Official History of the Russo-Japanese War: Part 5: Sha-Ho

The fifth and final volume in this Official History covers the Battle of Sha-Ho - this was the second and last large-scale land battle of 1904, fought along a 37-mile front centred at the Sha-ho River along the Mukden-Port Arthur spur of the China Far East Railway north of Liaoyang, Manchuria.

This was war being observed by every military establishment and news agency in the world. The level of interest in the Russo-Japanese War rested on two facts: First, the idea of a small and rising Asian power engaging in a conflict with an established and huge European colonial power captured the imaginations of everyone. The other substantial issue was the use of weapons that were the product of a century of industrial development. The conclusions of pre-World War I studies revealed that the battlefield had become intensely lethal, for which the belligerents were not well prepared in any aspect. Moreover, the defeat of Imperial Russia infused a level of hope and energy to struggle for liberation into the people of colour throughout the colonial world.

Because of the far-reaching global implications of the war, factors ranging from international political, financial and military relationships to the scale of the battlefield(s), to the size of armies and duration of battles, recent times have seen a resurgence in this conflict that was once rendered to the dustbin of history by World War I.