Article by Laurie Barber
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Checkmate at the Russian Border: Russia-Japanese Conflict before Pearl Harbour
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Over the north country whose seas are frozen
Spring wind blows across
It is time to beat Russia
Rampant for three hundred years.
Mora Orgai, 1904.
Japan and Russia's mutual enmity was long and bitter. Since the turn of the twentieth century power vacuums in central Asia focused Japan's attention to the north, to mineral rich lands often riven by warlordism and ineffectively governed. The Czarist Russian empire's authority over its far eastern domain was often loose, and local factions were advantaged by St. Petersburg's 10,000 miles distance. In early 1904 Russia's repressive Minister of the Interior, V.K. Plehve, remarked: 'In order to hold back the revolution, we need a small victorious war'.
Manchuria was the likely cockpit, given Russia's and Japan's rivalry for this territory's vast untapped mineral resources. Japan's defeat of China in the war of 1895 and her increased dominance over Korea gave her a sense of Asian destiny. Russia had bullied weakened China into agreeing to the building of the Trans-Siberian railway and had acquired the ice-free Port Arthur, Peking's port, and saw its eastern provinces as a new frontier.
The occasion for the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 was Russia's refusal to withdraw its troops from Manchuria following the suppression of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China, a withdrawal required by the treaty protocol. Negotiations brought no Czarist back-down, and on 9 February 1904 Japan launched an attack, and mauled the Russian Far Eastern Fleet anchored at Port Arthur. Japan, in this fight, possessed the advantage of a modernized and German trained army of 300,000 field troops, with a reserve of 400,000 trained reservists. Czarist Russia's... [continues]
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Checkmate at the Russian Border: Russia-Japanese Conflict before Pearl Harbour
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Over the north country whose seas are frozen
Spring wind blows across
It is time to beat Russia
Rampant for three hundred years.
Mora Orgai, 1904.
Japan and Russia's mutual enmity was long and bitter. Since the turn of the twentieth century power vacuums in central Asia focused Japan's attention to the north, to mineral rich lands often riven by warlordism and ineffectively governed. The Czarist Russian empire's authority over its far eastern domain was often loose, and local factions were advantaged by St. Petersburg's 10,000 miles distance. In early 1904 Russia's repressive Minister of the Interior, V.K. Plehve, remarked: 'In order to hold back the revolution, we need a small victorious war'.
Manchuria was the likely cockpit, given Russia's and Japan's rivalry for this territory's vast untapped mineral resources. Japan's defeat of China in the war of 1895 and her increased dominance over Korea gave her a sense of Asian destiny. Russia had bullied weakened China into agreeing to the building of the Trans-Siberian railway and had acquired the ice-free Port Arthur, Peking's port, and saw its eastern provinces as a new frontier.
The occasion for the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 was Russia's refusal to withdraw its troops from Manchuria following the suppression of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China, a withdrawal required by the treaty protocol. Negotiations brought no Czarist back-down, and on 9 February 1904 Japan launched an attack, and mauled the Russian Far Eastern Fleet anchored at Port Arthur. Japan, in this fight, possessed the advantage of a modernized and German trained army of 300,000 field troops, with a reserve of 400,000 trained reservists. Czarist Russia's... [continues]
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