Port Arthur Surrenders: Japan Rises, Russia Falls

Port Arthur held out for 154 days under conditions that foreshadowed the trench warfare of World War I a decade later. When the Russian garrison finally surrendered on January 2, 1905, roughly 15,000 soldiers remained from an original force of over 40,000. The Japanese besiegers had thrown 130,000 troops at the fortress and lost more than 57,000, making it one of the bloodiest sieges in modern military history. The Russo-Japanese War had erupted in February 1904 over competing imperial ambitions in Manchuria and Korea. Port Arthur, a warm-water port at the tip of China''s Liaodong Peninsula, was Russia''s most strategic naval base in the Pacific. Japan launched a surprise torpedo attack on the Russian fleet anchored in the harbor, then settled in for a siege that would test every assumption about modern warfare. General Nogi Maresuke''s Japanese forces assaulted the hilltop fortifications repeatedly, suffering catastrophic losses at 203 Meter Hill, where bodies piled so thick that attacking soldiers used corpses as cover. Nogi lost both of his sons in the fighting. The hill changed hands multiple times before Japanese artillery finally gained the high ground, allowing observers to direct fire onto the Russian fleet in the harbor below. Ship after ship was sunk at anchor. General Anatoly Stoessel surrendered against the wishes of his own war council. Several Russian officers believed the garrison could hold longer. The fall of Port Arthur sent shockwaves through every European capital. An Asian nation had defeated a European empire in a modern industrial siege, the first time that had happened in the era of mechanized warfare. Russia''s Baltic Fleet, already sailing halfway around the world to relieve Port Arthur, arrived months later only to be annihilated at the Battle of Tsushima. The combined humiliations helped trigger the 1905 Russian Revolution.