Battles of the Russo-Japanese War

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 32. Chapters: Naval battles of the Russo-Japanese War, Battle of Tsushima, Siege of Port Arthur, Battle of the Yellow Sea, Battle of Port Arthur, Battle of Chemulpo Bay, Dogger Bank incident, Battle of Yalu River, Battle off Ulsan, Battle of Mukden, Battle of Sandepu, Battle of Te-li-Ssu, Battle of Nanshan, Battle of Tashihchiao, Battle of Shaho, Battle of Liaoyang, Battle of Motien Pass, Battle of Hsimucheng, Battle of Korsakov. Excerpt: The Battle of Tsushima (Japanese: ¿¿¿¿, tsushima-kaisen, Russian: , Tsusimskoye srazheniye), commonly known as the "Sea of Japan Naval Battle" (Japanese: ¿¿¿¿¿, nihonkai-kaisen) in Japan and the "Battle of Tsushima Strait", was the naval battle fought between Russia and Japan during the Russo-Japanese War. This was naval history's only decisive sea battle fought by modern steel battleship fleets, the first naval battle in which wireless telegraphy played a critically important role, and it was the "...dying echo of the old era-for the last time in the history of naval warfare ships of the line of a beaten fleet surrendered on the high seas." It was fought on May 27-28, 1905 (May 14-15 in the Julian calendar then in use in Russia) in the Tsushima Strait between Korea and southern Japan. In this battle the Japanese fleet under Admiral Togo Heihachiro destroyed two-thirds of the Russian fleet, under Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky, which had conducted a voyage of over 18,000 nautical miles (33,000 km) to reach the Far East. In London in 1906, Sir George Sydenham Clarke, G.C.M.G., F.R.S., wrote, "The battle of Tsu-shima is by far the greatest and the most important naval event since Trafalgar" and decades later, Historian Edmund Morris again echoed the epitaph calling it the greatest naval battle since Trafalgar. Prior to the Russo-Japanese War, countries constructed their battleships with mixed batteries of mainly 152 mm (6-inch), 203 mm (8-inch), 254 mm (10-inch) and 305 mm (12-inch) guns, with the intent that these battleships fight on the battle line in a close-quarter, decisive fleet action. The battle demonstrated that battleship speed and big guns with longer ranges were more advantageous during naval battles than mixed batteries of different sizes. The wireless was invented in the last half of the 1890s, and by the turn of the century all of the major navies were adopting this greatly improved means of communications. Although Alexander Stepanovich Popov of the Na