Indonesian Caliphate
17. Battle of Tsushima
The Battle of Tsushima (russian: ⁇ , Tsusimskoye srazheniye) or the Battle of the Tsushima Strait was the last and most decisive naval battle of the Japan-Russia War (1904–1905). The battle took place in the Tsushima Strait on 27-28 May 1905 (14-15 May according to the Julian calendar then used in Russia) and was the largest naval battle of the Pre-Dreadnought era. The Battle of Tsushima is known in Japan as Nihonkai kaisen ( ⁇ , Battle of the Sea in the Sea of Japan).
Battle Chronology:
May 27, 1905 (JST)
04:45 Japanese cruiser Shinanomaru belonging to the Japanese Combined Fleet is on a special undercover mission. Shinanomaru's crew spotted the Russian Baltic Fleet in waters west of Kyushu and sent a telegram.
05:05 The Japanese Combined Fleet departed from the port, and sent a unloaded telegram to the Imperial Headquarters, "Today the weather is clear but the waves are high." ( ⁇ Honjitsu tenki seiro naredomo nami takashi) which contains a veiled message about the weapon to be used.
13:39 The Japanese Combined Fleet saw the Russian Baltic Fleet with the naked eye, and immediately raised the war flag.
13:55 Distance: 12,000 meters. The Mikasa battleship hoisted the flag of the Z motto.
14:05 Distance: 8,000 meters. The Japanese Combined Fleet began a maneuver to reverse course
14:07 Distance: 7,000 meters. The Mikasa battleship completed a reverse maneuver. The Russian Baltic Fleet began firing.
14:10 Distance: 6,400 meters. All the Japanese ships completed the reverse maneuver.
14:12 Distance: 5,500 meters. Mikasa was shot.
14:16 Distance: 4,600 meters. The Japanese Combined Fleet began to focus fire on Knyaz' Suvorov, the command ship of the Russian Baltic Fleet.
14:43 Oslyabya and Knyaz' Suvorov were burning.
14:50 Emperor Alexander III began to turn north and tried to escape the battle.
15:10 The Russian battleship Oslyabya is sunk, while Knyaz' Suvorov attempts to escape.
19:03 Emperor Alexander III drowned.
19:20 The Russian battleships Knyaz' Suvorov, Borodino, and Sisoy Veliki are sunk.
May 28, 1905 (JST)
09:30 The Russian Baltic Fleet is back within firing range of the Japanese Combined Fleet
10:34 The Russian commander gave the motto "XGE", meaning "I surrender" in the International Code of Prayer used at that time.
10:53 The Japanese side accepts the surrender of Russia.
After the Battle of Tsushima the four other warships under the command of Rear Admiral Nebogatov were forced to surrender the next day. Of the four ships, there is only one modern battleship, the battleship Orel, while the rest are the old battleship Emperor Nikolay I, and two ships Apraxin and Admiral Senyavin. The four ships would not be able to survive the attack of the Japanese fleet. Until the night of May 28, only one Russian ship was pursued by the Japanese fleet. Admiral Ushakov refused to surrender and was sunk by a Japanese cruiser. Despite her age, the cruiser Dmitri Donskoy fought 6 Japanese cruisers and survived until the next day, although it was severely damaged and had to be sunk. Three Russian cruisers, Aurora, Zhemtchug, and Oleg, escaped to the U. S. Navy base in Manila and were detained. On the Russian side, only Almaz (classed as a 2nd class cruiser) and 2 destroyers made it to Vladivostok.
Russia lost nearly all of its Baltic Fleet ships in the battle for the Tsushima Strait. The Japanese lost only 3 torpedo boats (Numbers 34, 35, and 69). This event brought down Russia's prestige internationally, as well as a major blow to the Romanov dynasty.
The pre-Dreadnought warship was a generation warship before HMS Dreadnought was launched by the British around 1906. He made HMS Dreadnought as a benchmark because at that time the ship reflected changes in the design, configuration of weapons and others that were different in the previous ship's time. At that time, as the present time required experiments to obtain the best warships.
The presence of warships before HMS Dreadnought or known as the pre-Dreadnought generation is inseparable from the development of the ship itself. The Industrial Revolution began with the invention of the Steam Engine by James Watt, which was followed by the invention of a new method of iron-steel processing by Henry Bassemer and Siemens. At that time the development of the technology of sailing ships and sailing warships, especially in the 19th century, had reached a saturation point, one of them is the presence of clipper type sailing ships that have speed above the speed of the sailboat at that time. In addition, the ships needed a stronger layer to compensate for the firepower of the cannon, the, while keeping pace with the development of cannon technology and cannon bullets, especially when the time delay method (time-delay mechanism) by Henry-Joseph Paixhans, was discovered, the bullet was fired horizontally at higher speeds and penetrated the wall of the ship and then exploded, resulting in a large fire inside the ship. The technique, introduced in 1840, was demonstrated when the Russian Navy defeated the Ottoman Navy at the Battle of Sinop in 1853. The Paixhans gun was developed by John A. Dahlgreen of the United States in 1854 and used during the American Civil War of 1861-1865. Until the naval battle of Tsushima, the firing of the cannon had not been carried out in an automatic salvo controlled in one control control, but by aiming and firing separately conducted on the crew of the cannon, but by firing separately, which is a relic of the firing of cannons during the ship's time using wooden construction. This requires special skills for the cannon crew to aim and shoot in a different ship than on land.
The use of this new type of bullet led ship designers to replace the wooden hull with a hull made of iron. Starting in 1859 appeared Ironclad type warships, which used an iron hull and became the beginning of the construction of armored frigates or armed frigates. The ship uses a single gun deck or single deck and is used specifically as a battleship.
The battle was known as the Battle of the Tsushima Strait or better known to the Japanese as the War on the Sea of Japan.
The Mikasa that became the Pre-Dreadnought Ship of Japan was a silent witness and perpetrator of the battle that led to the Japanese victory at the Battle of Tsushima Strait and the sinking of many overconfident Russian Pre-Dreadnought ships.
The Mikasa ( ⁇ ) was a pre dreadnought battleship built for the Imperial Japanese Navy in the late 1890s, and the only ship of its own class. It was commissioned as the flagship of Admiral Togou Heihachiro during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, including the Battle of Port Arthur on the second day of the war and the Battle of the Yellow Sea and Tsushima.