Russo-Japanese War
The war in which Japan destroyed two Russian fleets and beat a European great power, shocking the colonized world and triggering revolution in Russia.
In 1904 Japan attacked Russia over Manchuria and Korea. Eighteen months later it had taken the fortress of Port Arthur, won the largest land battle fought anywhere up to that point, and sunk almost the entire Russian navy. It was the first time in the modern era that an Asian country beat a European great power in a full war, and people noticed from Delhi to Cairo to Istanbul.
The collision had been building for years. Russia's Trans-Siberian Railway was pushing its power to the Pacific. It leased Port Arthur from China in 1898 for a warm-water naval base, and kept troops in Manchuria after the Boxer Rebellion despite promising to leave. Japan had industrialized fast since the Meiji Restoration and regarded Korea as a dagger pointed at itself. Tokyo offered a straightforward deal: Russia could have Manchuria if Japan could have Korea. Saint Petersburg did not bother to answer seriously. Russian officials did not think an Asian country could fight them, and Tsar Nicholas II referred to the Japanese in private as monkeys.
Eighteen months
Japan opened with a torpedo attack on the Russian squadron at Port Arthur on the night of 8 February 1904, two days before declaring war. Japanese planners would use the same sequence at Pearl Harbor thirty-seven years later. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 kept the other powers out and gave Japan British-built ships, British coal, and access to the London money market.
The land fighting looked like a preview of the First World War: trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, and huge casualties for small gains. Port Arthur fell in January 1905 after the Japanese took 203 Meter Hill and shelled the trapped Russian ships from above. At Mukden, in February and March, around 600,000 men fought for three weeks. The Russians pulled back in one piece but broken.
The war was settled at sea. Russia sent its Baltic Fleet 18,000 miles around Africa, a voyage of seven months during which the crews, convinced Japanese torpedo boats were everywhere, opened fire on British fishing trawlers in the North Sea. On 27 May 1905 Admiral Togo met the exhausted fleet in the Tsushima Strait, crossed in front of its line so every Japanese gun could fire while few Russian guns could answer, and destroyed it in an afternoon and a night. It is one of the most one-sided naval battles ever fought.
The peace and what followed
Both sides were finished, Japan financially and Russia politically. Theodore Roosevelt mediated the Treaty of Portsmouth in September 1905, which gave Japan control of Korea, the Port Arthur lease, and southern Sakhalin, and won Roosevelt the Nobel Peace Prize. It gave Japan no cash payment, and the Japanese public, who had never been told how close the treasury was to empty, rioted in Tokyo.
In Russia the defeat set off the 1905 Revolution: mutinies, a general strike, and the October Manifesto that granted a parliament the tsar spent the next decade undermining. Blocked in Asia, Russian ambition swung back to the Balkans, where it ran into Austria in 1914.
Japan got great-power status and annexed Korea outright in 1910. Its army also drew a lesson it would apply for forty years: that surprise, aggression, and willpower could beat a materially stronger enemy.
Everywhere else, people under European rule read the result as proof that European supremacy was a temporary fact rather than a law of nature. Sun Yat-sen, sailing home through the Suez Canal in 1905, was stopped by Arabs who had heard that an Eastern country had defeated a Western one and wanted to congratulate him for being Japanese.