RUSSO JAPANESE WAR UNIFORMS SERIES

Shortly afterward, advance units of the 5th Division departed for China, bringing Japanese strength to 3,800 personnel of the 17,000-man allied force. On July 8, the British ambassador to Japan offered Aoki one million British pounds in exchange for more reinforcements. As mentioned, the British army was tied down in South Africa, and it would take too much time and weaken internal security to deploy large forces from its India garrisons.

More ground troops were urgently needed to lift the Boxer siege of the foreign legations at Peking, and the Japanese had the only readily available forces in the region. The cabinet alerted the 5th Division on July 6 for China duty but set no timetable for its deployment.

Prime Minister Yamagata thought likewise, but others in the cabinet demanded guarantees from the westerners in return for the risks and cost of reinforcements. Overriding personal doubts about supporting what many Japanese thought amounted to a religious crusade by the western powers against the Chinese, Foreign Minister Aoki ShЕ«zЕЌ calculated that the advantages of participating in an allied coalition were too attractive to ignore. The dangerous circumstances compelled the British, then heavily engaged in the Boer War, to ask Japan for additional reinforcements. FukushimaвЂ™s detachment landed on July 5 near Tianjin.Дuring the interval, a few hundred naval infantry from the Sasebo Special Landing Force had joined British, Russian, and German troops to seize the Dagu forts near Tianjin on June 17, but four days later the Qing court declared war on the foreign powers. Fukushima Yasumasa, director of the second (intelligence) department, chosen because his fluent English enabled him to communicate with the British commander. Three days later the general staff did dispatch a 1,300-man provisional force to north China commanded by Maj. The road-bound and badly outnumbered allies withdrew to the vicinity of Tianjin, having suffered more than 300 casualties.ДЄware of the worsening conditions, the general staff in Tokyo drafted ambitious contingency plans, but the cabinet, with fresh and bitter memories of the Tripartite Intervention, refused to deploy large forces unless requested by the western powers. On June 12, mixed Boxer and Qing army forces halted the advance by destroying a bridge about 30 miles from the capital. The Japanese army would use the occasion to showcase its latest military reforms.ДЄ small, hurriedly assembled allied expeditionary force under British command of about 2,000 troops, including approximately 300 Japanese, marched from Tianjin for Peking in early June. The murder of the German ambassador to China and the subsequent Boxer siege of the foreign legation quarter at Peking caused the western powers (Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United States) as well as Japan to send troops to north China to rescue the diplomatic missions, protect western missionaries, and punish the Boxers.

RUSSO JAPANESE WAR UNIFORMS SERIES

Popular Chinese resentment over thirty years of foreign humiliation boiled over in 1900 as a series of violent attacks against foreigners led by the Boxers, a secret society that enjoyed covert backing from the Qing court, tapped widespread local support with its antiforeign and anti-Christian rhetoric. France carved out a sphere of influence in southern China, and Japan sought railroad concessions in Fujian opposite its Taiwan colony. Great Britain reacted by extracting concessions in April for a naval base at Weihaiwei. Two months later Russia negotiated a long-term agreement with the Chinese court for a leasehold on the Liaodong Peninsula between Dairen and Port Arthur (where Russian warships had been anchored since the previous December). In January 1898 Germany secured a ninety-nine-year lease on the Shandong Peninsula as a settlement for the murder of two German missionaries. JapanвЂ™s victory had exposed ChinaвЂ™s military weakness, which the western powers were quick to exploit, placing the empire in danger of dismemberment.

To many informed observers the advent of the new twentieth century heralded the demise of the old China.

Russo japanese war uniforms