Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905): Japan Defeats a European Power

The Russo-Japanese War was fought between the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan from February 1904 to September 1905 over control of Manchuria and Korea. Japan won a series of costly victories on land and sea, capturing Port Arthur, defeating the Russian army at Mukden and destroying a Russian fleet at Tsushima. It was the first great modern war in which an Asian state defeated a European power, and it changed the balance of power in East Asia and shook the Russian monarchy.

Background: two empires in Northeast Asia

After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan rapidly built a modern army, navy and industry. In the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 it defeated China and won the Liaodong Peninsula in southern Manchuria. Within days, however, Russia, France and Germany forced Japan to give the peninsula back in the so-called Triple Intervention.

Russia then took for itself what it had denied Japan. In 1898 it leased the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula, including the warm-water naval base of Port Arthur (now Lüshun) and the port of Dalny (Dalian), and built a branch of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Chinese Eastern Railway, across Manchuria to reach them. During the Boxer crisis of 1900 Russian troops occupied Manchuria and were slow to leave.

Japan regarded Korea, just across a narrow strait, as essential to its security and wanted to dominate it. In 1902 it signed the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which ensured that no third power would join Russia in a war against Japan. Negotiations in 1903 to divide spheres of influence, with Manchuria for Russia and Korea for Japan, broke down. Many in the Russian government underestimated Japan, and Tsar Nicholas II was influenced by advisers who favoured expansion in the Far East.

The balance of forces was less one-sided than it looked. Russia had by far the larger army, but most of it was stationed in Europe, thousands of kilometres away. The Trans-Siberian Railway was single-track and in 1904 still had a gap at Lake Baikal, where troops and supplies had to cross by ferry or, in winter, by tracks laid over the ice. Japan, by contrast, could move men and supplies by sea in a few days, as long as its navy controlled the waters around Korea.

The course of the war

The opening blow

On 6 February 1904 Japan broke off diplomatic relations. On the night of 8-9 February Japanese torpedo boats under Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō attacked the Russian Pacific Squadron at anchor outside Port Arthur, damaging two battleships and a cruiser. On 9 February a Japanese squadron at Chemulpo (Incheon) in Korea forced the crews of two Russian warships to scuttle them, where Japanese troops were landing. Japan declared war on 10 February.

With the Russian fleet bottled up in Port Arthur, Japan could ship armies to the mainland. The First Army under General Kuroki Tamemoto advanced through Korea and defeated the Russians at the Yalu River on 30 April-1 May 1904, the first major land battle of the war. Other armies landed on the Liaodong Peninsula and cut Port Arthur off from the north after the Battle of Nanshan in May.

Port Arthur

The Siege of Port Arthur became the war’s longest and bloodiest single campaign. General Nogi Maresuke’s Third Army launched repeated frontal assaults against concrete forts, barbed wire and machine guns from August 1904, suffering enormous losses. In August the Russian squadron tried to break out to Vladivostok but was turned back in the Battle of the Yellow Sea, in which its commander, Admiral Wilgelm Vitgeft, was killed.

After the capture of 203 Metre Hill in early December, Japanese heavy howitzers could fire directly on the harbour and sink the remaining Russian ships. General Anatoly Stessel surrendered the fortress on 2 January 1905.

The land war in Manchuria

Meanwhile the main Russian army under General Aleksey Kuropatkin fought a series of large battles in southern Manchuria against Japanese forces commanded by Field Marshal Ōyama Iwao. At Liaoyang (late August-early September 1904) and on the Shaho River (October 1904), Kuropatkin withdrew after heavy fighting rather than risk destruction, giving the Japanese victories that cost them dearly.

The Battle of Mukden (now Shenyang), from about 20 February to 10 March 1905, was one of the largest battles ever fought up to that time, involving well over half a million men. After weeks of fighting along a front more than 100 kilometres long, the Russians retreated north with heavy losses. Japan, however, was close to exhausting its manpower and money and could not pursue them far.

Paying for the war was a constant worry in Tokyo. Japan financed much of it through bonds sold in London and New York, with help from bankers such as Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, who was hostile to the tsarist government because of its treatment of Jews. Russia borrowed mainly in France and Germany. By mid-1905 both governments faced mounting debts, and Japan had called up almost all its trained reserves.

The fighting also fell heavily on people who were not parties to the war. Most of the land battles took place on Chinese soil in Manchuria, which the Qing government had declared neutral. Villages were destroyed, crops and animals requisitioned and civilians forced to work as labourers, and tens of thousands of Chinese civilians are thought to have died.

Tsushima

Russia’s last hope was naval. In October 1904 it sent its Baltic Fleet, renamed the Second Pacific Squadron, on an epic voyage of about 18,000 nautical miles around Africa to the Pacific. On the way it fired on British fishing trawlers in the North Sea in the Dogger Bank incident, almost causing a war with Britain. The crisis was defused when Russia agreed to an international commission of inquiry, which met in Paris and led Russia to pay compensation.

When it finally arrived, Tōgō’s fleet met it in the strait between Korea and Japan. The Battle of Tsushima on 27-28 May 1905 was one of the most decisive naval battles in history: almost the entire Russian fleet was sunk, captured or interned, while Japan lost three torpedo boats.

The Treaty of Portsmouth

Both sides now wanted peace. Japan was financially drained, and Russia was shaken by the revolution that had begun with Bloody Sunday in January 1905. US President Theodore Roosevelt offered mediation, and delegates led by Sergei Witte for Russia and Komura Jutarō for Japan met at Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

The Treaty of Portsmouth, signed on 5 September 1905, recognised Japan’s paramount interests in Korea, transferred Russia’s lease of the Liaodong Peninsula and the southern branch of the Manchurian railway to Japan, and ceded the southern half of Sakhalin island below the 50th parallel. Russia paid no indemnity. Japanese crowds, who had expected much more, rioted in Tokyo’s Hibiya Park.

Key people

• Tōgō Heihachirō (1848-1934): commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, celebrated as a national hero after Tsushima.
• Ōyama Iwao (1842-1916): commander-in-chief of the Japanese armies in Manchuria.
• Nogi Maresuke (1849-1912): commander at Port Arthur, who lost both his sons in the war.
• Aleksey Kuropatkin (1848-1925): Russian war minister and then commander in Manchuria.
• Sergei Witte (1849-1915): Russian statesman who negotiated the peace.

By the numbers

Consequences

For Russia, defeat helped turn discontent into the Russian Revolution of 1905, which forced Nicholas II to accept an elected Duma. The loss of most of its navy weakened Russia for years, and it turned its attention back towards the Balkans, with fateful results in 1914.

Japan became a recognised great power. It made Korea a protectorate in November 1905 and annexed it in 1910, and its new position in southern Manchuria, guarded by the Kwantung Army, laid the groundwork for later expansion into China. The disappointment over the peace terms also fed nationalist resentment at home.

The war also shifted alliances in Europe. With Russia weakened, Britain felt less threatened by it in Asia, and in 1907 the two empires settled their rivalries in Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet in the Anglo-Russian Convention. Together with the Franco-Russian alliance and the Anglo-French Entente of 1904, this created the Triple Entente that faced Germany in 1914.

Legacy

Across Asia and the colonised world the war was seen as proof that European power was not invincible. Figures as different as Sun Yat-sen, Jawaharlal Nehru and nationalists in Persia, the Ottoman Empire and Egypt later recalled the excitement of the news. Some modern historians caution that this enthusiasm sat alongside fear of Japan’s own imperial ambitions, which became clear in Korea.

Military observers from Europe and America watched trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, quick-firing artillery and huge casualties, especially at Port Arthur and Mukden. Many of these lessons were drawn only partly, and similar tactics would be repeated on a much larger scale in the First World War. Because of its scale and technology, the conflict has sometimes been called “World War Zero”.

Timeline

• 1902, 30 January: Britain and Japan sign the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.
• 1904, 8-9 February: Japanese torpedo boats attack the Russian fleet at Port Arthur.
• 1904, 10 February: Japan formally declares war.
• 1904, 30 April-1 May: Japanese victory at the Yalu River.
• 1904, August-September: Battle of the Yellow Sea and Battle of Liaoyang.
• 1905, 2 January: Port Arthur surrenders.
• 1905, 20 February-10 March: Battle of Mukden.
• 1905, 27-28 May: Battle of Tsushima.
• 1905, 5 September: the Treaty of Portsmouth is signed.

Why it matters

The Russo-Japanese War marked the arrival of Japan as a great power and exposed the weakness of tsarist Russia. It hastened revolution in Russia, sealed the fate of Korea, inspired anti-colonial movements and offered a grim preview of the industrial warfare of the First World War.