Engines of War

by Christian Wolmar

  Through the use of these two railways in the south and east, ‘Japan had in effect created a flanking strategy, whereby counter-attack into the heart of Russia was possible via the Manchurian or Korean system. Coupled with this, Japan had provided the one dimension it hitherto lacked: the ability to provide its Manchurian forces with the support of the railway.’39 This trapped the Russians. Their forces were gradually chased out of the heartland of Manchuria, abandoning swathes of the southern part of the region: ‘At the same time, the flanking effect achieved by the completion of the Korean railway network applied still greater pressure on Russian forces. Having to divide their attention between confronting regular Japanese forces in the South and the spectre of a further front opening in the East, while supplies for the large Russian Army dwindled, the Russian military was faced with multifaceted threat and few options at its disposal.’40

  The Japanese had learnt that the Russians were sending a naval squadron from the Baltic to reinforce its Pacific fleet but it had to travel all the way round the world, taking seven months to effect the 18,000-mile trip from the Baltic around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean – demonstrating why the Trans-Siberian had been built in the first place. The fleet had been despatched in October 1904 and clearly its destiny already seemed ill-fated since, passing near the United Kingdom, the Russians had fired on a group of thirty British trawlers which, because of a Chaplinesque series of blunders, they had mistaken for Japanese torpedo boats, even though they were thousands of miles from Asia on Dogger Bank. The incident, in which three sailors were killed, nearly brought Britain into the war on the side of the Japanese, with whom it had a treaty, and resulted in much anti-Russian coverage in the newspapers. The fleet never reached Russian waters in the Pacific. The Japanese simply lay in wait until the Russian navy had to sail through the straits between Japan and Korea, where they sank nearly all the ships, preventing the much-needed reinforcements from reaching the beleaguered Russians.

  The final battle of the Russo-Japanese War at Mukden was, therefore, played out on Japanese terms. In a situation that would repeat itself on a much larger scale in the First World War, the two sides had become entrenched across an eighty-mile front south of Mukden.41

  The battle commenced on 20 February and raged for three weeks. By then the two forces virtually matched each other, with an enormous number of men, 620,000, taking part in the fighting.42 Despite the apparent logistical advantages, the Japanese were worried about continued reinforcements on the Trans-Siberian and their leader, Field Marshal Prince Oyama Iwao, wanted to use this battle to chase the Russians out of Manchuria finally. The Russian leader, General Alexei Kuropatkin, deployed his forces defensively, hoping as ever to gain sufficient time for the army to arrive in force. However, thanks to their newly arrived reinforcements, the Japanese were able to launch several suicidal but successful attacks against entrenched positions and machine-gun emplacements. Kuropatkin retreated, digging in further west and leaving the Japanese to take Mukden on 10 March. It was the last major land conflict of the war, though occasional skirmishes flared up and the Russians continued bringing in reinforcements from the west along the Trans-Siberian.

  While the Japanese won both the land and the naval battles, the fact that the Russians had completed the line around Lake Baikal, and were building up capacity on the Trans-Siberian, theoretically gave them a stronger hand in the ultimate peace negotiations at Portsmouth in New Hampshire, brokered by the USA under the ebullient leadership of Teddy Roosevelt. By October 1905, when the war came to an end, the Russians, at last, greatly outnumbered the Japanese as a million men had been despatched by the now far more efficient railway. In fact, the Russian build-up of troops had come too late. The war was proving so unpopular in Russia that it had already prompted an unsuccessful revolution and the Tsar had realized that pursuing it would only add to the unrest. Therefore his hand was in reality weak as he entered the peace talks. However, thanks to the Russians’ stronger military position the terms thrashed out after much behind-the-scenes negotiation by Roosevelt gave them far more than they might have expected given the clear nature of their defeat. The Japanese were greatly disconcerted by the fact that while they had unequivocally won the war, they were treated almost as the losers in the subsequent peace negotiations and they did not get the monetary compensation they had sought, nor all the territory of Sakhalin Island that had long been a source of dispute between the two nations. This discontent contributed to the growing militarism that would be expressed most vigorously in the country’s involvement in the Second World War.

  Despite its success at the negotiating table, Russia had not won a single battle in the war – some were draws rather than outright victories for either side – and had lost the bulk of two of its three fleets. Nevertheless, its military leaders basked in the misapprehension that having eventually delivered such a huge force to the front through the railway, Russia would probably have won a continued conflict. In his extensive post-war writings, General Kuropatkin did not doubt that the canny timing of the attack by the Japanese was the decisive factor, but he argued strongly that had he been able to deliver more troops quickly through the railway he would have won. This failed to recognize the fact that the Japanese, too, had improved their logistics thanks to the railways they had built and would have been able to respond in kind to any increase in numbers on the Russian side. Defeated generals are wont to blame logistics but it was not really the newly built railway’s fault, since it had performed quite heroically in delivering an army of a million men and their supplies over more than 5,500 miles of largely barren wasteland. Kuropatkin ignored that it was his failure to exploit the potential that the railway had given him, and his enemy’s ability to improve their lines of communication rapidly, that led to defeat.

  Indeed, both sides had used the available railways to maximum intent and, as a result, never before had such vast numbers faced each other on the battlefield. Overall, the Russians had sent more than one million men to Manchuria, boosting their forces from 125,000 to 1,300,000 by the end of the war. The Japanese, for their part, had built a railway and adapted another to their needs, but crucially they were better able to exploit these assets. They started off with 300,000 men, and tripled the total to 900,000 during the same period.

  Independent analysts contradict Kuropatkin’s view that it was only a matter of timing that prevented Russia from winning, arguing that, as the war unfolded, the balance ‘shifted in the direction of Japan, and it was only a matter of how the denouement was to take shape in the ensuing months’.43 The Japanese were better supplied with ammunition and better fed than their Russian counterparts. The difference between the two combatants was that the Japanese managed to improve their supply chain in the second half of the conflict with the use of two extra railways, whereas the Russians, short of the ability to supply their troops from the ports on the Pacific, were entirely dependent on the Trans-Siberian, which, despite improvements, was still inadequate. The paradox was that the Russians had built an amazing railway – its inadequacies should not be used to detract from the fact that it was probably the most ambitious engineering project ever undertaken, even including the building of the pyramids – and yet had been unable to use it to bring about victory. That may have been because the military commanders were still rooted in the mores of feudal Russia, in sharp contrast to the modernizers who built the railway, led by the remarkable Sergei Witte, the driving force behind its construction and later Prime Minister of Russia. Witte, indeed, made sure that the dead hand of the military had been kept out of the construction process of the railway, which, as a result, was very advanced in its application of modern engineering skills. The disparity could be seen on every train heading east with its complement of peasant soldiers, mostly illiterate, travelling on the new iron road, probably for the first time – a potent symbol of the nation’s attempt at modernity.

  One example of the Russian military’s lack of understanding of the railw
ays’ potential and their missed opportunity to blend the old with the new was the way they failed to combine their awesome Cossack cavalry with transport by train. The Japanese cavalry, which had feeble horses ill-suited to the local environment, was a weak point in their armoury and had the Russians used the Cossacks as shock troops, transporting them by rail to the point of attack, they would have sown terror among the Japanese fighters. As it was, the fact that the Cossacks played little part in the war was a missed opportunity on the part of the Russians. Whereas the Russians viewed their railways in a passive way as merely a support facility and a means of transport, the Japanese recognized their value as a weapon of war: ‘The Japanese saw their railways as an element to be integrated into their overall strategy, using the lines as a support facility, but also integrating them into their broader plan of attack.’ Neither did the Russians understand the lessons learnt in previous wars on the relations between the military and railway managers: ‘lines of communication between Russian officers and railway officials were at all times based on the assumed superiority of the former’.44 As we have seen numerous times, railway managers have to be left to operate the railways to reap the maximum benefit from them.

  Because of its location and timing, the Russo-Japanese War is seen as an obscure conflict whose importance is often underestimated. Yet, in several respects, it was a prelude to the type of conflict which would engulf the world a decade later, as illustrated by the fact that at the battle of Mukden there were 620,000 combatants, probably more than at any previous battle in history. All the paraphernalia of modern warfare was on show: the telephone, the telegraph, the machine gun, barbed wire, torpedoes and, of course, the railways, both large and small. Indeed, if any war showed that the railways completely changed the scale and nature of war, it was the Russo-Japanese War. It was not only made possible by the Trans-Siberian Railway, but, as we have seen, was a direct consequence of its construction. While the soldiers fought on the battlefield, another battle raged behind the scenes to improve railway connections to that distant front in order to mobilize sufficient forces and supplies to overwhelm the other side. It was the railway battle that was won decisively by the Japanese.

  The lessons of the Boer and Russo-Japanese wars on the use of railways in wartime were not directly relevant to the forthcoming conflict that would envelop the whole of Europe because they were fought around single, very lengthy, lines rather than whole networks. Nevertheless, as the next chapter shows, these two wars were important in highlighting the central role of railways in future conflicts, a lesson that became universally understood as thereafter detailed plans for railways were included as a core part of every country’s preparations for war. As the historians of the role of the Russo-Japanese railways conclude, ‘The strategic role of railways on a continental scale would henceforth be seen as crucially important for the transport of war.’45 The First World War, which started less than a decade later, would certainly confirm that.

  SIX

  THE WAR THE WORLD ANTICIPATED

  With hindsight, it is possible to view the period between 1870 and 1914 as one long preparation for a war that everyone saw coming. Of course, it is not that simple. The war might have been averted entirely if the right diplomatic decisions had been taken, or if a less bellicose set of political leaders had been in power. Or, alternatively, another type of war might have occurred with perhaps a different set of alliances and a different outcome had Archduke Ferdinand’s driver not mistakenly gone down the street where the sickly student assassin happened to be waiting.

  However, given the changes in Europe during this period and the tensions surrounding them, a canny futurologist of the late nineteenth century trying to guess when war was most likely would undoubtedly have plumped for the mid-1910s as odds-on favourite. It is, therefore, difficult to resile from the view taken by most historians that the First World War was inevitable. This was a period of rapid economic growth which destabilized the old power balances created by the Congress of Vienna at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Instead of a structure of the five great powers – Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia – with a wide range of interlocking interests, Europe had divided into two blocs – the two Germanic powers and the rest – with several explicit military commitments and alliances. The build-up of Germany’s strength, its ambitions for expansion, the gradual collapse of the old order and the tensions caused by rapid technological developments all increased the likelihood of conflict. French resentment at the loss of Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War and the failure of the Russian ruling class to implement any significant reform of the tsarist absolute monarchy added to the unstable atmosphere throughout Europe. Indeed, the lengthy periods of peace in the nineteenth century, broken since Napoleon’s day by relatively few conflicts – and short ones at that – could be seen as exceptional by historical standards. At the most prosaic level, the timing of the war was just right, too, in another respect. The generals on the European continent were, by then, too young to have fought in the 1870-71 conflict and perhaps harboured romantic views of the nature of battle.

  Apart from these long-standing tensions, the theory that attackers had an inherent advantage over defenders, which as we have seen arose partly as a misinterpretation of the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War, pushed Europe towards war: ‘During the decades before the First World War, a phenomenon which may be called a “cult of the offensive” swept through Europe. Militaries glorified the offensive and adopted offensive military doctrines, while civilian elites and publics assumed that the offense had the advantage in warfare’,1 despite the counter-evidence, since the proponents of this idea ‘largely overlooked the lessons of the American Civil War, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8, the Boer War, and the Russo-Japanese War which had demonstrated the power of the new defensive technologies’.2 And yet every European power adopted a military strategy based on the idea that a ‘quick win’ could be achieved by the attacker and that there were windows of opportunity which had to be grasped to ensure victory with sufficient cran et élan, as the French put it. Nothing characterizes the sheer arrogance of this concept more than the French entering the war with their troops wearing bright blue uniforms with red trousers, an overt invitation to ‘shoot me’.

  The growth of the railways in the thirty years following the Franco-Prussian War further convinced the military leaders that attack was the best means of defence. This was a period of tremendous expansion on the railways, which still remained unchallenged from cars and lorries and yet had to cater for the demands of fast-growing economies. Existing lines were improved and capacity increased, while new ones were built to connect virtually every town and village with the railway network. The track mileage in Europe almost tripled between 1870 and 1914 to 180,000 miles and in the larger countries such as Germany and Russia the increase was proportionately even greater. The improvements in quality, speed and capacity were even more important. According to van Creveld, ‘at the time of the Franco-Prussian War, it was reckoned that a single line could carry eight trains a day, a double one twelve, whereas on the eve of World War 1, the figures were forty and sixty respectively’.3 Dense networks had been built up throughout the Continent, ostensibly for peaceful purposes, but actually the construction of many lines made sense only if their value to the military was taken into account, since commercially, they were basket cases.

  The growth of the railways had gone hand in hand with the huge changes in Europe in the decades after the Franco-Prussian War. The production of raw materials such as coal and pig iron trebled in the three leading powers, Britain, France and Germany, as industrialization swept through the Continent. Their populations also increased rapidly as people became more prosperous and, crucially, hygiene had at last begun to improve, cutting the death rate from infectious diseases, but more ominously the size of the armed forces grew proportionately far faster. France, the second-largest military power in Europe, had roughly 500,000 men available in 1870,
while by 1914 the Army was able to mobilize 4 million, even though the population had risen by only 10 per cent. This increase in scale of the armies made it inevitable that the military would take a far greater interest in the main way of transporting them, the railways. Therefore, this rise in army personnel was more than matched by an increase in their complements of railway experts and during this period all the major powers developed burgeoning specialist railway sections of their armies to operate, maintain and even build railways in wartime.

  Periodic scare stories in newspapers and powerful jingoistic movements in several European countries added to an air of inevitability about the prospect of war. The Franco-Prussian War was seen as unfinished business on both sides. The French wanted Alsace-Lorraine back, while the Germans felt that even their triumphal march on the Champs-Elysées in 1871 was not enough to assert their permanent superiority over their western neighbour. In German eyes the bloody French remained respected in the arts and culture, their language was widely used in diplomatic circles and their economy was still buoyant. As an example of Germany’s permanently bellicose attitude towards its neighbour, an official by the name of Steiber dreamt up a plan to place spies in key positions at junctions and strategic stations in the French railway workforce so that they could carry out sabotage missions in the event of the outbreak of war. The plan, conceived in 1880, was implemented with the approval of Bismarck but was discovered by the French three years later and 182 Germans were hastily repatriated.