The negotiations made little headway, producing an atmosphere of crisis in which neither side dared yield; but Russia never expected Japan to go to war. After all, Japan was a newly emergent country, and the Russian military the most powerful in the world. Moreover, the Russians thought of the Japanese almost as children, incapable of managing large military equipment because of their diminutive size. One Russian admiral seriously described Japanese sailors on a battleship as struggling like infants with an oversized toy, and Russia’s military attache in Tokyo (supposedly a Japanese expert) thought the Japanese “would need about a century to develop a modern army comparable to that of the weakest army in Europe.”601 Needless to say, such benighted notions also clouded Russian estimations of the Japanese capacity for strategic thought.
The Russians had not always been so blind. Although Admiral Krusenstern had thought (perhaps correctly) in 1805 that “two [Russian] cutters of sixteen guns and sixty men would be sufficient... to sink the whole Japanese fleet,”602 others had read more clearly between the lines. Vasily Golovnin, for example, despite the humiliation and abuse he had suffered during his Japanese captivity of 1814, had emerged with a healthy appreciation of the military potential of his captors. “Japanese seamen put on a European footing could,” he warned, once the nation came out of its self-imposed isolation, “in a short time match their fleet with the best of Europe.... One must not provoke the Japanese, a populous, intelligent, patient and imitative people. For if ever there ruled over that people a monarch like our own Peter the Great, it would not be many years before Japan was lording it over the whole Pacific Ocean.”603 Japan delayed the day, but just fourteen years after it was forcibly opened to the world economy by gunboat diplomacy, when Commodore Perry sailed into Yedo Bay, Japan began its remarkably rapid transformation from a semi-medieval, feudal society into a largely Westernized modern industrial and military state.
The transformation began with the rapid adoption of European cultural habits and styles, such as public lavatories, Western garb, and building materials of brick, plaster, and plate glass. In 1871, a post and telegraph office was opened; in 1872, the first railway, linking Tokyo and Yokohama, “with an imported Englishman to drive the train.”604 In 1873, Japan adopted the solar calendar, and in the same year introduced universal conscription, sounding the death knell for the Samurai. By 1877, the Japanese military had also put together a Prussian-style general staff. Japan’s soldiers began to be trained by the Germans, British, and French, and by 1903 it had an army of thirteen divisions, six first-class battleships, and six armored cruisers built in British yards. The government’s China indemnity had helped pay for all this, but Japan’s growing economy sustained the military growth. During a single decade (1893 to 1903) the value of its imports trebled, the tonnage of its merchant marine quadrupled, and the combined deposits in all its banks increased by more than six times. Although the emperor was declared to be sacred and inviolable, Japan’s constitution allowed the election of a national Diet, modeled on that of Bismarck’s Germany.
Even after Japan had embarked on its program of modernization and development, Russia failed to take its measure. “To most Russians,” one writer observed, “Japan was a fairy-book sort of place, filled with fascinating little people who lived in paper houses, indulged themselves with geishas, and wasted hours on flower arrangements and tea ceremonies.”605
At the beginning of February 1904, the Russian Army had 1,100,000 men under arms, compared with Japan’s 180,000. Russia’s active reserve also totaled 2,400,000, and it was believed that in that category Japan could muster no more than 150,000 men. In fact, since all Japanese males between the ages of seventeen and forty were liable to military service, the Japanese could muster 850,000 men – six times the Russian estimate – and these were much closer than their Russian counterparts to the potential theater of war. Nevertheless, aside from greatly underestimating the number of fighting men Japan could put into the field, it was also axiomatic in the racist court circles of Nicholas II that “one Russian soldier was the equal of three Japanese.”606 Even ordinary Russians sometimes referred to the Japanese as “Makakas,” a zoological term meaning “related to the monkey or baboon.” Man for man, of course, the manpower reserve of the empire appeared to give Russia overwhelming might. But it was in fact in a disciplined infantry that Japan had its secret strength. “With the invention earlier in the nineteenth century of breech-loading rifles using metallic cartridges,” explains one historian, “muskets and muzzle-loaders had been cast aside, but the Russians had not appreciated the value of the new weapon. In training, they spent most of their ammunition rations on unobserved fire. The Japanese trained on the range. The Russian soldiers shot badly, the Japanese excellently. The Russians fired in volleys. The Japanese learned to aim and to shoot to kill.”607
As for the comparative naval strengths of the two powers in East Asian waters, Japan was numerically inferior in battleships but superior in cruisers. Its warships were also equipped with the newly developed Whitehead torpedo, powered by a propeller-driven compressed air engine, while some of the Russian ships in Port Arthur were relatively old and in disrepair.
Strengthened by their alliance with Great Britain, the Japanese, in fact, believed they could prevail in a limited war. Russian land forces in the Far East were as yet inconsiderable, and the one-track Trans-Siberian Railway for a number of reasons was incapable of rapidly hauling heavy supplies. The Russian general staff, however, estimated that the Trans-Siberian and Chinese Eastern railways could carry six to eight troop trains to Manchuria a day, effectively matching Japan’s capacity for amphibious landings on the Korean coast. Moreover, the six or more Russian divisions already in Manchuria were well positioned should war break out. Nevertheless, War Minister Kuropatkin later claimed, “I thought that a rupture with Japan would be a national calamity and did everything in my power to prevent it.”608 As to the first half of his statement at least, he was right.
Russia steadily increased its troop strength in the Far East during 1903, raised additional battalions in the homeland, and toward the end of January 1904 moved three battalions of the East Siberian Rifle Regiment toward the Yalu River. Four artillery brigades stationed in European Russia and Western Siberia were also dispatched to Manchuria. In March, one battleship, seven cruisers, and four torpedo boats left the Red Sea for Port Arthur, a voyage of six or seven weeks.
Meanwhile, the Japanese drilled regiments of troops in subzero weather on Mount Hakkoda in northern Japan in preparation for a Siberian campaign.
With the completion of the Chinese Eastern, all that now remained for a railway through to the Pacific was the formidable stretch designed to round the southern tip of Lake Baikal. Thousands of Central Asian, Persian, Turkish, and Italian navvies joined the Russian construction crews, but the problems they encountered were more daunting than on any other segment of the line. The only access roads were meandering goat trails along the steep walls of the cliffs, and timber baulks had first to be built along the overhangs to prevent rockslides from crushing workers on the track. Along Baikal’s eastern shore, the heights came down to the water, and a long tunnel was required to bring the track out along a road bed cut in the solid rock. From there the line described a great semicircle through hills and tunnels to Verkhneudinsk. With hostilities looming on the horizon,