Battle of Tsushima in the context of "Torpedo boat"

Isoroku Yamamoto (山本 五十六, Yamamoto Isoroku; April 4, 1884 – April 18, 1943) was an admiral of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) and the commander of the Combined Fleet during World War II. He commanded the fleet from 1939 until his death in 1943, overseeing the start of the Pacific War in 1941 and Japan's initial successes and defeats before his plane was shot down by U.S. fighter aircraft over New Guinea.

Yamamoto graduated from the Imperial Naval Academy in 1904 and served in the Russo-Japanese War, where he lost two fingers at the Battle of Tsushima. He later studied at Harvard University in the United States and was appointed naval attaché to the Japanese embassy in Washington. His experiences convinced him that naval power depended on access to oil and industrial capacity, and that Japan thus had little hope to defeat the U.S. in a war. He was one of the first naval leaders to conclude that naval aviation and aircraft carriers would play a decisive role in any future conflict.

The Battle of Mukden (奉天会戦, Hōten kaisen), one of the largest land battles to be fought before World War I and the last and the most decisive major land battle of the Russo-Japanese War, was fought from 20 February to 10 March 1905 between Japan and Russia near Mukden in Manchuria. The city is now called Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning province in China.

Involving 610,000 combat participants and 164,000 combatant casualties, it was the largest modern-era battle fought prior to World War I, and possibly the largest battle in world history at that point. The scale of the battle, particularly in the amount of ordnance being expended, was unprecedented in world history. The Japanese side alone fired 20.11 million rifle and machine gun rounds and 279,394 artillery shells in just over ten days of fighting (yet the Russians still fired more), matching the ammunition consumption of the German army in the entire 191-day Franco-Prussian War and more than the British had fired during the entire Second Boer War. The battle was a decisive strategic victory for the Japanese and, coupled with their victory at the Battle of Tsushima four months later, proved critical in ending the war in their favour.

The 1900s (pronounced "nineteen-hundreds") was the decade that began on January 1, 1900, and ended on December 31, 1909. The Edwardian era (1901–1910) covers a similar span of time. The term "nineteen-hundreds" is sometimes also used to mean the entire century from January 1, 1900, to December 31, 1999 (the years beginning with "19").

The Scramble for Africa continued, with the Orange Free State, South African Republic, Ashanti Empire, Aro Confederacy, Sokoto Caliphate and Kano Emirate being conquered by the British Empire, alongside the French Empire conquering Borno, the German Empire conquering the Adamawa Emirate, and the Portuguese Empire conquering the Ovambo. Atrocities in the Congo Free State were committed by private companies and the Force Publique, with a resultant population decline of 1 to 15 million. From 1904 to 1908, German colonial forces in South West Africa led a campaign of ethnic extermination and collective punishment, killing 24,000 to 100,000 Hereros and 10,000 Nama. The First Moroccan and Bosnian crises led to worsened tensions in Europe that would ultimately lead to World War I in the next decade. Cuba, Bulgaria, and Norway became independent.