Why The Trenches of France Shouldn’t Have Been Such a Surprise – Remembering the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5

Posted: February 4th, 2014 | No Comments »

As 2014 kicks in we’re all being inundated with World War One books, documentaries and editorials as the centenary of the start of the conflict approaches in August. So much of the commentaries and writing are focussed on the horror of the war, the mechanised bloodshed of the trenches, machine guns, gas, aerial bombing, ferocious naval battles, tanks, the horrific injuries and death toll as well as the war on civilians. So often the level of the carnage is presented as something that shocked the public as well as the military high command but I’d suggest that if those who sent troops into action in 1914 had better studied and understood the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 better then they might not have been so surprised at what happened in France and Belgium a decade later and might just have used different tactics. Perhaps the tone of so much of the current commentary on WW1 – that it somehow came out of nowhere in terms of its ferocity and tactics – would be a bit more historically on the mark if it looked to the coverage of the Russo-Japanese War and asked why the European powers and America didn’t learn more from the previous conflict?

The Russo-Japanese War pitted the Tsarist Empire against the modernising Meiji and was fought largely on Chinese soil. It was a major defeat, the first, for a European army in Asia in a major conflict and saw so many of the horrors of WW1 played out – trenches (seen below), stalemates, huge casualty rates and horrific injuries, tanks and a modern media reporting. It all began this week in February 1904.

So, below is a longish section from my book Through the Looking Glass – China Foreign Press Corps from Opium to Mao that deals with the war and the way it was reported, indicating that nobody in Europe or America should have been unaware of the conflict and able to take valuable lessons from it.

The Vultures Descend

“You see a thing in China and you think that you understand it. You fix it in your mind and tell yourself that you have absorbed it, whatever it may be, and that you now have the final thought and word and correct meaning. But after a little time you find, by a peculiar process of Chinese national twisting and shifting, no matter, what you see, hear, think, believe, your final thought and word and correct meaning are changed completely.”

 

                                    Edwin Dingle, China’s Revolution (1912)

“I am disgusted! I’ll never go to a war between Orientals again. The vexations and delay are too great.”

                                    Jack London

 

A Foreign War on Chinese Soil

The major event to consume foreign correspondents in China after the onslaught of the Boxers was the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War. Characterised by some as a rehearsal for World War 1, with trenches and sword-wielding cavalry going up against machine guns, China was not a combatant, but the conflict was fought largely along its borders and a fair amount of it on Chinese soil in Manchuria. It should have been an instructive conflict for European generals and politicians, giving them some indications, which they largely ignored, of how brutal and efficient modern warfare was becoming. It should also have raised alarm bells among the Chinese about the rise, regional ambitions and military prowess of Japan that many intellectuals absorbed but the Qing court singularly failed, or chose not, to appreciate. Some papers had predicted the clash. In 1903 the Times correspondent in Seoul reported deteriorating Russo-Japanese relations and the Hongkong Telegraph voiced its agreement with London’s opinion, but it was Shanghai’s North China Herald that got the scoop on the start of the conflict proper. The Herald’s editor Bob Little personally received a telegram announcing the closure of Vladivostok port, which meant that the paper was the first to proclaim the start of the conflict and launched the ensuing media scrum to cover it.

The newspapers and fledgling wire services were desperate for additional correspondents and persuaded many foreigners in China to switch professions and take up the pen. Willard Dickerman Straight was one such person. An orphan, he had attended Cornell before being appointed to work as personal secretary to Robert Hart at the China Imperial Maritime Customs Service. He had many friends in Beijing’s foreign press corps and, as a part-time artist, had illustrated J. O. P. Bland’s rather forgettable 1902 book Verse and Worse (most of which fell firmly into the latter category). However, despite being well known for having become wealthy by the time he was 30 and reputedly “earning as much as the President of the United States”, when the Russo-Japanese War broke out he signed up as a correspondent with Reuters and headed off to northern China and Korea. His despatches caught the eye of the American State Department and he was soon persuaded to change jobs once again, becoming the personal secretary to the American ambassador in Korea while still covering the Japanese annexation of Korea as a freelancer. He was later to return as American consul-general in Shenyang and reacquainted himself with Bland, illustrating the latter’s rather better book Houseboat Days. Straight eventually left China after the Nationalist revolution in 1911. His departure was not a comment on the rise of the Republic but rather that in 1906 at a Beijing dinner party he had been introduced to Dorothy Payne Whitney, heiress to the Whitney fortune, and they had fallen in love and decided to marry. This meant that he, rather fortuitously, no longer had need of employment, having made a fortune and then married one. Still, it seems that the press had got into his blood and he and Dorothy subsequently established the New Republic together in 1914.

The new correspondents also included some who had actually been around in Asia for a while but opted to trade professions. Many fancied a life of adventurous reporting and newspapers believed that it was easier to train someone to write a despatch than to educate them in China’s myriad ways and language. In 1891 James Ricalton, a school teacher from Maplewood, New Jersey, with a penchant for travel to Russia and the Far East, resigned from his regular job to become a photographer and war correspondent. For 15 years he photographed and recorded events, including the Boxers, the lavish Delhi Durbar that installed Edward VII as emperor of India and then the Russo-Japanese War. Ricalton’s real passion was photography but he also wrote despatches to accompany his images. Indeed, as well as arguably being the first real photojournalist to operate in China, he also staged the first moving picture show in China, presenting a programme of Edison films at Shanghai’s Tien Hua Tea Garden in 1897.

This occasional-correspondent life was a feature of the time and gained momentum with the Russo-Japanese War, as did reporting with wireless despatches. The Times got the scoop on the opening clashes of the conflict from its special correspondent Lionel James who reported the first months of the war from the first-ever wireless station used by a war correspondent anywhere. James, who had previously covered the Boer War, transmitted from a specially chartered ship in the Yellow Sea to a cable station at the British enclave of Weihaiwei, which gave the Times and the New York Times the chance to publish reports the next day. It was a short-lived venture as James was forced to abandon his enterprise as a result of Russian paranoia and concerns from the British Admiralty of reprisals by the Japanese with whom James had struck a special deal. Though James survived the pioneering experience unscathed, his less fortunate assistant, Yei Theodora Ozaki, was largely unable to assist due to constant and terrible sea-sickness.

As well as the hastily recruited reporters, there were also some big names around. Chicagoan John Foster Bass, brother of the New Hampshire governor Robert Bass, went to cover the war with his sister Gertrude, but he later sent her to Shanghai for safety while he followed the frontline troops. Bass became a noted war correspondent and went on to cover World War 1 while Gertrude, later known as Gertrude Bass Warner, became famous for her Asian art collection and portrait photography of Japan and China.

And then there was Jack London. Though the American was later to become known for his novels and short stories, he was also present for the Russo-Japanese War, reporting for the Hearst group. He was just 28 but had already published his classic story The Call of the Wild in 1903. London was one journalist who didn’t mind the harsh conditions in Manchuria, having just emerged from the Yukon, but while in Japan and Koreahe did suffer from bouts of debilitating depression that laid him low for days at a time.

London was one of a group of American journalists who travelled together from San Francisco to Yokohama on the SS Siberia specifically to report the war. They called themselves the “Vultures” and included Richard Harding Davis, a correspondent of rather aristocratic manners who was more used to socialising with admirals, generals and statesmen than roughhousing with hacks. He was something of a contrast to the more down-at-heel London, as was Frederick McCormick, Collier’s magazine’s extremely literate war correspondent who travelled with the Russian side.

London travelled all the way to Pyongyang where he sent out his first scribbled notes on rice paper covering the initial land clashes and smuggled out photographs from the Japanese front at Chemulpo, a major staging-post for Japanese ground forces in Korea. For this he was arrested and subjected to hours of rigorous interrogation by the Japanese who suspected him of being a Russian spy. After some arguing back and forth, Harding Davis and Lloyd Griscom, the US minister to Japan, managed to secure his release. Back at large, London used his sailing skills to hire a boat and catch up with the Japanese First Army, which was moving north over treacherous, icy mountain passes towards Manchuria where he was to see the fighting around Pyongyang and the assaults on Russian fortifications in northeast China. He managed to get himself arrested again and was forced to enlist Harding Davis’s support to secure his release twice more. London went on in his career to cover other wars and revolutions but never in Asia, after declaring of his experiences in the Russo-Japanese War: “I am disgusted! I’ll never go to a war between Orientals again. The vexations and delay are too great”.

Harding Davis — London’s multiple saviour from Japanese jails, or potentially a firing squad — was a novelist and playwright as well as a war correspondent. He was to inspire a series of sketches by the immensely popular American illustrator Charles Dana Gibson while also churning out pulp fiction for Collier’s and Scribner’s magazines to pay for his lifestyle. While not off chasing wars, he was usually to be found at his private table at Delmonico’s in Manhattan. He was a muscular Christian, student football and tennis star at Lehigh University and, as most who knew him agreed, a terrible snob. He was also the son of Clarke Davis, the managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, though Harding Davis always worked for his father’s competition the Philadelphia Record before moving to the Philadelphia Press where he interviewed Walt Whitman and other luminaries. From Philadelphia he moved to the New York Evening Sun. By the time he reached Manchuria he had already covered the Boer War and Teddy Roosevelt’s dramatic charge up San Juan Hill in 1898. China was not to be his last posting either as he went on to cover World War 1 where he was caught behind German lines near Brussels.

Harding Davies was notoriously competitive, whether in ensuring the success and good reception of his theatrical plays, on the tennis court or arguing for the prominence of his by-lines. Immediately upon arrival in Japan, he launched a spat with the resident Tokyo correspondent of Collier’s over who should be the lead reporter. However, he was also among friends: he had travelled to Japan with his wife and there found his old friend Bass, with whom he had previously covered the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. At first, in effect, Harding Davies and Bass could get no news as all the reports from the station closest to the front in Yantai were censored by the Japanese authorities and useless. Rather than join the first batch of foreign correspondents who went to the front, both reporters remained in Tokyo after they discovered that the closest anyone was allowed to get to the fighting was three miles away. However, they did eventually reach Manchuria and the frontlines.

As well as the American Vultures, the British press corps was well represented. Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, an experienced British war correspondent, reported as an “embedded” reporter with the Japanese forces for the Daily Telegraph. He was the eldest son of the Brooklyn-born Sir Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett MP who moved to England where he did remarkably well: he became Lord of the Admiralty and was viewed as having become “more English than the English” (not always considered as a compliment). With his father, Ellis had spent time with the Turkish army in the Greco-Turkish War and served as a subaltern in the Bedfordshire Regiment during the Boer War. Hisdespatches from northern China were widely read, along with those of his colleague, Bennet Burleigh, the paper’s famous special war correspondent who was based in Tokyo during the conflict.

 

Others “embedded”themselves with the Russians in China. These included Maurice Baring, an Englishman of letters, dramatist, poet, novelist, translator, essayist and travel writer. A former diplomatic official, he had become a correspondent after finding himself bored rigid in Whitehall. He took up a recommendation from his friend Count Alexander Benckendorff, the Russian ambassador to London, and followed the Russians for the London Morning Post. Like Ashmead-Bartlett, Baring had an illustrious father, the banker Baron Revelstoke. He trailed the czar’s army kitted out in his trademark straw boater, a permanent fixture since his mildly eccentric Cambridge days. He spoke fluent Russian but in Manchuria he reportedly came to be fond of the Chinese and found he could write strong prose too. After witnessing a battle he wrote of the casualty-strewn battlefield:

 

He was lying with brown eyes wide open and showing his white teeth. But there was nothing grim or ghastly in that smile. It was miraculously beautiful … a smile of radiant joy and surprise, as if he had suddenly met with a friend for whom he had longed, above all things, at a moment when of all others he had needed him. Near him a Russian boy was lying, fair and curly-headed, with his head resting on one arm, as if he had fallen asleep like a tired child overcome with insuperable weariness, and had opened his eyes to pray to be left at peace just a little longer.¹

Obviously members of the Russian press corps turned up but they found themselves in trouble and intrigue pretty quickly with their own compatriots and government. The newspaper Novi Krai had been established in the Russian enclave of Port Arthur. It survived the siege of the city during the war and, when the town fell to the Japanese, the presses and staff decamped for Shanghai before eventually re-establishing operations in Harbin and re-launching the paper. Despite being owned and run by Russians, the paper managed to annoy St. Petersburg by effectively accusing General Anatoly Stoessel, the Russian “defender” of Port Arthur, of cowardice and fleeing the town leaving it, and its Russian inhabitants, to an uncertain fate while also severely mistreating the town’s Chinese residents. Then in May 1905 the paper’s proprietor Colonel Artemieff was summoned to St. Petersburg for a personal audience with the czar which was believed to be about the paper’s rather too detailed coverage of the war and the several “stormy” interviews Artemieff had conducted with Stoessel which had shown the czarist general in a bad light. Afterwards he returned to continue running Novi Krai in Harbin with his editors Messers Veroshkin and Tchernikofsky, the latter of whom was well known to the Shanghai press corps as the former telegraphic correspondent of Moscow’s Ruskoe Slovo. The paper had clearly angered officialdom in St. Petersburg which, though apparently aware of Stoessel’s poor leadership, had still publicly backed and decorated him. In March 1906 all three men suddenly disappeared and Novi Krai was suppressed. Nothing further was ever heard of any of the three journalists and the paper never resumed publication.

The conflict between the Russians and the Japanese in the Chinese far north had seen more journalists arrive in China than any previous single event and it affected many of them deeply. Originally from a long-standing newspaper family, the muckraking American reporter Charles Edward Russell came as the New York Herald’s correspondent. In his time Russell penned several pro-socialist books and was as well known as his muckraking contemporaries such as Upton Sinclair who had been inspired by Russell’s articles to write The Jungle, his condemnation of the Chicago meatpacking industry. Russell wrote:

I question much if any of the correspondents that followed the Russo-Japanese War are enthusiastic supporters of the theory that modern war has been humanised … I was in Japan just after the close of the war, and saw some of the remains of Japanese soldiers brought home for burial, an arm or a foot or a cap (being all that could be found after the shell exploded), and there was nothing about these spectacles that appealed much to one’s senses as remarkably humane.²

In China, reporting the Russo-Japanese War, Russell moved from being an impartial observer to becoming a dedicated pacifist and socialist for the rest of his life. Many of the press corps who travelled to Manchuria saw the writing on the wall for the mechanical future of war and were disturbed, but the politicians and the Qing dynasty all seemingly took far less notice.

 

---