohibited on pain of death from leaving or reentering the home islands. Of Westerners, only the Dutch were allowed a trading presence on the southern port of Nagasaki. Laxman was refused permission to trade, as were later visitors, such as Nikolai Rezanov in 1804 and Vasily Golovnin in 1811. Golovnin, in fact, was captured by Japanese forces, sparking a brief crisis between the two nations.

By the 1850s, Russia was determined not to be left behind in any commercial agreements being signed between Japan and Western powers such as the United States and Great Britain. Though as yet possessing little trade potential, Russia had watched Britain's expansion into China after the first Opium War (1839–1842), and in response approved expeditions deep into Siberia, reaching Sakhalin Island in 1852, and eventually resulting in the founding of Vladivostok, on the Sea of Japan, in 1860. Russia signed a commercial treaty with Japan in August 1858, though its trading presence was limited to the northern port of Hakodate.

Japan perceived Russia as a territorial threat, rather than an economic one. By the 1880s, Korea was the main strategic concern of the new imperial Meiji government. Both Ch'ing China and tsarist Russia threatened to control the peninsula. Russia in particular moved forward with its plans for the Chinese Eastern and South Manchurian Railroads, part of the Trans-Siberian network. Clashing over influence at the Korean court, Japan attacked China in 1894, inaugurating the Sino-Japanese War. Despite its victory, Tokyo was forced by Russia, France, and Germany to return its territorial gains in what was known as the Triple Intervention of 1895. In the years after the war Russia increased its influence in Korea, and as part of the Allied intervention against the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, dispatched 175,000 troops to Manchuria.

Repeated diplomatic wrangling failed to produce a solution, despite Japan's clear desire to

recognize Manchuria as Russia's sphere of influence in return for a reciprocal acknowledgement of its Korean interests. Russia continued to build naval bases in northern China and even in southern Korea. This intransigence generated anti-Russian popular movements in Japan and pushed Tokyo to pursue an agreement with Great Britain, namely the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, announced in January 1902. The Russian government remained unresponsive to Japanese proposals during 1902 and 1903, and by the end of that year, Japan had decided upon war.

the fighting

The war began with a Japanese surprise attack on the Russian Pacific Fleet at Port Arthur (now called Lüshun), located on the Liaodong Peninsula in northern China, in early February 1904. Japanese naval action during the first months of the war focused on bottling up and attempting to destroy the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. The Japanese, led by Admiral Heihachiro Togo, maintained a blockade of the port, and in mid-April their mines destroyed the Russian flagship Petropavlovsk, killing the Russian naval commander, Vice Admiral Stepan Osipovich Makarov. In mid-May, however, the Japanese in turn lost two of their six battleships to mines, leading to a naval stalemate and an increased focus on land warfare.

During February and March 1904, the Japanese First Army landed in Korea, occupying Pyongyang and other major cities. On 30 April, three Japanese divisions defeated the Russians, commanded by Alexei Kuropatkin, former war minister, at the Yalu River, thereby breaking Russia's defensive line into Manchuria and proving their ingenuity at hauling heavy howitzers over difficult terrain, among the first times it had been done in large-scale fighting. The battle of the Yalu River removed the Russian threat to Korea, which was the strategic objective of the war, and put at risk the Russian headquarters at Liaoyang, north of the Liaodong Peninsula. Equally important, it marked the first defeat of a European army by an Asian one, and was a correspondingly decisive military and psychological blow to the Russians.

The Russian Fleet remained at Port Arthur, although bottled up, and the Japanese landed the Second Army on the Kwantung Peninsula, an extension of the Liaodong Peninsula, in early May. After a month of heavy fighting around Nanshan, the Russians retreated south to Port Arthur, and the Japanese took control of strategically important Dalian (Dalny) on Dalian Bay. This gave them a superior vantage point from which to attack Port Arthur. The Japanese besieged the fortress from August through January 1905, led by General Maresuke Nogi, who had captured it from the Chinese in 1894. The months of fighting, the nature of which in many ways prefigured World War I, claimed over 30,000 Russian and 60,000 Japanese casualties.

As the campaign progressed, the Russians increasingly found themselves hampered by the logistics of an 8,000-kilometer (5,000-mile) supply line. Kuropatkin was also unable to reinforce his troops quickly enough to match the Japanese buildup, because fresh formations had to travel from western Russia by the Trans-Siberian Railroad. After advancing on Liaoyang during June and July 1904, the Japanese fought a pitched battle from 23 August to 3 September. The victory, purchased with heavy losses, was incomplete, for the bulk of the Russian army escaped north to their main headquarters at Mukden (now called Shenyang). The Japanese followed in pursuit, but both armies went into winter quarters—a vestige of earlier, more measured war making. Not till February 1905 did the armies clash once more. At a cost of nearly 16,000 killed and 60,000 wounded, the Japanese under Field Marshal Iwao Oyama destroyed Kuropatkin's forces, inflicting 70,000 casualties including 20,000 killed or missing. With the capture of Mukden, the land war came to an end.

The final act of the war was a naval battle in the Tsushima Strait, located between Japan and Korea. As part of the plan to relieve the then-blockaded Russian forces at Port Arthur, St. Petersburg ordered the Baltic Fleet to sail 33,300 kilometers (18,000 nautical miles) to the theater of war. Commanded by Rear Admiral Zinovi Rozhdestvenski, the fleet departed in October 1904 and reached the strait, intending to continue on to Vladivostok, in late May 1905. On 27 May, nearly the entire fleet was destroyed by the Japanese navy, which had been lying in wait off the coast of Korea.

the peace

The destruction of the Baltic Fleet marked the end of hostilities. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, upon urging from Japanese diplomats, offered to mediate a peace settlement. The Russians were represented by Sergei Witte, former finance minister, and the Japanese by Baron Jutaro Komura. The two sides met during August and September, signing a treaty in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on 5 September. The treaty gave Japan unfettered influence in Korea, and it ceded to Tokyo the southern section of the Manchurian Railroad, the southern half of Sakhalin Island, and the Russian lease on the Liaotung Peninsula, including Port Arthur. Nevertheless, the refusal of Russia to pay any indemnity and the joint agreement to withdraw troops from Manchuria led to popular riots in Tokyo against the treaty. Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediating efforts.

the effect

Japan's victory made it the hegemon of East Asia. It took control over Korea as a protectorate in

1905, and formally annexed it in 1910. Russian ambitions in Asia were destroyed, and popular riots against the tsar broke out in St. Petersburg and Odessa. More generally, the defeat of a European Great Power by an Asian nation seemed a harbinger of the end of Western colonialism, and gave rise to nationalist sentiments in colonized lands. It also engendered public riots in both Japan and Russia, exposing the increasing role of public opinion in foreign affairs. Finally, it made the United States and Japan the sole contenders for power in East Asia, and thus brought them closer to conflict.

Militarily, the war highlighted the role of technology and foreshadowed the type of fighting that would mark World War I. Mass infantry attacks, trench warfare, the extensive use of machine guns and heavy artillery on land, and the comprehensive employment of steam-powered armored warships armed with big guns made the Russo-Japanese War the first modern war. Military observers from many nations took the lessons of the war with them into battle in 1914.

See alsoMukden, Battle of; Portsmouth, Treaty of; Revolution of 1905 (Russia).

bibliography

Connaughton, R. M. Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear: Russia's War with Japan. Rev. ed. London, 2003.

Steinberg, John W., Bruce W. Menning, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David Wolff, and Shinji Yokote, eds. The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero. Leiden, Netherlands, 2005.

Michael R. Auslin