Battle of Tsushima | |||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Part of the Russo-Japanese War | |||||||
Admiral Tōgō on the bridge of Mikasa, at the beginning of the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. The signal flag being hoisted is the letter Z, which was a special instruction to the Fleet. |
|||||||
|
|||||||
Belligerents | |||||||
Empire of Japan | Russian Empire | ||||||
Commanders and leaders | |||||||
Tōgō Heihachirō Kamimura Hikonojō Dewa Shigetō |
Z. Rozhestvensky (POW) N. Nebogatov (POW) O. Enkvist |
||||||
Strength | |||||||
Total: 89 ships 4 battleships 27 cruisers 21 destroyers 37 torpedo boats plus gunboats, and auxiliary vessels |
Total: 38 ships 8 battleships 3 coastal battleships 6 cruisers 9 destroyers 12 other ships |
||||||
Casualties and losses | |||||||
117 dead 583 injured 3 torpedo boats sunk (450 tons sunk) |
4,380 dead 5,917 captured 6 battleships sunk 1 coastal battleship sunk 14 other ships sunk 7 ships captured 6 ships disarmed (126,792 tons sunk) |
The Battle of Tsushima (Russian: Цусимское сражение, Tsusimskoye srazheniye), also known as the Battle of Tsushima Strait and the Naval Battle of the Sea of Japan (Japanese: 日本海海戦, Nihonkai-Kaisen) in Japan, was a major naval battle fought between Russia and Japan during the Russo-Japanese War. It was naval history's only decisive sea battle fought by modern steel battleship fleets, and the first naval battle in which wireless telegraphy (radio) played a critically important role. It has been characterized as 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 27–28 May 1905 (14–15 May 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 Tōgō Heihachirō destroyed two-thirds of the Russian fleet, under Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky, which had traveled over 18,000 nautical miles (33,000 km) to reach the Far East. In London in 1906, Sir George Sydenham Clarke wrote, "The battle of Tsu-shima is by far the greatest and the most important naval event since Trafalgar"; decades later, historian Edmund Morris agreed with this judgment. The destruction of the Russian navy caused a bitter reaction from the Russian public, which induced a peace treaty in September 1905 without any further battles.