The war of the rising sun and tumbling bear

"The horrors of the First World War -- the machine guns, the pounding artillery, the barbed wire and the trench systems -- came as a ghastly surprise to the generals. They should, and could have known better. In 1904, Japan and Russia had gone to war for the dominance of the East. Foreign journalists and military attachés had made meticulous observations, but they dismissed the war's lessons as irrelevant and their countries later suffered severely as a consequence. Richard Connaughton has written the definitive modern account of the Russo-Japanese war, examining the essential components of strategy, tactics and logistics. A little-known war of tremendous significance, it caused the Russian Bear to tumble and the Rising Sun of Japan to begin its ascendancy in part in a natural amphitheatre around the beleaguered city of Port Arthur (now Lu-shun), under the eyes of its fearful citizens and the assembled war correspondents of the world. The epic conclusion took place at sea, where a Japanese fleet sank a Russian armada which had sailed around the world to relieve Port Arthur. As Connaughton explains, this distant war raided the cry 'Asia for the Asians'. Not only did it presage the First World War but it also fostered the growing rivalry between the United States and Japan in the Pacific. It has long deserved the full and vivid analysis which Richard Connaughton now presents"--Jacket.