Result of War affected by Soldier's Stature

Abstract

THE Japanese had an unquestionable advantage in the recent war as being smaller than the Russians; they were smaller targets for fire-arms. I wish to point out that it is possible to express this advantage quantitatively on the assumption, justifiable in modern war, that bullets are, on the average, uniformly distributed over the target presented by a man's body, also that a man presents a target proportional in area to the square of his height. The Anthropological Institute has kindly given me figures for the purpose; the average height of 2500 Japanese, 1260 of them being soldiers, was 1585 millimetres as compared with an average of 1642 millimetres for the average of 177,948 European Russian conscripts. The average Russian height thus exceeds that of the Japanese by about 3.47 per cent. The squares of the two average heights, representing, as I have said, the average targets offered by each to an enemy, differ therefore approximately by 7 per cent., so that the Russian fire was relatively ineffective to that extent.