Lessons from the Russo-Japanese War
On television and online, commentators reach for comparisons to past conflicts for insights into the Russia-Ukraine war. How will it ever end?
At the same time, military analysts watch closely to see how lethal new technologies lead to ghastly carnage like in Donbas and Irpin. What can we learn about how to fight future wars?
Surprising answers arise from comparisons to an often-overlooked conflict more than a century ago, between a small nation just elbowing its way onto the world stage and a huge but faltering western power that just happened to be Russia.
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 was a big deal at the time, and it is generally considered the first modern war. The world watched with rapt attention. In the story of this conflict, we can find clues to what is happening, and what may still happen, in Vladimir Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine.
Repeating rifles, machine guns and fast-firing artillery were as new in 1904 as Javelin anti-tank missiles and Turkish drones are today. They all played roles, as did swiftly manoeuvring steel warships. The Japanese navy’s destruction of the Russian Baltic Fleet, which had sailed halfway around the planet, shocked the world in 1905 as much as Ukrainian missiles’ sinking of the Russian cruiser Moskva did in April.
But it shouldn’t have. And nor would the struggles of the Russian military today surprise anyone who studied the RussoJapanese War. Rivers of similarities run through these two conflicts. Naturally, there were differences, the biggest being that Japan, angered by diplomatic betrayals and Russian expansion in Asia, started the war. It began with a surprise nighttime torpedo boat attack against the Russian fleet in Port Arthur (now the Lüshunkou District of China).
Japan’s navy was modern, its traditions based on Britain’s royal navy; Japanese sailors even ate curry on Fridays like their English counterparts. (They still do.) Its warships were state-of-the-art and built in England. Thus, a major western power supplied modern technologies to the smaller of the warring nations, like in the current conflict.
The Japanese soldiers and sailors, swept up in their nation’s extraordinary shift to modernity, were motivated to fight. They were also trained and fed well. And they saw Russia as an overreaching bully.
Russian soldiers, meanwhile, quickly found themselves under siege in the barren winter hellscape of Port Arthur, thousands of kilometres from Russia’s major urban centres — and with no real rationale in their heads as to why they were fighting. Supply lines, already extraordinarily long, were easily cut. Russian soldiers’ equipment, training and basic supplies were lacking. Sound familiar?
Like the conflict in Ukraine that has been livestreamed to and from smartphones, the Russo-Japanese War was witnessed globally almost in real time. Telegraph wires and steam-powered newspaper presses sent new editions onto the streets hourly to feed a hungry public.
Russian Emperor Nicholas II sent his huge Baltic Fleet on an around-the-world voyage to teach the upstart Japanese a lesson. After seven months, the fleet arrived in the Far East. Alerted by telegraph from the island of Tsushima, the Japanese admiral, Heihachiro Togo, set sail aboard the Mikasa with his fresh, eager fleet to meet the exhausted Russians. In a matter of hours, practically all the Russian battleships were at the bottom of the sea.
The two countries soon had a negotiated peace. Japan had become a world power.
There is still pride in Japan over the victory at Tsushima. The Mikasa is now a museum in Yokosuka near Tokyo. You can visit Togo’s cabin and admire his bathtub. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to admire Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s bathtub in Kyiv.