The Russo-Japanese war saw the first defeat of a major European imperialist power by an Asian country. When Japanese and Russian expansionist interests collided over Manchuria and Korea, the Tsar assumed Japan would never dare to fight. However, after years of planning, Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian Port Arthur, on the Liaoyang Peninsula in 1904 and the war that followed saw Japan win major battles against Russia. This book explains the background and outbreak of the war, then follows the course of the fighting at Yalu River, Sha-ho, and finally Mukden, the largest battle anywhere in the world before the First World War.

Every war leaves an imprint in history, but few have had such a pervasive impact in so many respects as the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. Politically, it fatally weakened the Russian Empire while allowing Japan to follow more dangerous paths. Diplomatically, it shook the power balance in Europe and reshaped it in the form of two coalitions, leading to World War I. With regard to the art of warfare, it emphasized the use of trench warfare and machine guns on land and the deployment of battleships and the use of torpedoes at sea. Yet, despite its importance at the time, it has become very much a forgotten war. The A to Z of the Russo-Japanese War provides considerable breadth and depth of coverage based on Japanese, Russian, and Western sources. The breadth is accomplished through a wide-ranging introduction, a detailed chronology and an extensive bibliography. The depth comes in the hundreds of entries on military and political leaders, major battles and lesser encounters, tactics and strategy as well as the weaponry and of course the causes and consequences. The result is the first major reference work on the Russo-Japanese War in English and the largest in any language.

Like Volume one, Volume two of The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective examines the Russo-Japanese War in its military, diplomatic, social, political, and cultural context. In this volume East Asian contributors focus on the Asian side of the war to flesh out the assertion that the Russo-Japanese War was, in fact, World War Zero, the first global confl ict of the 20th century. The contributors demonstrate that the Russo-Japanese War, largely forgotten in the aftermath of World War I, actually was a precursor to the catastrophe that engulfed the world less than a decade after the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth. This study also helps us better understand Japan as it emerged at the beginning of its fateful 20th century.

Despite the growing number of publications on the Russo-Japanese War, an abundance of questions and issues related to this topic remain unsolved, or call for a reexamination. This 30-chapter volume, the first in the two-volume project Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, provides a comprehensive reexamination of the origins of the conflict, the various dimensions of the nineteen-month conflagration, the legacy of the war, and its place in the history of the twentieth century. Such an enterprise is not only timely but unique. It has benefited from a multinational team of thirty-two scholars from twelve nations representing a broad disciplinary background. The majority of them focus on topics never researched before and without exception provide a novel and critical view of the war. This reexamination is, of course, facilitated by a century-long perspective as well as an impressive assortment of primary and secondary sources, many of them unexplored and, in a number of cases, unavailable earlier.

Examining Russian military intelligence in the war with Japan of 1904-05, this book gives an overview of the origins, structure and performance of Russian military intelligence in the Far East at the turn of the twentieth century.

Over the remote Pacific island of Chichi Jima, nine American flyers-Navy and Marine pilots sent to bomb Japanese communications towers there-were shot down. Flyboys, a story of war and horror but also of friendship and honor, tells the story of those men. Over the remote Pacific island of Chichi Jima, nine American flyers-Navy and Marine pilots sent to bomb Japanese communications towers there-were shot down. One of those nine was miraculously rescued by a U.S. Navy submarine. The others were captured by Japanese soldiers on Chichi Jima and held prisoner. Then they disappeared. When the war was over, the American government, along with the Japanese, covered up everything that had happened on Chichi Jima. The records of a top-secret military tribunal were sealed, the lives of the eight Flyboys were erased, and the parents, brothers, sisters, and sweethearts they left behind were left to wonder. Flyboys reveals for the first time ever the extraordinary story of those men. Bradley's quest for the truth took him from dusty attics in American small towns, to untapped government archives containing classified documents, to the heart of Japan, and finally to Chichi Jima itself. What he discovered was a mystery that dated back far before World War II-back 150 years, to America's westward expansion and Japan's first confrontation with the western world. Bradley brings into vivid focus these brave young men who went to war for their country, and through their lives he also tells the larger story of two nations in a hellish war. With no easy moralizing, Bradley presents history in all its savage complexity, including the Japanese warrior mentality that fostered inhuman brutality and the U.S. military strategy that justified attacks on millions of civilians. And, after almost sixty years of mystery, Bradley finally reveals the fate of the eight American Flyboys, all of whom would ultimately face a moment and a decision that few of us can even imagine. Flyboys is a story of war and horror but also of friendship and honor. It is about how we die, and how we live-including the tale of the Flyboy who escaped capture, a young Navy pilot named George H. W. Bush who would one day become president of the United States. A masterpiece of historical narrative, Flyboys will change forever our understanding of the Pacific war and the very things we fight for.