On 9 August, Admiral Wilgelm Vitgeft, commander of the 1st Pacific Squadron, was ordered to sortie his fleet to Vladivostok, link up with the Squadron stationed there, and then engage the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) in a decisive battle. His successors failed to challenge the Japanese Navy, and the remaining six Russian battleships and five armoured cruisers were effectively bottled up in their base at Port Arthur.īy May, the Japanese had landed forces on the Liaodong Peninsula and in August began the siege of the naval station. The Russians were revitalised by the arrival of Admiral Stepan Makarov and were able to achieve some degree of success against the Japanese, but on 13 April Makarov's flagship, the battleship Petropavlovsk, struck a mine and sank Makarov was among the dead. At first, the Russian naval forces remained inactive and did not engage the Japanese, who staged unopposed landings in Korea. To achieve this, it was necessary to neutralize Russian naval power in the Far East. Japan's first objective was to secure its lines of communication and supply to the Asian mainland, enabling it to conduct a ground war in Manchuria. On 8 February 1904, destroyers of the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a surprise attack on the Russian Far East Fleet anchored in Port Arthur three ships – two battleships and a cruiser – were damaged in the attack. His flagship Mikasa has been preserved as a museum ship in Yokosuka Harbour.īackground Conflict in the Far East In Japan, the battle was hailed as one of the greatest naval victories in Japanese history, and Admiral Tōgō was revered as a national hero. The loss of almost every heavy warship of the Baltic Fleet forced Russia to sue for peace, and the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed in September 1905. The Japanese, which had lost no heavy ships, had 117 dead. Russian casualties were high, with more than 5,000 dead and 6,000 captured. Eight auxiliaries and one destroyer were disarmed and remanded at Shanghai by China. Three cruisers were interned at Manila by the United States until the war was over. Only a few warships escaped, with one cruiser and two destroyers reaching Vladivostok, and two auxiliary cruisers as well as one transport escaping back to Madagascar. At night, Japanese destroyers and torpedo boats attacked the remaining ships, and Admiral Nikolai Nebogatov surrendered in the morning of 28 May.Īll 11 Russian battleships were lost, out of which seven were sunk and four captured. Rozhestvensky was wounded and knocked unconscious in the initial action, and four of his battleships were sunk by sunset. The Russians were sighted in the early morning on 27 May, and the battle began in the afternoon. The Russian fleet had a large advantage in the number of battleships, but was overall older and slower than the Japanese fleet. The Russians hoped to reach Vladivostok and establish naval control of the Far East in order to relieve the Imperial Russian Army in Manchuria. The battle involved the Japanese Combined Fleet under Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō and the Russian Second Pacific Squadron under Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky, which had sailed over seven months and 18,000 nautical miles (33,000 km) from the Baltic Sea. The battle was described by Sir George Clarke as "by far the greatest and the most important naval event since Trafalgar". A devastating defeat for the Imperial Russian Navy, the battle was the only decisive engagement ever fought between modern steel battleship fleets and the first in which wireless telegraphy (radio) played a critically important role. The Battle of Tsushima ( Russian: Цусимское сражение, Tsusimskoye srazheniye), also known in Japan as the Battle of the Sea of Japan ( Japanese: 日本海海戦, Hepburn: Nihonkai kaisen), was the final naval battle of the Russo-Japanese War, fought on 27– in the Tsushima Strait.
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