Good morning.
Wednesday brings a day of gradual clearing, a high of twenty-one, and a wind chill between zero and ten. There will be 9h 7m of sunlight, 10h 11m of daylight, with a waning gibbous moon.
On this day in 1905, the Russian surrender to the Japanese at Port Arthur was the first of a string of Japanese victories in the war between those two nations:
During the Russo-Japanese War, Port Arthur, the Russian naval base in China, falls to Japanese naval forces under Admiral Heihachiro Togo. It was the first in a series of defeats that by June turned the tide of the imperial conflict irrevocably against Russia.
In February 1904, following a Russian rejection of a Japanese plan to divide Manchuria and Korea into spheres of influence, Japan launched a surprise naval attack on Port Arthur, decimating the Russian fleet. In the subsequent fighting, Japan won a series of decisive victories over the Russians, who underestimated the military potential of its non-Western opponent.
In January 1905, the strategic naval base of Port Arthur fell to the Japanese; in March, Russian troops were defeated at Shenyang, China, by Japanese Field Marshal Iwao Oyama; and in May, the Russian Baltic fleet under Admiral Zinovi Rozhdestvenski was destroyed by Admiral Togo’s fleet near the Tsushima Islands. These three crucial defeats convinced Russia that further resistance against Japan’s imperial designs on East Asia was hopeless, and in August 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt mediated a peace treaty at Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Japan emerged from the conflict as the first modern non-Western world power and set its sights on greater imperial expansion. For Russia, however, the disastrous performance in the war was one of the immediate causes of the Russian Revolution of 1905.
Pres. Roosevelt, by the way, received the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for his role as mediator.
On 1.2.1918, Wisconsinites left for war in Europe:
1918 – Wisconsin Troops Depart for Europe
On this date the Wisconsin 127th and 128th Infantries departed for France from their training facility at Camp Arthur in Waco, Texas. Initially, these divisions were assigned to construct depots and facilities for troops that would follow. On May 18, they were assigned to the frontline at Belmont in the Alsace where they faced three German divisions. In the following months, 368 troops were killed, wounded or missing. Ironically, their enemy, native Alsatians, spoke German and the Wisconsin troops were better able to communicate with them than their French allies.
Google-a-Day asks a history question: “At what school did the man who was the great grandson of one president and the grandson of another president become a history professor in the 1870’s?”