Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905)
Peace and Aftermath
Treaty of Portsmouth
The defeats of the Russian Army and Navy shook up Russian confidence. Throughout 1905, the Imperial Russian government was rocked by revolution. The population was against escalation of the war. The Russian Empire
Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. The rise of the Russian Empire coincided with the decline of neighbouring rival powers: the Swedish Empire, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Qajar Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and Qing China. Russia remains the third-largest empire in history, surpassed only by the British Empire and the Mongol Empire. was certainly capable of sending more troops, but the poor state of the economy, the embarrassing defeats of the Russian Army and Navy by the Japanese, and the relative unimportance to Russia of the disputed land made the war extremely unpopular. Tsar Nicholas II elected to negotiate peace so he could concentrate on internal matters after the disaster of Bloody Sunday on 22 January 1905.
Both sides accepted the offer of Theodore Roosevelt, the President of the United States, to mediate; meetings were held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with Sergei Witte leading the Russian delegation and Baron Komura, a graduate of Harvard, leading the Japanese delegation. The Treaty of Portsmouth was signed on 5 September 1905 at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard on Seavey's Island, Kittery, Maine, while the delegates stayed in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Witte became Russian Prime Minister the same year.
After courting the Japanese, Roosevelt decided to support the Tsar's refusal to pay indemnities, a move that policymakers in Tokyo interpreted as signifying that the United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country in North America. It is the world's third-largest country by both land and total area. The United States shares land borders with Canada to its north and with Mexico to its south. The national capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city and financial center is New York City. had more than a passing interest in Asian affairs. Russia recognized Korea as part of the Japanese sphere of influence and agreed to evacuate Manchuria. Japan
The Empire of Japan, also known as the Japanese Empire or Imperial Japan, was a historical nation-state and great power that existed from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 until the enactment of the post-World War II 1947 constitution and subsequent formation of modern Japan. Economic and political turmoil in the 1920s led to the rise of militarism, nationalism and totalitarianism eventually culminating in Japan's membership in the Axis alliance. would annex Korea in 1910 (Japan–Korea Treaty of 1910), with scant protest from other powers.
Russia also signed over its 25-year leasehold rights to Port Arthur, including the naval base and the peninsula around it, and ceded the southern half of Sakhalin Island to Japan. Both would be taken back by the Soviet Union
Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The Soviet Union fall process began with growing unrest in the Union's various constituent national republics developing into an incessant political and legislative conflict between them and the central government. Estonia was the first Soviet republic to declare state sovereignty inside the Union. following the defeat of the Japanese in World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers. World War II was a total war that directly involved more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries. World War II is generally considered to have begun on 1 September 1939, when Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland. View World War II ».
Roosevelt earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his effort. George E. Mowry concludes that Roosevelt handled the arbitration well, doing an "excellent job of balancing Russian and Japanese power in the Orient, where the supremacy of either constituted a threat to growing America." As Japan had won every battle on land and sea and as the Japanese people did not understand that the costs of the war had pushed their nation to the verge of bankruptcy, the Japanese public was enraged by the Treaty of Portsmouth as many Japanese had expected the war to end with Russia ceding all of Siberia to Japan and for Russia to pay an indemnity. The United States was widely blamed in Japan for the Treaty of Portsmouth with Roosevelt having allegedly "cheated" Japan out of its rightful claims at the peace conference. On 5 September 1905 the Hibiya incendiary incident as the anti-American riots were euphemistically described erupted in Tokyo, and lasted for three days, forcing the government to declare martial law.
Japanese propaganda of the war: woodcut print showing Tsar Nicholas II waking from a nightmare of the battered and wounded Russian forces returning from battle. Artist Kobayashi Kiyochika, 1904 or 1905
Political Consequences
This was the first major military victory in the modern era of an Asian power over a European nation. Russia's defeat was met with shock in the West and across the Far East. Japan's prestige rose greatly as it came to be seen as a modern nation. Concurrently, Russia lost virtually its entire Pacific and Baltic fleets, and also much international esteem. This was particularly true in the eyes of Germany
The German Empire, also referred to as Imperial Germany, the Second Reich, as well as simply Germany, was the period of the German Reich from the unification of Germany in 1871 until the November Revolution in 1918, when the German Reich changed its form of government from a monarchy to a republic. During its 47 years of existence, the German Empire became the industrial, technological, and scientific giant of Europe. and Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. Austria-Hungary was one of the Central Powers in World War I, which began with an Austro-Hungarian war declaration on the Kingdom of Serbia on 28 July 1914. before World War I
World War I, also known as the First World War, or the Great War, was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. More than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilized in one of the largest wars in history. The war drew in all the world's economic great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies versus the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. View World War I ». Russia was France's and Serbia's ally, and that loss of prestige had a significant effect on Germany's future when planning for war with France
French Third Republic was the system of government adopted in France from 4 September 1870, when the Second French Empire collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War, until 10 July 1940, after the Fall of France during World War II led to the formation of the Vichy government. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the French colonial empire was the second largest colonial empire in the world only behind the British Empire., and Austria-Hungary's war with Serbia.
In the absence of Russian competition, and with the distraction of European nations during World War I, combined with the Great Depression that followed, the Japanese military began efforts to dominate China and the rest of Asia, which eventually led to the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War theatres of World War II.
Historical Significance
The effects and impact of the Russo-Japanese War introduced a number of characteristics that came to define 20th century politics and warfare. Many of the technological innovations brought on by the Industrial Revolution first became present on the battlefield in the Russo-Japanese War. Weapons and armaments were more technological than ever before. Technological developments of modern armaments, such as rapid-firing artillery and machine guns, as well as more accurate carbine rifles, were first used on a mass scale in the Russo-Japanese War. The improved capability of naval forces was also demonstrated. Military operations on both sea and land demonstrated that warfare in a new age of technology had undergone a considerable change since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Most army commanders had previously envisioned using these weapon systems to dominate the battlefield on an operational and tactical level but, as events played out, these technological advancements forever altered the capacity in which mankind would wage war. For East Asia it was the first confrontation after thirty years involving two modern armed forces.
The advanced weaponry led to massive casualty counts. Neither Japan nor Russia had prepared for the number of deaths that would occur in this new kind of warfare, or had the resources to compensate for these losses. This also left its impression on society at large, with the emergence of transnational and nongovernmental organizations, like the Red Cross, becoming prominent after the war. The emergence of such organizations can be regarded as the beginning of a meshing together of civilizations through the identification of common problems and challenges, a slow process dominating much of the 20th century.
Debate with respect to the Russo-Japanese War preluding World War II is a topic of interest to scholars today. Arguments that are favorable toward this perspective consider characteristics specific to the Russo-Japanese War to the qualities definitive of "total war". Numerous aspects of total war characterize the Russo-Japanese War. Encompassed on both ends was the mass mobilization of troops into battle. For both Russia and Japan, the war required extensive economic support in the form of production of equipment, armaments, and supplies at such a scale that both domestic support and foreign aid were required. The conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War also demonstrated the need for world leaders to regard domestic response to foreign policy, which is argued by some scholars as setting in motion the dissolution of the Romanov dynasty by demonstrating the inefficiencies of tsarist Russia's government.
Reception around the World
To the Western powers, Japan's victory demonstrated the emergence of a new Asian regional power. With the Russian defeat, some scholars have argued that the war had set in motion a change in the global world order with the emergence of Japan as not only a regional power, but rather, the main Asian power. Rather more than the possibilities of diplomatic partnership were emerging, however. The Japanese success increased self-confidence among anti-colonial nationalists in colonised Asian countries – Vietnamese, Indonesians, Indians and Filipinos – and to those in countries like the Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire, also known as the Turkish Empire, was an empire that controlled much of Southeast Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa between the 14th and early 20th centuries. The Ottomans ended the Byzantine Empire with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The Ottoman Empire's defeat and the occupation of part of its territory by the Allied Powers in the aftermath of World War I resulted in its partitioning and the loss of its Middle Eastern territories. and Persia in immediate danger of being absorbed by the Western powers. It also encouraged the Chinese who, despite having been at war with the Japanese only a decade before, still considered Westerners the greater threat. "We regarded that Russian defeat by Japan as the defeat of the West by the East. We regarded the Japanese victory as our own victory," declared Sun Yat-sen. And Jawaharlal Nehru, "Japan's victory lessened the feeling of inferiority from which most of us suffered. A great European power had been defeated, thus Asia could still defeat Europe as it had done in the past." In the Ottoman Empire, the Committee of Union and Progress, embraced Japan as a role model for the Ottoman empire.
In Europe too, subject populations were similarly encouraged. James Joyce's novel Ulysses, set in Dublin in 1904, contains hopeful Irish allusions as to the outcome of the war. And in partitioned Poland
Congress Poland, Congress Kingdom of Poland, or Russian Poland, formally known as the Kingdom of Poland, was a polity created in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna as a semi-autonomous Polish state, a successor to Napoleon's Duchy of Warsaw. It was established when the French ceded a part of Polish territory to the Russian Empire following France's defeat in the Napoleonic Wars. In 1915, during World War I, it was replaced by the German-controlled nominal Regency Kingdom until Poland regained independence in 1918. the artist Józef Mehoffer chose 1905 to paint his "Europa Jubilans" (Europe rejoicing), which portrays an aproned maid taking her ease on a sofa against a background of Eastern artefacts. Painted following demonstrations against the war and Russian cultural suppression, and in the year of Russia’s defeat, its subtly coded message looks forward to a time when the Tsarist masters will be defeated in Europe as they had been in Asia. Perhaps the most extreme response to the Japanese victory came in Austria where Baron Christian von Ehrenfels wrote "the absolute necessity of a radical sexual reform for the continued existence of the western races of men has... been raised from the level of discussion to the level of a scientifically proven fact", arguing that to stop the Japanese "yellow peril" would require drastic changes to society and sexuality in the West.
The significance of the war for oppressed classes as well as subject populations was clear too to the Socialist thinker Rosa Luxemburg: "The Russo-Japanese War now gives to all an awareness that even war and peace in Europe – its destiny – isn't decided between the four walls of the European concert, but outside it, in the gigantic maelstrom of world and colonial politics. And it’s in this that the real meaning of the current war resides for social-democracy, even if we set aside its immediate effect: the collapse of Russian absolutism. This war brings the gaze of the international proletariat back to the great political and economic connectedness of the world, and violently dissipates in our ranks the particularism, the pettiness of ideas that form in any period of political calm." It was this realisation of the universal significance of the war that underlines the historical importance of the conflict and its outcome.
Assessment of War Results
Russia had lost two of its three fleets. Only its Black Sea Fleet remained, and this was the result of an earlier treaty that had prevented the fleet from leaving the Black Sea. Japan became the sixth-most powerful naval force, while the Russian Navy declined to one barely stronger than that of Austria–Hungary. The actual costs of the war were large enough to affect the Russian economy and, despite grain exports, the nation developed an external balance of payments deficit. The cost of military re-equipment and re-expansion after 1905 pushed the economy further into deficit, although the size of the deficit was obscured.
The Japanese were on the offensive for most of the war and used massed infantry assaults against defensive positions, which would later become the standard of all European armies during World War I. The battles of the Russo-Japanese War, in which machine guns and artillery took a heavy toll on Russian and Japanese troops, were a precursor to the trench warfare of World War I. A German military advisor sent to Japan, Jakob Meckel, had a tremendous impact on the development of the Japanese military training, tactics, strategy, and organization. His reforms were credited with Japan's overwhelming victory over China in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. However, his over-reliance on infantry in offensive campaigns also led to a large number of Japanese casualties.
Military and economic exhaustion affected both countries. Japanese historians regard this war as a turning point for Japan, and a key to understanding the reasons why Japan may have failed militarily and politically later. After the war, acrimony was felt at every level of Japanese society and it became the consensus within Japan that their nation had been treated as the defeated power during the peace conference. As time went on, this feeling, coupled with the sense of "arrogance" at becoming a Great Power, grew and added to growing Japanese hostility towards the West, and fueled Japan's military and imperial ambitions. Only five years after the war, Japan de jure annexed Korea as part of its colonial empire. In 1931, 21 years later, Japan invaded Manchuria in the Mukden Incident. This culminated in the invasion of East, Southeast and South Asia in World War II, in an attempt to create a great Japanese colonial empire, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. As a result, most Chinese historians consider the Russo-Japanese War as a key development of Japanese militarism.
Following the victory of the Battle of Tsushima, Japan's erstwhile British
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was a sovereign state in Northwestern Europe that comprised the entirety of the British Isles between 1801 and 1922. The United Kingdom, having financed the European coalition that defeated France during the Napoleonic Wars, developed a large Royal Navy that enabled the British Empire to become the foremost world power for the next century. ally presented a lock of Admiral Nelson's hair to the Imperial Japanese Navy, judging its performance then as on a par with Britain's victory at Trafalgar in 1805. It is still on display at Kyouiku Sankoukan, a public museum maintained by the Japan Self-Defense Force. Nevertheless, there was a consequent change in British strategic thinking, resulting in enlargement of its naval docks at Auckland, New Zealand
The Dominion of New Zealand was the historical successor to the Colony of New Zealand. In 1841, New Zealand became a colony within the British Empire. Subsequently, a series of conflicts between the colonial government and Māori tribes resulted in the alienation and confiscation of large amounts of Māori land. New Zealand became a dominion in 1907; it gained full statutory independence in 1947, retaining the monarch as head of state.; Bombay, British India; Fremantle and Sydney, Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. In 1770, the British explorer James Cook mapped and claimed the east coast of Australia for Great Britain, and the First British Fleet arrived in 1788 to establish the penal colony of New South Wales. Australia sent many thousands of troops to fight for Britain during WWI.; Simon's Town, Cape Colony; Singapore and British Hong Kong. The naval war confirmed the direction of the British Admiralty's thinking in tactical terms even as it undermined its strategic grasp of a changing world. Tactical orthodoxy, for example, assumed that a naval battle would imitate the conditions of stationary combat and that ships would engage in one long line sailing on parallel courses; but more flexible tactical thinking would now be required as a firing ship and its target maneuvered independently.
The US and Australian reaction to the war had also been mixed, with fears of a Yellow Peril eventually shifting from China to Japan. American figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Lothrop Stoddard saw the victory as a challenge to white supremacy. A few Australian invasion literature novels appeared.
List of Battles
- 1904 Battle of Port Arthur: naval battle inconclusive
- 1904 Battle of Chemulpo Bay: naval battle Japanese victory
- 1904 Battle of Yalu River: Japanese victory
- 1904 Battle of Nanshan: Japanese victory
- 1904 Battle of Te-li-Ssu: Japanese victory
- 1904 Battle of Motien Pass: Japanese victory
- 1904 Battle of Tashihchiao: Japanese victory
- 1904 Battle of Hsimucheng: Japanese victory
- 1904 Battle of the Yellow Sea: naval battle Japanese victory strategically, tactically inconclusive
- 1904 Battle off Ulsan: naval battle Japanese victory
- 1904–1905 Siege of Port Arthur: Japanese victory
- 1904 Battle of Liaoyang: inconclusive
- 1904 Battle of Shaho: inconclusive
- 1905 Battle of Sandepu: inconclusive
- 1905 Battle of Mukden: Japanese victory
- 1905 Battle of Tsushima: Japanese victory
HISTORY
RESOURCES
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Russo-Japanese War", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.
© Stories Preschool. All Rights Reserved.
