Bias, Rejection of Military History Stunts Growth

In 1904, war broke out between Tsarist Russia and Imperial Japan; Western nations sent observers to the seat of war to observe the effect of modern technology on the character of warfare. The British Indian Army’s lead observer was Lieutenant General Sir Ian Hamilton, an infantryman and veteran of several significant colonial wars, including the First and Second Boer Wars, and who would later command the forces of the British Empire at Gallipoli during World War I. Attached to the Imperial Japanese Army advancing from the Korean peninsula northward, Hamilton observed a succession of battles in which the modern, disciplined, and well-led Japanese forces defeated the poorly commanded Russian field army. Russian forces, using equipment, methods, and tactics largely unchanged since the Crimean War of half a century earlier, were simply outclassed by the Japanese. Incompetent Russian generalship flattered the attacking Japanese army, which nevertheless suffered grievous casualties and was often unable to exploit success as a result. The lesson Hamilton reported back to the British Indian Army was that, even on the early-twentieth-century battlefield, disciplined and determined infantry would always carry the day—even against entrenched positions. If Hamilton had been present at the Japanese army’s attempts to force its way through the modern defences of Port Arthur, far to the south, he would have seen a very different picture: piles of Japanese infantry hanging on barbed wire, stopped in their tracks by machine guns and artillery fire. Inevitably perhaps, Hamilton, a former commandant of the British Army’s School of Musketry, formed an analysis based on unconscious bias.