The New Makers of Modern Strategy, page 59
In the first war, Japan’s stated objective was to expel China from the Korean Peninsula on the pretext that Chinese intrusions violated Korean sovereignty (so did Japan’s) in order to impose a Meiji reform package that would fix Korea’s endemic instability. Unstated goals included the negative objective of preventing Russian expansion and the positive objective of overturning the regional balance of power by supplanting China as the dominant power.6 No one but the Japanese saw this coming. To achieve these strategic objectives, Japanese leaders set three operational objectives: expel China from Korea, permanently secure Japanese sea lines of communications to Korea, and maximize imperial winnings, which the navy and diplomats thought should be Taiwan but the army thought should be Manchuria’s Liaodong Peninsula.
A tall order requires an accurate assessment of available opportunities and unavoidable constraints—the strategic cards dealt. The choices on how to play the hand constitute the strategy. Treaty revision opened an opportunity for Japan to settle its foreign policy. In addition, a century of internal rebellions, killing tens of millions and wrecking entire provinces, had gravely weakened China’s Qing dynasty and undermined the legitimacy of continued Manchu minority rule over the subjugated Han majority. Simultaneously, Korea suffered even greater governmental dysfunction and unrest. The long-suffering peasantry erupted in the largest uprising in its history. When the ruling house invited China, its suzerain, to intervene, Japan stepped in to protect its nationals.
A strategy of military intervention entailed huge risks. The sheer size of the Korean theater would stretch Japan’s limited manpower, in contrast to China’s bottomless manpower and resource potential. China’s problem was its difficulty mobilizing its forces. Japan could lose either on land or at sea, whereas China could lose only on land because interior lines meant it did not require the sea to reach the theater. So, it could afford to risk its fleet in ways that Japan could not. Japan also faced time constraints; it must conclude hostilities before its window of opportunity slammed shut with completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway, anticipated soon after 1900. By definition, a window of opportunity means that time is on someone else’s side.
The war was comprised of two pairs of key battles plus a naval coda. The first pair occurred in a three-day period in mid-September 1894, when the Japanese army defeated the Chinese at Pyongyang. This resulted in the expulsion of Chinese forces from the Korean Peninsula, the original stated war aim. Meanwhile, the Japanese navy defeated the state-of-the-art Chinese Beiyang Fleet in the Battle of the Yalu. This resulted in Japanese command of the sea because China avoided engaging the opposing navy again.
After the Korean Campaign, Japan launched a succession of three others. The first two, the Manchurian and Shandong Campaigns (over the winter of 1894–95), focused on the land and sea approaches to Beijing, threatening a pincer movement on the capital. The Japanese army took the state-of-the-art naval base at Lüshun (Port Arthur) by land and the Japanese navy blockaded the remaining Chinese naval base at Weihaiwei. Both services jointly destroyed the trapped fleet, ending Chinese naval power for the next century because China could not afford a replacement. The naval coda, the Battle for the Pescadores, which secured a maritime empire, coincided with the peace negotiations.
China followed Japan’s script by fighting incompetently in predictable places, blunders Japan leveraged. China ceded the initiative by defending such cities as Pyongyang behind its walls, which crumbled before modern artillery, instead of defending at river crossings and mountain passes that Japanese troops had to traverse—locations that geography made both predictable and dangerous and that China had ample time to leverage. The Chinese Beiyang Fleet sat out the war instead of destroying troop transports and supply ships at sea. Rather than fleeing from Pyongyang to the Yalu River, Chinese forces could have combined with Koreans to deliver an insurgency to threaten Japanese supply lines. Had China exacerbated Japan’s logistical problems by always fighting inland, cold and starvation would have weakened Japan. China also botched war termination. Its failure to send duly accredited negotiators gave Japan the opportunity to send them home and use the extra time to capture the Pescadores and successfully demand sovereignty over Taiwan. In other words, China was a “cooperative adversary” in the sense that it played its available cards poorly, unwittingly following the Japanese script, thus producing an optimal outcome for Japan, not China.
The Japanese army overreached with demands for the Liaodong Peninsula—an area Russia proclaimed off limits to others. When Russia, France, and Germany intervened to demand Japan withdraw in return for a higher indemnity from China, Japan had to back down. It could not take on three great European powers. Despite the humiliation, the indemnity made the war profitable. Domestically, the outcome validated the very controversial westernization program that had appalled traditionalists. Military prestige emerged greatly enhanced. Regionally, Japan supplanted China as the dominant power—unprecedented in Asian history. Internationally, Japan became a recognized great power as demonstrated by the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, Britain’s only long-term alliance between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. But Japan’s victory on Russia’s vulnerable Siberian frontier precipitated an arms race with Russia, which made an unprecedented (and misguided) shift in foreign policy priorities from Europe to Asia, setting the stage for another war.
III
Russia’s occupation of Manchuria, a region exceeding the combined area of France and Germany, in response to the Boxer Uprising (1899–1900) threatened Japan’s plans for empire. Japan exhausted diplomacy when Russia pocket vetoed its final proposal to exchange recognition of Russia’s primacy in Manchuria for Japan’s in Korea. So, Japan prepared to take militarily what Russia would not cede diplomatically. This required victory within another tight window of opportunity that opened with the Anglo-Japanese Alliance but would close upon completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway, when Russian could bring its material superiority to bear—its three times Japan’s population, seven times the soldiers, and eight times the gross national product.7 But like the Qing dynasty, the Romanov dynasty was past its prime. Russia, Turkey, and Montenegro remained the only European states without a parliament. Assassinations of public figures resumed when Tsar Nicholas II stonewalled demands for political representation from his increasingly well-educated urban population.
As in the previous war, Japan marshalled and integrated multiple instruments of national power into a coherent strategy. Diplomacy had isolated Russian through the Anglo-Japanese alliance. The treaty terms promised British intervention should Russia combine with another power against Japan. The terms went into effect for five years, until 1907. By 1904, Japan had used the previous war’s indemnity to rearm before Russia did. But Russian naval capabilities in Asia would surpass Japan’s soon after 1904.8 Japan also secured a succession of foreign loans that ultimately financed thirty-eight percent of the war.9 At war’s start, Russia had yet to repair two thirds of the Manchurian section of the Trans-Siberian Railway that the Boxers had damaged.10 The railway was not double-tracked and lacked a link around Lake Baikal, which approximated Switzerland in size. At the onset of hostilities, it could transport 20,000 to 40,000 men per month to the front; that capacity reached 100,000 men per month by the end. If this carrying capacity had been available from the start, Russia would have had numerical superiority throughout.11
Japanese reconnaissance included Chinese scouting units behind Russian lines, Chinese spies within Russian camps, and the deployment of Colonel (later General) Akashi Motojirō to coordinate spies from the Japanese legation in Stockholm, funding Russian, Polish, and Finnish revolutionaries to stir up trouble throughout the Russian empire.12 The Japanese cultivated Chinese loyalties by paying for local goods, creating a wartime economic boom in Manchuria.13 Japan located Russian ships by intercepting fleet communications.14 Japan also pre-positioned representatives in the United States to request mediation at the appropriate moment.
The army’s 1903 war plan emphasized speed and initiative so that Japan could leverage its initial, but temporary, numerical superiority in order to swarm northward up the Korean Peninsula by foot and up the Liaodong Peninsula by rail to converge in a war-winning battle, perhaps in the vicinity of Liaoyang, before Russian could adequately mobilize. It would be a replay of the Franco-Prussian War’s double envelopment at the Battle of Sedan.15 On February 8, 1904, Japan opened hostilities with a surprise attack to destroy Russia’s Port Arthur Squadron in its homeport of Lüshun (Port Arthur) at the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula. Neither country anticipated that the battle for Lüshun would become so difficult, nor so essential, to the war’s outcome. Complicating Japan’s plans was the small Vladivostok Squadron. Complicating Russia’s plans were the 625 miles separating Lüshun and Vladivostok, which ran by Japan.
Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō and General Nogi Maresuke’s joint solution—the former to cork the Port Arthur Squadron in port until the latter destroyed it by land—was the high-water mark of Japanese army-navy coordination. Though the surprise attack failed to destroy the squadron, which remained a fleet in being, posing a potential threat to Japan’s sea lines of communication, the attack did insure safe simultaneous troop landings on the Korean Peninsula for the long hike northward to Shenyang (Mukden), the Qing dynasty’s ancestral home. The inability to block the port entrance forced a continuous blockade.
Given the tsar’s insistence on relieving Lüshun, from late May to mid-June, Russia fought (and lost) the battles of Nanshan (forty-five miles north of Lüshun) and Delisi (Te-li-ssu, eighty miles north of Lüshun) on the railway line to Harbin, located at the T-intersection between the east-west line connecting European Russia with the port of Vladivostok, and the southwestward line to Lüshun. Japan cut land access to Lüshun and soon took the nearby commercial port of Dalian to serve as its logistical hub. The tsar’s forward strategy undermined field commander General Aleksei N. Kuropatkin’s plans to fight only after building his forces and doing so much closer to Harbin (over 600 miles north of Lüshun) in order to force Japan to fight both outnumbered and on extended lines.16 On June 20, the tsar doubled down by ordering the Baltic Fleet to prepare to relieve Lüshun, a quixotic mission given the distance and lack of intermediary basing for coaling or refitting.17 The Baltic Fleet would not arrive in theater until the following May.
Meanwhile, the Port Arthur Squadron unsuccessfully tried to escape to Vladivostok on June 23 and August 10, the latter known as the Battle of the Yellow Sea, which cost numerous ships and the commanding admiral.18 It took two successive incoming tides for the whole squadron to exit Lüshun’s narrow entrance, leaving little mystery to its movements.19 Meanwhile, in the seven sorties of the much smaller Vladivostok Squadron before its destruction at the Battle of Ulsan on August 14, it sank troop transports and Krupp siege guns reluctantly removed from Japan’s own coastal defenses. Replacement guns essential to sink the Port Arthur Squadron would not be emplaced for six months.20
Nine days after the Battle of the Yellow Sea that had threatened a more active Russian fleet, General Nogi doubled down with the first of four manpower-murdering assaults on Lüshun. Japan could not concentrate its forces deep in Manchuria for the anticipated a battle of annihilation as long as one army out of four remained pinned at Lüshun. Similarly, the blockade pinned the navy, which could not refit in preparation for the approaching Baltic Fleet. The first two assaults immediately preceded major land battles, the battles of Liaoyang (August 26–September 4) and Shahe (October 5–17). Liaoyang, located over 200 miles north of Lüshun and fifty-five miles south of Shenyang, was the second largest battle in history after the Battle of Sedan that the Japanese so wanted to emulate, but it left victorious Japan unable to pursue given its desperate lack of munitions, irreplaceable losses of officers, and shortage of horses.21 The Russians counter attacked about fifteen miles south of Shenyang in the Battle of Shahe, where unbeknownst to the Russians, Japanese supplies and forces verged on collapse. But Russian morale suffered from peculating officers, inadequate clothing, incompetent command, and rampant alcoholism.
Japan followed with two more costly assaults on Lüshun, having belatedly realized the importance of a highpoint necessary to place spotters in order to adjust Japan’s line of fire on the squadron trapped in port. The necessary Krupp siege guns were not in place until the fourth assault finally captured the highpoint, allowing Japan to sink the squadron within the week. Lüshun surrendered on January 2, 1905. Nogi’s army was soon off to Shenyang for the long-anticipated annihilating battle. Sadly for Japan, the assaults on Lüshun had cost the equivalent of an entire army.22 Sadly for Russia, it no longer had a base capable of refitting the Baltic Fleet. With the fall of Lüshun, the fleet had only one possible destination, Vladivostok, sending it right past Japan.
General Ōyama Iwao, commander of the Manchurian forces, was desperate for an annihilating battle. In the Battle of Shenyang (February 19–March 10, 1905), the largest battle in history to that date, he committed everything Japan had left. Even so, Japan deployed only 250,000 against Russia’s 375,000. At battle’s end, Japan verged on both military and financial exhaustion, while Russia’s troop buildup continued apace. Japan requested US mediation to end the war.23 One more land battle would have shattered the Japanese army for lack of men, arms, and horses.
Yet the tsar placed his hopes on the navy. In the Battle of Tsushima (May 27–28, 1905), Tōgō’s Combined Fleet made short work of the Baltic Fleet in one of history’s most lopsided naval battles. As in the first war, Japan destroyed the enemy navy virtually in toto. Tsushima was the rare decisive battle that led directly to war termination and the achievement of the war’s objective. The tsar folded in the face of a gathering revolution throughout his empire over his incompetent military and political leadership. He feared that riotous reserves would join rather than suppress the unrest.24 The United States played its scripted role to host the negotiations. As in the first war, Japan’s navy took islands during the peace negotiations to gain leverage—the Pescadores in the first, and Sakhalin Island in the second.
The Portsmouth Peace Treaty confirmed the outcome of the First Sino-Japanese War yielding Japan, not China or Russia, as the dominant regional power of Asia. Whereas at war’s outset, Japan had been willing to trade Manchuria for Korea, in the end it got the southern halves of Manchuria and Sakhalin, too.25 Russia lost influence in Korea, which soon became a Japanese protectorate. Russia’s very expensive south Manchurian railway concessions became an indemnity in kind for Japan, which had secured its strategic objective of a continental empire.
In reality, first Chinese and then Russian incompetence had saved Japan. Like the failing Qing dynasty, the failing Romanov dynasty was a cooperative adversary that could have played its cards quite differently. Had Russia spent its defense budgets on the railway systems to deploy its armies, as a continental power should, instead of on capital ships that it could not reliably deploy in wartime, this would have yielded numerical superiority of ground troops from start to finish. As it was, Russia increased its troop levels in theater from 98,000 in February 1904 to 149,000 in August 1904 at the Battle of Liaoyang, when its numbers creeped past Japan’s, and reached 788,000 in August 1905, just one month before the conclusion of the peace treaty. At that time, Russia had deployed just forty percent of its army to the theater, while Japan had deployed 670,000, virtually its entire army.26 Moreover, in both wars, the population in theater was at worst neutral and often supportive of the Japanese versus the Manchus or Russians. Nevertheless, the Japanese chalked up their victories to what they had done right, not to what their enemies had done wrong. This self-deception was one of multiple unpromising trendlines that would bear cumulative long-term effects. Japan became comfortable with risk-accepting strategies. Had it not defeated the world’s two largest continental powers? Clearly, will power trumped material inferiority, or so the Japanese believed. The army and navy failed to recognize that victory depended on their coordination at Lüshun. Postwar, they developed separate war plans against different adversaries, fought bitter budget battles, and refused to consult—let alone cooperate—with each other.
War had become an increasingly expensive instrument of policy. In the first one, the indemnity had yielded a fifty percent profit.27 In the second, Japan suffered more casualties and expended more ammunition at the relatively small Battle of Nanshan than during the entire previous war.28 Estimates differ on the relative costs of the two conflicts—multiples range from five to over eight times more expensive.29
IV
Japan, surrounded entirely by seas, could never become a continental power capable of ingesting expansive continental neighbors over great-power objections. Great continental powers generally are self-sufficient in food, energy, and war materiel, and surrounded by protective geographic barriers because they have already expanded into the most accessible contiguous areas. Often, they whittle away at neighbors. Although continental powers can suffer catastrophic defeats, their geography and resources allow the great ones to rise again.
In the interwar period, Japan’s ability to profit from its mainland holdings declined as nationalism energized Korean and Chinese hostility. In East Asia, the interwar period began in 1905 with the Portsmouth Peace Treaty, not in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles, and ended in 1931 with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, not in 1939 with Germany’s invasion of Poland. Chinese and Russian decline had made the international environment of the Meiji era hospitable to Japanese ambitions for great powerhood. Rising hostile neighbors and cascading economic depressions of the interwar period threatened these ambitions.
