old rival, Russia, embroiled in a war in the Far East, and the alliance set the stage for war by giving Japan a free hand to fight Russia alone.
The Japanese, choosing their time in February 1904, set a new pattern for modern warfare by first crippling Russian naval strength in the Far East, and then declaring war. Russia was far stronger than Japan, but suffered the disadvantage of having to fight the war at the end of a single-track railway several thousand miles long. Her military operations were further hampered by revolutionary movements at home. The Japanese were consistently victorious, bottling up the Russians in the Liaotung Peninsula ports, which fell after costly assaults, and driving their other armies northward through Manchuria. Russia sent her European fleet from the Baltic Sea to the Far East, but the entire Japanese navy fell upon it in the straits between Japan and Korea and annihilated it. Although Russia was being soundly trounced, Japan was so exhausted that she welcomed the peace arranged in 1903 by President Theodore Roosevelt, who greatly admired Japanese efficiency and pluck.
In the peace treaty, Russia acknowledged Japan’s paramount interests in Korea, transferred to Japan her lease of the Liaotung Peninsula and the railways she had built in Southern Manchuria, and ceded the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, north of Hokkaido. Japan, the military ally of Great Britain, the victor over Russia, and the possessor of expanding colonial domains, had become a true world power.
Relieved of Chinese and Russian competition in Korea, Japan quietly annexed the whole of Korea in