What Was the Battle of Tsushima?
On the morning of 27 May 1905 (14 May old style), the Russian Second Pacific Squadron sailed into the Tsushima Strait expecting to steam on to Vladivostok. By nightfall, the bulk of it was at the bottom of the sea. Of 38 Russian ships, 21 were sunk, captured, or driven ashore; more than 4,000 Russian sailors were killed and another 5,000 captured. Three Japanese torpedo boats were sunk; about 117 Japanese sailors were killed. It was the decisive engagement of the Russo-Japanese War, and one of the most lopsided fleet actions in the age of steam.
The battle was also a defining political event. Within days, the autocratic government’s refusal to admit the scale of the defeat had been exposed in the Russian press, and the discrediting of the navy became one of the sparks of the 1905 Revolution. Roosevelt’s mediation, which produced the Treaty of Portsmouth in September 1905, was the direct result.
How the Second Pacific Squadron came to be in the Tsushima Strait
When the war with Japan opened in February 1904, the Russian Pacific Squadron was at Port Arthur, on the coast of Manchuria. Within months it had been destroyed in place: two of its best battleships had been blown up, others had been scuttled as blockships when Port Arthur fell in January 1905, and the surviving ships had been interned in neutral ports. The only fleet Russia could send was one based on the Baltic, sailing halfway around the world.
The Second Pacific Squadron, as it was redesignated, sailed from Liepāja in October 1904 under Vice Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky. It was built around eight battleships of the Suvorov and Borodino classes, but only three of those were new; the other five were elderly units of the Oslyabya class, with thin armour and slow machinery. The voyage took seven months, around the Cape of Good Hope, with stops for coaling at Dakar, Madagascar, and Cam Ranh Bay. It was the longest continuous movement of a fleet in history to that point, and it was a logistical nightmare. The Dogger Bank incident of October 1904, in which the Russian fleet mistakenly opened fire on British trawlers in the North Sea, briefly threatened to bring Britain into the war against Russia.
By the time the squadron reached the Tsushima Strait, the crews were exhausted, the coal supply was barely adequate, and the ships had developed serious mechanical problems. Rozhestvensky was convinced that the only way to reach Vladivostok was to break past the Japanese fleet.
The battle
Admiral Togo Heihachiro had been waiting. He had four modern battleships, the Mikasa class, and a screen of armoured cruisers, with the speed and the training to choose the range. He sighted the Russian column at about 13:40 on 27 May and closed at once.
The first hours were decisive. The Russian flagship Knyaz Suvorov was crippled by concentrated Japanese fire and forced out of the line; Rozhestvensky was severely wounded and command passed to Rear Admiral Nebogatov. The Oslyabya was sunk in the early afternoon — the first fleet engagement in which a battleship was sent to the bottom by gunfire alone. By sunset, half the Russian battleships were out of action.
The second day, 28 May, was a mopping-up operation. The surviving Russian ships tried to escape north to Vladivostok, but Togo’s cruisers and destroyers caught them in detail. Five more ships were sunk during the day, and on 28 May Rear Admiral Nebogatov surrendered with the remaining six battleships and a few auxiliaries. A handful of smaller Russian vessels escaped to neutral ports; the destroyer Bedovy and a few auxiliaries reached Vladivostok.
Why it mattered
Tsushima was a political earthquake. The Russian public had been told that the fleet was fighting its way to Vladivostok, and the news of the destruction arrived in a country already seething with the grievances of the 1905 Revolution. The Saint Petersburg Soviet of 1905 had already been formed when the news came in May, and the slogan “the autocracy is at war with the people” was not a metaphor.
Militarily, the battle was a vindication of three doctrines that the Russian Navy had not adopted: the all-big-gun battleship, the concentrated fleet action, and rigorous gunnery training. Togo’s fleet was the heir of Admiral John Fisher’s thinking about the battleship fleet; the Russian Navy had built bigger-looking ships but with mixed batteries, thin armour, and a doctrinal commitment to ramming and torpedo attack that the Japanese did not share. The British navalist and strategist were quick to draw the lesson; the German Naval Staff was watching; and the United States Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, used Tsushima as a teaching case in the decade that followed.
What happened next
Roosevelt’s mediation at Portsmouth, which produced the treaty of 5 September 1905, was a direct consequence of the battle. The Russian government could not afford to continue the war, and the Japanese government, having overstretched its finances, could not afford to keep fighting. The treaty recognised Japan’s predominance in Korea, transferred the southern half of Sakhalin to Japan, and left Manchuria nominally Chinese but in practice a Japanese sphere of influence. Russia was not required to pay an indemnity, a fact that was widely resented in Japan and that contributed to the assassination of the Japanese plenipotentiary at the port of Simonoseki shortly after the treaty was signed.
In Russia, the navy undertook an important reform under the leadership of Admiral Ivan Grigorovich, who became minister of the navy in 1908 and rebuilt the fleet around modern destroyers and submarines. By 1914, the Baltic Fleet was a credible force again, and the Black Sea Fleet was able to play a significant role in the early phase of the First World War. None of this rebuilt Russian naval power in the Pacific, and the Pacific Ocean remained effectively a Japanese lake until 1945.