Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
hero for years to come. Only recently has his foolhardiness, ego, and overreaching ambition been acknow-
ledged as the true reason for the brutal end he met.
Port Arthur Closed to the West until the arrival in Tokyo Bay of Matthew C. Perry in 1853, Japan
had remained far from involvement in European and American affairs. But the opening to the West in the
second half of the nineteenth century brought rapid modernization to Japan and fueled that country's am-
bitious plans to gain a piece of the great Euro-American colonial expansion into Asia. By the turn of the
century, the heretofore reclusive Japanese were ready to become players on the world stage. With the once-
formidable Chinese empire in disarray as European countries carved off parts of China and claimed them
as “spheres of influence,” Japan first set its sights on controlling Korea and Manchuria, a goal that brought
a head-on collision with Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5.
Japan's first military target was the Russian-held Port Arthur, a strategic deepwater harbor on the tip
of the Liaodong Peninsula in what is now China. It was then Russia's only ice-free harbor on the Pacific;
control of the port meant command of the local seas. The Japanese attack on the fortified city, in which
the full fury of a twentieth-century militarized industrial state was brought to bear, lasted from mid-August
1904 to January 1905. When the Russian commander finally surrendered, the Japanese had suffered sixty
thousand casualties; the Russians numbered thirty thousand dead and wounded.
The fall of Port Arthur forced the Russians to sue for peace, which was negotiated by President
Theodore Roosevelt in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Russia ceded Port Arthur and part of Sakhalin Island,
and was forced to leave Manchuria. Japan was left as the predominant power in East Asia and would seek
to expand its military power and influence in the Pacific during the next three decades, a policy that even-
tually produced a collision with the United States in the Second World War.
Marne, Tannenberg, Ypres, Gallipoli, Verdun, and the Somme When the First World War broke out
in the summer of 1914, Germany's plan was simple: drive swiftly through Belgium and deliver a knockout
blow to France. Then Germany would turn its attention to the east and contend with Russia. The first part
of that sweep brought war to the low, flat plains of Belgium and central France, the scene of fighting a
century earlier in the Napoleonic Wars.
The German strategy, known as the Schlieffen plan, was initially successful as the kaiser's armies cut
a wide swath through Belgium and bore down on Paris until they met an Allied army on the banks of the
Marne, a river in central France just north of Paris. The first of two battles was fought there in September
1914. After suffering this first defeat, the Germans withdrew and their initial impetus stalled. When both
sides dug in, the long, terrible stalemate of World War I's trench warfare began.
A few weeks earlier, the Germans had exacted a severe toll from the Russians, their opposition on the
eastern front. In fighting near Tannenberg, a small village in what is now Poland, the Germans turned back
a Russian invasion intended to weaken Germany by creating battlefronts on two sides. But the Russian
troops were badly commanded, poorly equipped, and ill trained; they met disaster when they faced the
modernized, cohesive German army. After thousands of starving Russian soldiers surrendered, the Russian
commander committed suicide. The war on this eastern front continued inconclusively until 1917, when
the Russian Revolution overturned the tsar and Lenin's Bolshevik government withdrew from the war.
Back on the western front, the Germans concocted a plan to cut across Belgium and take the port cities
on the English Channel. One of their targets was the small lace-making town of Ypres, a communications
hub and strategic crossroads. Over the next four years, three battles would be fought over Ypres, producing
a million casualties on both sides. Many of the dead are buried in the forty cemeteries that dot the vicinity
and which would eventually give the town its grisly nickname, Ypres la Morte. The first battle, in October
1914, began the long period of trench warfare that so senselessly chewed up the young men of Europe.
By the spring of 1915, the war in Europe had turned into a terrible and costly stalemate. Fierce nation-
alistic pride and the certainty of having superior armies kept both sides from negotiating a settlement. A
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