The Russian sailors “fought most gallantly,” said Togo? The Japanese have a way of expressing important things through understatement. You performed your great task heroically until you were incapacitated. During the battle, your men fought most gallantly, and I admire them all, and you in particular. The only question is whether or not we do our duty. “We fighting men suffer either way, win or lose.
“There is no need for a warrior to associate an honorable defeat with shame,” said the Japanese naval leader. But the Japanese admiral had come to see the Russian for a reason, and there were more words for the commander of one of the world’s most powerful fleets to say to the commander of another, ill-fated assemblage of now-lost ships. The Japanese admiral stared at the Russian, who in return smiled weakly, and with a visible look of great sadness upon his countenance. Heihachiro Togo (1848-1934), vice admiral and commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy, “for the absence of comforts due to such a distinguished patient.” The Russian nodded his head slowly. He wore a relatively simple uniform, but on his breast was a large, bejeweled medal in the shape of a chrysanthemum. This visitor was, at that moment, an object of adulation in Japan, as well as, in certain other circles, of the political and military capitals of the world. All in attendance made way with great deference for this visitor, as the rather smallish fellow walked up to the side of the hospital bed. Into the hospital room walked another man, intending to pay a visit to the wounded Russian admiral. Rozhdestvenski had been wounded in a sea battle with the Japanese fleet transferred from his sinking flagship by his assistants and eventually captured while lying injured, below decks, in a Russian ship that could not elude its Japanese pursuers. Zinovy Rozhdestvenski (1848-1909), most recently the commander of a massive Russian naval fleet called the Second Pacific Squadron, most of which was now sitting on the bottom of the Sea of Japan off the island of Tsushima. The title and name of this man was Rear Adm. Japanese doctors had recently operated on him to remove a plethora of steel splinters, the residue of several massive explosions that the wounded soul stood too near. His head and upper body were wrapped in bandages. There was abed in this Japanese hospital a badly injured man. Let us go back to the first week of June 1905, and look inside a hospital located in Sasebo, Japan, run by the Imperial Japanese Navy. So permit me, dear readers, to choose a particular time, and to zoom in upon a rather remarkable event with which to commence my review of the matter. Now I want to discuss why it changed the world, but such a discussion has to begin at some point. In earlier articles, I have discussed the details of the battle itself. The culminating battle of the Russo-Japanese War was the naval engagement at Tsushima, an island at the southern end of the Sea of Japan. In this article, I want to discuss why this is so. Its consequences are still with us, more than a century after the last shot was fired. Some historians have labeled the Russo-Japanese War as “World War Zero.” The war was, in many respects, a dress rehearsal for the Great War (World War I) that would break out in 1914.
I would like to take this opportunity to discuss more about the echoes of those guns. I have referred, on occasion, to the Russo-Japanese War in other articles in W&G, and have discussed it in talks and interviews that I have given in other media. They are archived at Odyssey to Tsushima and The Sound of the Guns. LAST YEAR, I wrote several articles for Whiskey & Gunpowder on the topic of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.
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