Railways and the Russo-Japanese War: Transporting War (review)

The centenary of the Russo-Japanese War unleashed a flood of publications. John W. Steinberg and others edited two massive volumes, each entitled The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective. World War Zero (Leiden, 2005-07), while Rotem Kowner produced two similarly large, edited collections, Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5 (Folkestone, 2007) and The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War (New York, 2007). In these four volumes alone, well over one hundred scholars have explored new avenues regarding the war as well as provided re-evaluations of previously considered aspects of the struggle. Surprisingly, given the centrality of the railways for the Russo-Japanese conflict, only one article in the foregoing collections, that of Steven Ericson, concentrated on rail transport, and his work was focused on the Japanese use of railways rather than on the Russian. The omission of any consideration of how railways affected the Russian side of the war is shared in a recent study of the impact of railways on international relations, Railways and International Politics (London and New York, 2006) edited by T.G. Otte and the reviewer.

Thus, Railways and the Russo-Japanese War had an opportunity to fill an important gap in the study of what many have come to consider the first modern war. Unfortunately, this slim (there are only 129 pages of text) book fails to provide any particular insights into this important aspect of the war. The book is based on secondary literature and fails to rise much above the level of a broad survey that would be appropriate for a lecture given to a general audience, but not to scholars. Indeed, it is difficult to know just what this book intends to do. It is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter is a potted history of Russian expansion into the Far East; the second is a look at how railways in general affected the development of China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The third chapter (seven pages) deals specifically with the Russian construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway, a line that was to be central for the Russo-Japanese War itself. It is not until chapter four (page 50) that we are introduced to the war itself. And, here, one of the major weaknesses of the book emerges. Of the thirty-one footnotes underpinning the chapter, twenty-three of them refer to Cassell's History of the Russo-Japanese War, a five-volume work produced in 1904-05 to keep the British public abreast of the events in Manchuria. This dependence on the same dated single source is repeated in chapter six, 'The railway and hostilities', in which the putative topic of the book is at last discussed, although we are given very little information about how the railways actually affected military affairs in terms of the amounts of men and material actually sent to Manchuria and the impact that this had on the battles themselves. No reference is made to the important work of such scholars as Bruce Menning and Peter Gatrell, whose works are central for an understanding, respectively, of Russian military efforts in the period and Russian military industrialization

The two other chapters, five and seven, fit uneasily into the book. The first attempts to show the significance of the Russo-Japanese War both for international politics and for the position of Japan in the modern world. Both of these topics have been done much better – and in a more sophisticated fashion – by a number of authors such as Thomas Otte and Ian Nish. Chapter seven discusses the impact of the war on Russian national consciousness, especially popular songs, a topic that in itself is of interest (although done much better in the works referred to above), but scarcely of importance in a book that claims to deal with the impact of railways on the war. And, with regard to Russian national consciousness and the war, the authors would have...