The Long Way to Tsushima

The squadron sailed from Libau (Liepāja) on 15 October 1904 under Vice-Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky. Russia was at war with Japan, and it was sending its Baltic Fleet, renamed the Second Pacific Squadron, to the far side of the world: seven battleships, four of them new ships of the Borodino class, with cruisers, torpedo boats and supply ships. It had no bases on the way and too few colliers of its own.

The fleet expected trouble before it had left European waters. Rozhestvensky looked for a torpedo attack, and on the evening of 21 October the transport Kamchatka, lagging ten miles behind with engine trouble, fired on a Swedish steamer and wirelessed that she was "attacked on all sides by torpedo boats". He ordered his ships to keep watch through the night.

Toward one in the morning of 22 October the last division, led by the flagship Knyaz Suvorov, came upon the Hull trawler fleet working the fishing grounds of the Dogger Bank with its lights burning: some forty steam trawlers and two mission hospital ships, about four hundred men. Lookouts saw an unlit vessel, the admiral ordered fire, and for ten or twelve minutes the battleships shot at the trawlers and at shadows. The trawler Crane sank and her skipper and third hand were killed; six fishermen were wounded and five more trawlers were hit. In the confusion the Russians also fired on their own cruiser Aurora, whose chaplain later died of his wounds. Then the squadron steamed on to the south-west without stopping.

In Britain the news caused fury. The Daily Mail ran the headline "Ultimatum to Russia Expires This Afternoon", the Morning Post called the admiral's explanation "that of a lunatic", and Lord Rosebery spoke of "an unspeakable outrage". For several days, as the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica put it, there was "an acute crisis in the relations between Russia and England", and British cruisers shadowed the squadron down the coast of Portugal.

The way out was new. On 28 October the prime minister, Arthur Balfour, announced that the Tsar had expressed his regret and that an international commission would investigate. France proposed the procedure, written into the Hague Convention of 1899 and never yet used: an International Commission of Inquiry, to establish the facts of a dispute that touched neither honour nor vital interests. Five admirals, from Britain, Russia, France, the United States and Austria-Hungary, sat in Paris from 22 December 1904 to 26 February 1905, and Hull fishermen crossed the Channel to give evidence.

The commission found that there had been no torpedo boats among the trawlers or anywhere near them, so the opening of fire was not justified and the responsibility was Rozhestvensky's; the Russian admiral on the commission dissented. All five agreed that the admiral had done what he could to stop his ships firing on the trawlers once they were seen for what they were. Russia paid £65,000 in compensation. A quarrel that the newspapers had talked of settling by war was settled by a report.

From Vigo, where it lay from 26 October to 1 November, the squadron went on to Tangier, and there it split. The older ships, under Rear-Admiral Dmitry von Fölkersam, took the short way through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. The new battleships, whose draught was thought too deep for the canal, went round Africa with Rozhestvensky: to Dakar, to the roads off Libreville in Gabon, to Great Fish Bay in Angola and to Angra Pequena in German South West Africa. They passed the Cape of Good Hope on 19 December and anchored off the island of Sainte-Marie, Madagascar, on 29 December.

Russia had no bases on the way and too few colliers, so it bought its coal through a neutral company: Albert Ballin's Hamburg-Amerika Line. Under contracts signed in June 1904 the German line bought coal, most of it British, on the Russians' account and carried it in its own and chartered steamers, which sailed apart from the warships and met them at agreed anchorages. The first contracts were for 186,000 tons; by January 1905 the guarantees covered some 297,000, and at times up to eighty steamers were at sea for the squadron. Neutral governments were wary hosts: at Vigo Spain allowed each ship only 400 tons.

On 2 January 1905 the Russian fortress of Port Arthur surrendered to the Japanese. The news reached the ships at sea on 6 January, on the way to Nosy Be, the island off Madagascar's north-west coast where Fölkersam's ships had been waiting since 28 December. "There is now no need for haste," the squadron's chief engineer, Eugène Politovsky, wrote in his diary.

For two months the squadron lay at anchor. St Petersburg did not say whether it should go on, wait for reinforcements or come home ("They are silent," Politovsky wrote), and at home, on 22 January, troops fired on the Bloody Sunday march in the capital. The coal ran into politics too. On 18 January the Hamburg-Amerika Line refused to send its colliers beyond Madagascar without new orders; Nicholas II telegraphed Wilhelm II, and the Kaiser answered that the coal was the company's private affair. In the end four German colliers from Diego Suarez supplied the fleet and followed it as far as Indochina, and on 16 March the squadron sailed for the east.

The squadron crossed the Indian Ocean without a port of call and on the afternoon of 8 April steamed past Singapore, where a Japanese correspondent photographed the long line of ships. On 13 April it anchored in Cam Ranh Bay in French Indochina, and later moved up the coast to Van Phong Bay. France was Russia's ally against Germany but neutral in the war with Japan, and the French authorities pressed the Russians to leave. "The French sternly drive us away, but we stay on," Politovsky noted.

On 9 May the smoke of Nikolai Nebogatov's Third Pacific Squadron appeared: an old battleship, an armoured cruiser and three coastal defence ships, sent out from Libau in February by way of Suez. On 14 May the combined fleet sailed for Vladivostok, and its course lay through the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan.

At 2.45 on the morning of 27 May a Japanese auxiliary cruiser, the Shinano Maru, saw the lights of a Russian hospital ship, and by five the Russians' position was on its way to Admiral Togo by wireless. The fleets sighted each other at 1.40 in the afternoon, and Togo, in the battleship Mikasa, crossed ahead of the Russian line. The Oslyabya sank about an hour and a half into the battle; by evening the Knyaz Suvorov, the Imperator Aleksandr III and the Borodino were gone as well, and through the night Japanese destroyers and torpedo boats attacked what was left.

Rozhestvensky was knocked unconscious by a shell splinter early in the fight and was taken off the burning Suvorov by a destroyer; he was later moved to another, the Bedovy, which surrendered on 28 May. That morning Nebogatov, surrounded, surrendered with four ships. Of the eleven Russian battleships seven were sunk and four captured. Only the small cruiser Almaz and two destroyers reached Vladivostok, and three cruisers, the Aurora among them, ran for Manila and were interned there. More than 4,000 Russian sailors were killed and nearly 6,000 taken prisoner; Politovsky was among the dead. Japan lost three torpedo boats and 117 men.

Tsushima cost Russia almost every heavy ship of its Baltic Fleet and pushed it to make peace: the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed on 5 September 1905. The war's defeats also fed the revolution at home, where the year that had begun with Bloody Sunday brought mutinies in the fleet, the most famous aboard the battleship Potemkin in June.

In Britain, Admiral Sir John Fisher had become First Sea Lord on 20 October 1904, the day before the Dogger Bank night, and was already planning a battleship armed only with big guns; HMS Dreadnought was laid down on 2 October 1905. Russia, humbled, settled its quarrels with Britain in Asia, and three years after the Dogger Bank the two signed the Anglo-Russian Convention of 31 August 1907, which with the Franco-Russian alliance made the Triple Entente.

The Dogger Bank case was the first time the Hague procedure of inquiry was ever used, and it worked: a crisis between two great powers was cooled by a finding of fact. Ten years later The Hague was offered again. In July 1914 Serbia's reply to the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum proposed to submit the dispute to the Hague tribunal or to the great powers; the Austro-Hungarian minister left Belgrade that evening.