Warships and their story

by R. A. Fletcher

Of China’s principal battleships, two fine vessels of 7,400 tons displacement, one the Chen-Yuen, surrendered at Wei-Hai-Wei, and having been repaired, was taken to Japan and added to the navy of her captors, and the other was sunk by a Whitehead torpedo during a night attack by torpedo boats at Wei-Hai-Wei. Similar fates befell a couple of armoured cruisers, and of the six smaller cruisers which completed China’s fleet at the Battle of the Yalu, five were sunk or wrecked, and one surrendered. One was raised and added to the Japanese navy. Some of the ships of which China was despoiled distinguished themselves in the Japanese attack upon the Russians at the Battle of Tsushima.

The Battle of Tsushima, which ended Russia’s naval pretensions in the war between that country and Japan a few years ago, is the only one in which modern ships and guns have been employed on both sides in anything approximating to equal terms. After the Russian squadron already in the Far East had suffered so severely at Port Arthur and the few vessels at Vladivostok deemed it advisable to stay there, Russia collected as many sea-going war vessels of all shapes and sizes as she could muster, and sent them out in two detachments from Europe in the hope that they would reach Vladivostok, Japan permitting. The voyage was exciting enough at the start when, through a bad attack of nerves, the Russians opened fire upon and damaged one or two British trawlers in the North Sea under the delusion that they were Japanese torpedo boats advancing to attack them. Loud was the outcry in Great Britain and great was the clamour that the British fleet should make short work of the Russian ships before they did any more damage. But the Government saved its powder and money and put its trust in the Japanese, confident that the Mikado’s ships would do all that was necessary if the imaginative Russians ever got that far. The Russian ships were very slow, the best speed of which the fleet was capable was nine knots, and as the Russians themselves estimated the Japanese speed at sixteen knots, and this estimate was endorsed by the naval experts, it was taken for granted that the Russian fleet was going out to certain disaster.

THE RUSSIAN BATTLESHIP “TSAREVITCH” AFTER THE FIGHT OFF PORT
ARTHUR, AUGUST 10, 1905.

EFFECTS OF JAPANESE SHELLS ON THE “GROMOBOI.”

The progress of this heterogeneous fleet was a matter of some months, but at last it approached the Japanese coast, off which the ships of the Mikado’s fleet were waiting. The Japanese vessels, being of superior speed, were able to choose their own position for the attack. No innovations in the way of tactics were attempted. When the Japanese were ready they attacked, and they selected a moment for doing so when the slow-moving Russian ships were attempting to carry out an order of their admiral and were, in consequence of the order being incompletely executed, unable to offer a resistance to the suddenness of the attack. This very suddenness, indeed, threw them into greater disorder, and rendered them the more easily assailable by their relentless antagonists.

The Russian ships, too, were so overloaded with stores and coal that the upper edges of their heavy armour-plates were well below the water-line and, therefore, in so far as the hull protection was concerned, they were armoured cruisers and not battleships. The cabins, passages, etc., were so filled with coal that the sanitary arrangements for the men were blocked in some of the ships since leaving Leghorn, and the decks were in consequence in an indescribable condition.[52]

The Russian ships are said to have rolled very heavily owing to their having so much coal on board, and to the circumstance that their bunker coals were used before their extra supplies carried on their decks were consumed. However, the Russians fought their ships with the utmost bravery and determination, but the superior training of the Japanese sailors and their better gunnery told its tale, and in less than a couple of hours the Russian fleet was hopelessly defeated.

Admiral Togo, according to Lieut.-Commander W. S. Simms, must have gone into action with two principal objects clearly defined in his mind. One was to fight at the maximum range at which actual experience of battle practice had shown him that he could hit effectively, viz. about 6,000 yards, and at which he knew the Russian fire would not be dangerous; and the other was to manœuvre so as to maintain as exactly as possible that range upon the head of the enemy’s column. If he had not been able to accomplish these two objects, says the American authority, he might still have won the battle because of the Russian inferiority in many other respects, but the Japanese fleet would certainly have suffered more. If the Russians had been able by superior speed to run into 1,800 yards range, the battle range of their choice, they would have made a large percentage of hits, and those hits would have been very effective, especially from their modern ships of French design, the Suvaroff, Alexander III., Borodino, and Orel.