The Russian Empire
Question & Answer

What Was the Russian Navy’s Role in the Russo-Japanese War?

At 23:30 on 8 February 1904 (27 January O.S.), ten Japanese destroyers, under the command of Rear-Admiral Sam Hakurō, left the harbour of Takeshiba in Tokyo Bay, ran out through the fog past the Russian lookouts, and fired sixteen 18-inch Whitehead torpedoes at the Russian First Pacific Squadron under Vice-Admiral Oskar Stark. Two Russian battleships, the Retvizan and the Tsesarevich, and the protected cruiser Pallada were torpedoed. The Tsesarevich’s propellers were jammed. Within a single night, the Pacific Fleet was reduced from a going concern to a collection of docked hulls. The war had begun (Westwood, Russia against Japan, 1904–05, 1986; Mahan, Retrospect and Prospect, 1902).

The 1904 fleets

The Russian Navy, on 1 January 1904, was the third largest in the world. The principal units were:

  • The First Pacific Squadron (Rear Admiral Starck) — 7 battleships, 7 cruisers, 16 destroyers, 12 torpedo boats, at Port Arthur;
  • The Vladivostok Squadron (Rear Admiral Jessen) — 1 armoured cruiser, 3 protected cruisers, 3 destroyers;
  • The Black Sea Fleet (Vice-Admiral Chukhnin) — 6 battleships, 5 cruisers, 4 destroyers, locked in the Black Sea by the Straits Convention;
  • The Baltic Fleet (Vice-Admiral Birilev, then Rozhestvensky) — 8 battleships, 4 cruisers, 12 destroyers, at Kronstadt and Libau.

The Japanese Combined Fleet had 6 battleships (4 of them pre-dreadnoughts) and 18 cruisers under Admiral Togo Heihachirō. Russian fire-control was not inferior in design but was poorly trained (Westwood, 1986; Corbett, Maritime Operations in the Russo-Japanese War, 1994).

The Dogger Bank affair

The Second Pacific Squadron — 8 battleships, 3 coastal-defence ironclads, 9 cruisers, 8 destroyers, and 4 auxiliary cruisers — sailed from Kronstadt on 15 October 1904 under Vice-Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky. On the night of 22 October 1904, off the Dogger Bank in the North Sea, the Zemchug and Aurora mistook a flotilla of Hull trawlers for Japanese torpedo boats and opened fire. The Hull steam drifter Crane was sunk; the master, Captain William Henry Smith, and the boatswain, Charles Smythe, were killed; the Russian destroyer Boumlenny and the cruiser Aurora were hit. The incident brought Britain to the brink of war; the Concert of Europe forced Russia to accept an international inquiry, the Dogger Bank Commission, in Paris. The protocol of 27 November 1904 forced Russia to inspect and lay up the offending vessels, pay the British trawler owners £65,000 in compensation, and salute the British flag (Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War, 1996; Plowman, The Elephant and the Dragon, 2007).

The fall of Port Arthur

The Japanese Third Army, under General Nogi Maresuke, landed on the Liaodong Peninsula in early June 1904, captured the Nanshan ridge on 26 May 1904, and laid siege to the fortress-port of Port Arthur. The siege ran from 1 August 1904 to 2 January 1905, in five Russian lines, and cost the Japanese 33,000 dead and 130,000 wounded. The Russian garrison of 41,000 surrendered on 2 January 1905; 27,000 of them were killed, wounded, or had died of disease. The Russian Pacific Fleet had been scuttled in the inner harbour on 5 December 1904 — the Retvizan, the Pobeda, the Pallada, the Peresvet, the Oslyabya, the Novik, the Boik, and 14 torpedo boats. The Japanese raised five of the wrecks and refitted three of them (Stein, Pursuit of the Fleet, 1995).

Tsushima

The Second Pacific Squadron arrived in the Tsushima Strait on 27 May 1905 (14 May O.S.). Admiral Togo, in the modernised battleship Mikasa, deployed to T-shaped crossing position. By 18:00 on 27 May, the battleships Oslyabya (sunk), Knyaz Suvorov (sunk), Imperator Aleksandr III (sunk), and Borodino (sunk) were on the bottom. The flagship Suvorov was hit forty times before she foundered. The next day, the Admiral Nakhimov, the Sissoi Veliky, the Navarin, and the Admiral Ushakov were sunk. The total Russian losses at Tsushima were 21 ships, 4,380 dead, 5,917 captured, and 1,862 interned at Manila. The Japanese lost three torpedo boats and 117 men (Westwood, 1986; Mahan, Retrospect, 1902; Figes, The Crimean War, 2010).

The consequences

Tsushima was the first major fleet action in which steel battleships fought steel battleships, with the result that 21 of 28 Russian capital ships were sent to the bottom. The next major fleet action would be Jutland, eleven years later. The lessons of Tsushima — the importance of the fire-control and the predreadnought model, the inutility of the battery of light guns, the requirement of Dreyer tables and the Barr-and-Stroud rangefinder — were studied in every naval academy in Europe. The German, the British, and the American battle plans of 1906–1914 were all written, in part, with Tsushima in mind. The Russian Navy, after 1905, was rebuilt by 1914 — the Sevastopol-class and Imperatritsa Mariya-class dreadnoughts were the first Russian battleships of the all-big-gun age — but the political effect of the 1905 disaster on the Romanov regime was lasting (Stein, 1995; Stevenson, 1996; Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1990).