The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective. World War Zero. History of Warfare Volume 29

John W. Steinberg, Bruce W. Menning, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, and Shinji Yokote, eds. The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective. War Zero. History of Warfare Volume 29. Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005. xxiii, 671 pp. Illustrations. Maps. Index. $198.00, cloth.The Russo-Japanese War on its first centenary is finally receiving the attention it has long deserved from historians and scholars. The war marked not only the first major defeat of a European by an Asian nation, it also ushered in a new era of industrialized warfare. In their elegant introduction to this handsomely produced volume, the assembled editors justify the rather clumsy designation of the conflict as World War Zero by pointing to both its political, economic, technological and cultural implications. The conflict first highlighted what happened when ever-greater masses of manpower on the battlefield collided with a new generation of precision weapons systems-creating 10,000 Japanese casualties whilst assaulting a single position around Port Arthur alone (p. xx). Trenches, barbed wire and concrete fortifications, as well as machine guns and massed artillery bombardments, all played a hitherto unprecedented role. Electrically-based means of communication also increasingly destroyed the empathic barrier previously created by physical distance, making the morale of the front an increasingly large part of the grand strategic equation for both sides. The global nature of military alliances at the time also served both to broaden the potential base of war finance (as two excellent chapters by Boris Ananich and Ed Miller point out) and to increase pressure on the gathering of strategic as well as tactical and operational intelligence.At the same time, the war itself also contained elements that were something of a throwback-the Japanese naval victory at Tsushima in 1905 was the single most decisive naval clash since Trafalgar, but it was also the last time in naval history that two surface fleets would engage in a sustained and decisive gunnery duel. In addition, as the handsome illustrations at the front of this book attest, this was one of the last conflicts to be portrayed as a chivalric duel between individuals rather than as a faceless modern war that it so often in fact was; writers and illustrators of the day still preferred to vaunt individual human courage over the glorification of pure technology, as the chapters here by Richard Stites, Paul Bushkovitch, Naoko Shimazu, Tatiana Filippova and James Ulak in Part 3 of the book regarding the two home fronts in this conflict point out.This book is the first of two volumes (the second will examine the broader Asian impact of the conflict) and the thirty-one individual contributions here in many ways symbolize the cutting edge of current academic thinking on the conflict, particularly new discoveries made in more easily accessible Russian archives. Michael R. Auslin opens the work with an effective summary of Japanese grand strategy in the Far East between 1792 and 1895, arguing that the war itself marked a critical stage in the internationalization of Japan (p. 3). In his view the two sides were effectively, therefore, already on a collision course (of which the Russians were blissfully unaware) even before the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, since an invasion of Korea was already being discussed in Japanese court circles in the early 1870s, a decision postponed only to allow for more intensive modernization (pp. 17-18).David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye's essay examines the immediate causes of the war. Reflecting the focus of much of his own research and writing, particular stress is laid on the role played by ministerial conflicts within the tsarist state, as well as a new imperial ideology surrounding Russia's unique mission in the East, the fatal intertwining influences of which effectively hindered attempted resolution efforts in the Far East before 1904. …

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