The Russian battleship Oslyabya had a grand legacy. Named for a Russian hero, the vessel was little more than two years old when it went into battle against the Japanese in the Russian Far East. It would end up making history, but not for the reasons the Russian Empire would hope for. Its first naval engagement would be its last. Steaming into the 1905 Battle of Tsushima against the Imperial Japanese fleet, it would become famous as the first modern steel battleship to be sunk solely by enemy guns.
The Battle of Tsushima went about as well for Russia as the rest of its ill-fated war against Japan, which is to say: not at all. On paper, the war shouldn’t have been such a complete drubbing for the Russians. Both sides utilized similar, modernized technology, had a roughly similar number of troops available to fight and as a result, inflicted a horrendously similar number of casualties. But in naval terms, the number of Russian ships in its various fleets should have outmatched the Japanese – but that did not happen.
In fact, the opposite happened. Twice.
Japan was a relative newcomer to the modern world, but its military modernized and grew at a rapid pace, and that includes its leadership. Japan rocked China’s world in the First Sino-Japanese War that ended in 1895, acquiring control of Korea and the Liaodong Peninsula with its warm water port of Port Arthur. Russia, Germany and France forced the Japanese out of China, and that’s when Japan got the idea that the Europeans weren’t taking their empire seriously and had to be taught a lesson. When Japan offered to recognize Russian dominance in Manchuria in exchange for Russian recognition of Japan’s dominance of Korea, the Russians not only rejected it but suggested that Japan cede Korea.
That’s when Imperial Japan went for the sucker punch it would soon be famous for. It launched a surprise attack on Port Arthur in February 1904 and then laid siege to the city. In a war that would see upwards of 200,000 Japanese killed or wounded and 250,000 Russians killed or wounded, the Russian leadership would not win a single battle. Despite the Russian Empire’s massive population, large military and nearly unlimited resources, all of that stuff was in Europe and the railroad to the Pacific wasn’t finished yet. When the Japanese crippled the Russian Far East Fleet at Port Arthur, Tsar Nicholas II had to send his largely untested Baltic Sea Fleet to the Pacific.
Under the command of Adm. Zinovy Rozhestvensky, the Baltic Fleet almost immediately fired on ships it thought were Japanese torpedo boats… in the North Sea. Those enemy warships turned out to be British fishing boats. Two British sailors were killed along with two Russians (somehow). The Russians even managed to mistake their own ships for Japanese vessels and fired on each other. The British would decide not to go to war over it, but the new Russian battleships opted to go around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, rather than steam through the British-controlled Suez Canal.
The Baltic Sea Fleet’s mission to relieve the Siege of Port Arthur would ultimately fail, mostly because it took seven months to get to the Sea of Japan. The city had fallen to the Japanese by then, and the battleships in port were sunk by Japanese land artillery. After steaming 18,000 nautical miles to the theater of war, the Russians weren’t really in the best shape to do battle with Japan’s veteran sailors and battleships. They were poorly maintained, many were old, and almost all of them were gathering microorganisms on their hulls, slowing them down and reducing their maneuverability. To be fair, they weren’t looking to fight; they wanted to slip past and head to Vladivostok to regroup – but they tried the fastest, shortest, and most dangerous route past Japan: the Tsushima Strait.
So, of course, a Japanese cruiser caught them, then sent a telegram to Adm. Tōgō Heihachirō, who went to sea with his entire fleet. It took six hours to catch up to the Russian fleet and less than an hour for Japan to cross the Russians’ T, which meant the Japanese could fire full broadsides while the Russians could reply only with their forward batteries. Just 90 minutes into the battle, the Oslyabya, flagship of Rear Adm. Baron Dmitry von Fölkersam, was sunk by Japan’s guns, the first modern steel battleship to go down that way. Fölkersam went down with the ship, which is probably another historic first.
By the time the sun went down on May 27, 1905, Adm. Rozhestvensky was unconscious and the Russians had lost four battleships. Torpedo boats and destroyers harassed the Russians throughout the night (because the Russians decided to use their searchlights to try to find the enemy, giving away their positions in the dark). The next morning, what was left of the Russian ships tried to retreat but they were outclassed. They surrendered.
Along with the Oslyabya, the Russians lost five more battleships during the Battle of Tsushima, as well as a littoral battleship and 14 other vessels. Two battleships, two coastal battleships, and a destroyer were captured, and more than 11,000 Russian sailors were killed or captured. The Battle of Tsushima also featured the first time wireless telegraph was a decisive part of the battle, as it signaled the Japanese fleet the Russians were present. The defeat forced Russia to sue for peace, setting the stage for Japan’s rise as a true imperial power.