Sarah Paine

At this moment, the Russian army was three times the size of the Japanese army.

And that army in theater was increasingly comprised of crack soldiers, not the kind of colonial kind of soldiers they'd started out with.

And so

Here's the field marshal, Yamagata, who in the first Sino-Japanese War, because the government in Tokyo was afraid he was going to march on Beijing and do regime change, they pulled him out of theater and gave him a sinecure to make sure he didn't do that.

This time, he's a wiser man.

He goes, we must now be prudent.

And here are other members of this brilliant Meiji generation, the chief of staff of the Manchurian army.

He said, look, if you start a fire, you've got to put it out.

And here is the field marshal Oyama, who is the commander of Manchurian forces.

But before he sets out to take command, he tells the Navy minister, I will care for fighting in Manchuria, but I'm counting you as the man to tell me when to quit.

So the Navy is going to be the fire department, apparently.

To tell you what the Navy was up to, they took Elliott Island to turn it into a cruiser base, and that's how they're running the blockade operations on Port Arthur of keeping the Russian fleet in until they can eventually sink it there.

In addition, the Imperial Japanese Navy is busy laying mines.

A lot of ships go down to mines.

So...

This is an interesting story.

So Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, doesn't much like it that his fleet is just sitting in port, not doing anything.

And so he sends Admiral Makarov out there to assume command.

And I've had the misfortune to read Makarov's major literary contribution, which is all about naval strategy.

And he's a real hero in Russia.