General Sir Ian Hamilton’s Staff Officer’s Scrap-Book during the Russo–Japanese War 1904–1

As Hamilton was the military attaché of the British Indian Army serving with the Japanese army in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, he was well placed to publish in 1907 this impressive eye witness account to a military confrontation between a well-known European army and a less-familiar Asian army. Good maps (many in colour), a full index and 600+ pages make this facsimile two-volume set a fine reference for the modern scholar, of a war that is still the classic example of a conflict waged for purely imperialistic motives, a rivalry for the control of Korea and Manchuria and indeed for the mastery of the Far East and China.

Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 had profound effects. Domestically, it accelerated revolutionary discontent in Russia and enhanced Japan’s national image as a modern state. Internationally, it shattered long-standing beliefs in European military dominance; it also marked a significant step on the road to the First World War. For these reasons and others, the war has attracted considerable attention from historians.

The Russo-Japanese War was the first time that the tactics of entrenched positions for infantry were defended with machine guns and artillery. This was the first twentieth-century war in which the technology of warfare became increasingly important, factors which came to dominate the evolution of warfare during the First World War. Hamilton wrote that cavalry was obsolete in such a conflict, regarding their role as better accomplished by mounted infantry. He became a supporter of non-traditional tactics such as night attacks and the use of aircraft. Conversely, the successful Japanese infantry assaults convinced him that superior morale would allow an attacker to overcome prepared defensive positions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hamilton’s career in the British army is forever remembered with the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign. In March 1915, Lord Kitchener appointed Hamilton, aged 62, to the command of the Allied Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, with orders to gain control of the Dardanelles straits from the Ottoman Empire and to capture Constantinople. Whilst a senior and respected officer, perhaps more experienced in different campaigns than most, Hamilton was considered too unconventional, too intellectual and too friendly with politicians to be given a command on the Western Front. With the Gallipoli Campaign stalled, Hamilton was recalled to London on 16 October 1915, effectively ending his military career. After Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, Hamilton described himself as “an admirer of the great Adolf Hitler” and dismissed ‘Mein Kampf’ as a “youthful excess”