Everyone knows that wars are supposed to teach us lessons, and that only a careful study of the last war allows armies to prepare for the next one. Consider our standard narrative of the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War: It featured trenches and barbed wire, rapid-fire artillery and machine guns, and hundreds of thousands of casualties. European generals did not seem to learn much from it, however. Just 10 years later they led armies into World War I, and in many ways that conflict looked like a replay: the trenches and wire, the pounding artillery, machine guns chattering away and soldiers being sent to their deaths wholesale in senseless infantry assaults.
An open and shut case of military ignorance?
Hardly.
The notion that the generals of World War I failed to note the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War is laughable. Every single Great Power—including the United States—sent observers to the earlier conflict, and staff officers pored over their reports in excruciating detail. The intensive firepower, the strength of the defense, the monstrous casualties—the Great Powers knew all about these things. Indeed, the lessons they learned from "World War Zero" guided the fighting in World War I.
If you were handicapping a war between the Russian and Japanese empires in 1904, you probably would have picked the Russians to win. Russia held all the strategic advantages: three times the population (130 million to 47 million), five times the trained military manpower and virtually unlimited resources. Just as important to the contemporary world, the Russians (most of them, anyway) were white Europeans, and in the heyday of Western imperialism it seemed inconceivable for an Asian people to beat them in a war. When conflict did erupt, the smart money was on Russia—literally. Japan needed foreign loans to fight the war but found that international money markets were closed to them. No one in Europe was eager to loan money for a quixotic and probably doomed military adventure.
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