The war's origins lay in the conflicting territorial ambitions of both sides for the strategic port city of Lüshun (Port Arthur), occupied by Russia since 1897 after Japan was displaced by the Tripartite Intervention of 1895. Russia had been energetically turning the town into an impregnable fortress and naval base ever since. The city was the key to Manchuria's mineral wealth; Russia had built a railroad down the Liaodong Peninsula to exploit the massive coal and metal desposits of the region, running between Port Arthur and their railhead on the Trans-Siberian Railway at Mukden, the ancient Manchurian capital.
Their hatred inflamed by the gratuitous taunts and contempt of the Russian administration (Prince Alexander Alexeiev, Viceroy at Port Arthur; M. Pavlov, Russian Ambassador to Beijing), the Japanese gave up on diplomacy and advanced their plans for open war. In a striking precursor to Pearl Harbor, they launched a sneak attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. The Russian ships were blazing with light on the night of Februrary 8, 1904, when blacked-out Japanese torpedo boats crept into the enemy's roadstead and delivered a devastating attack, neutralizing 2 of Russia's best battleships (Tsesarevich and Retvizan) and incapacitating most of the rest of her fleet. In a follow-up raid the next day, Togo's battleships steamed up and down just beyond the Tiger's Tail, shelling the hapless Russian fleet at the waterline. The results showed the Russians to have been utterly unprepared for this crippling one-two blow. In addition to the 2 battleships cited above, the Poltava was shelled at the waterline; the cruisers Pallada and Diana were seriously damaged by torpedoes; the cruiser Novik was damaged by shellfire; the 5-funnel Askold also suffered minor damage from Japanese shells.
It was an awkward situation for the Russians, who had only one drydock at Port Arthur capable of handling their largest vessels. Repairs therefore had to be tackled serially, one ship at a time. This meant their powerful fleet remained out of action for months after the initial sneak attack. While fleet operations were out of the question, the great harbor was filled with grounded warships, canted at grotesque angles on the mudflats inside the Tiger's Tail, awaiting their turn in drydock: reminders of the Port's vulnerability to this superbly well-prepared enemy. Meanwhile, the Japanese had suffered no losses in these initial raids.
Also caught out as hostilities commenced were the Russian protected cruiser Varyag (built by Cramps in Philadelphia) and gunboat Koriets, in the Korean port of Chemulpo (Inchon). When a squadron of 6 Japanese cruisers and 8 destroyers arrived in the bay to ensure unopposed landings for Japanese troops on Feb. 8, the four-funneled Varyag sortied to meet her doom. After an hour's bloody affray, the cruiser limped back into the neutral harbor laden with 31 dead and 191 wounded. Faced with insuperable odds, she was fired and scuttled by her own crew after her wounded had been taken off, capsizing onto her starboard side. Meanwhile the Koriets was blown up by her crew; the survivors escaped capture and many were taken aboard a French cruiser. They enjoyed international fame for their heroic (and well-publicized) fight. The heavily damaged Varyag was salvaged after the war and laboriously repaired in Japan. Renamed IJN Soya, she was taken into the Mikado's fleet, but was among several ex-Russian vessels sold back into the Tsar in 1916; she foundered while under tow to the wreckers in 1920.
Russia's second squadron in the Far East consisted of 4 large armored cruisers based at Vladivostok, on the other side of the Korean Peninsula. These vessels were ordered to sea to retaliate by raiding Japanese commerce in the Sea of Japan. In the one incident of note, the four cruisers encountered a wallowing 1,000-ton freighter, the Nakanoura Maru, built in 1865, and a smaller vessel, Zensuko Maru, only 9 years old and of 319 tons. The smaller of the two made good her escape while all 4 cruisers ganged up on the old cargo ship, sending her to the bottom (above) after taking her crew prisoner. This seems a peculiar strategy, and one contrary to the rules of cruiser warfare, which would have stopped at taking the vessel as a prize of war and paroling her crew. This one prize was the only victorious exploit of this Vladivostok squadron in the entire war. When Adm. Kamimura showed up with a battleship, 6 cruisers and a TB flotilla to bombard Vladivostok in revenge, the homeported fleet cowered inside the Golden Horn and would not be lured out. Though damage to the town was not mortal, the bombardment noticeably dampened the residents' morale.With that, the Japanese had asserted strategic command of the sea and placed the Russians in a defensive mode from which they never truly recovered. The two Russian fleets never managed to link up. The Japanese Navy continued to harass the blockaded Russians, depleting their fleet with mines and torpedo attacks, bombarding the town and port of Port Arthur from long range, and inviting fleet action by sending weak squadrons to cruise close offshore, within sight of the harbor, while their battleship division lurked just over the horizon, ready to swoop down on unwary Russians. Meantime the Russians regrouped: a charismatic and inspiring commander, Admiral Stepan Makaroff, arrived with a trainload of shipwrights and supplies. Makaroff turned Russian operations upside-down and reversed the slide in morale. He was as likely to leap aboard a destroyer and lead the charge as to wait for steam to come up aboard his flagship, the small battleship Petropavlovsk.
One of the signal Japanese successes of the war was to lure out Makaroff and lead him over a freshly laid minefield. Makaroff's flagship, the battleship Petropavlovsk, detonated two mines and dissolved in a great mushroom of grey-brown smoke (right), sinking in mere minutes with all hands. This catastrophe left the Russian navy bereft of its most capable and daring commander, as became apparent when the remaining Port Arthur fleet, attempting a breakout for Vladivostok, clashed with the Japanese in the Battle of the Yellow Sea, August 10, 1904. While Tsesarevich and Askold escaped with a severe mauling, Adm. Witgeft was killed in the battle and the remaining Russian ships returned to Port Arthur where they remained bottled up for the rest of the War, their battle damage unrepaired: a highly visible premonition of doom. Meantime, the Vladivostok-based cruisers were defeated in the Battle of Ulsan, Aug. 14, 1904, by 4 armored cruisers under Adm. Kamimura.
However, the Japanese too suffered losses from mines: two of the six Japanese battleships struck mines and sank May 15, 1904 while blockading Port Arthur. At a single blow, this reduced Japanese capital-ship strength by one third, and killed more than 800 of Japan's élite sailors.
The remaining Russian warships in the East being in no condition to sortie, and Gen. Alexei Kuropotkin (the Russian C.-in-C.) being unable to break the ring of steel circling Port Arthur, the Tsar determined on desperate measures to lift the siege. He scraped together his entire remaining strength in warships -- a motley collection, since most of his best ships had been deployed to Port Arthur -- and sent them off around the globe from the Baltic. The story of this gargantuan undertaking is well told in Richard Hough's The Fleet That Had to Die, and in more abbreviated form on Big, Bad Battleships' own Battle of Tsushima page.When the fleet was refitting at Madagascar, halfway to the East, they received news that Port Arthur had fallen in one of the greatest sieges of modern times; this time the fortress would remain in Japanese hands. And following this defeat came an even greater one on land, as Gen. Alexei Kuropotkin was assailed in his heavily fortified position at Mukden. More than 600,000 troops clashed in what was then the greatest land battle in history. Although the Russians at Mukden outnumbered the Japanese almost 2:1, the contest ended in a Russian rout. The Japanese surrounded and dislodged Kuropotkin, then pursued their defeated foes northwards along the high road and parallel railroad line, driving them out of Manchuria. Russian troops would not return until autumn 1945. After the land war had led to utter and irretrievable defeat, on orders from Petersburg Russia's entire battleship fleet persisted in its suicidal mission. It was within a day's steaming of Vladivostok when it was intercepted by Japanese forces under Adm. Togo Heihachiro in the Straits of Tsushima, between Korea and Kyushu. The Russian fleet was annihilated May 27, 1905 with very great loss of life: 4,000 killed and some 8,000 taken prisoner, versus 116 killed and 538 wounded for the Japanese. This final, crushing blow to Russian ambitions set the stage for revolution all across the Tsar's domains -- an uprising the Tsar survived only with great difficulty.
Browse the pages above for a more detailed photo history of the campaigns of this, the greatest naval conflict of the Pre-Dreadnought Era, and the greatest land war prior to World War I. Examine the roots of the conflict -- and its racial dimension -- in our Sino-Japanese War page. Follow our hot links to the abundant material available on the World Wide Web. Or just browse through the pictorially rich histories of individual ships involved. It's all a mere mouse-click away at Big, Bad Battleships' Russo-Japanese War site.
