On the night of May 26–27, 1905, two battle fleets—one Russian, the other Japanese—sailed toward the Tsushima Strait, the eastern channel of the Korea Strait between that nation and Japan. The Russian commander, Vice Adm. Zinovy Rozhestvensky, desperately wanted to avoid contact and take his ships safely into Vladivostok, his nation’s primary naval port in the Pacific. His Japanese counterpart, Adm. Heihachiro Togo, was determined to locate, engage and destroy the Russian fleet and thus effectively end the Russo-Japanese War in his country’s favor.
Rozhestvensky’s hopes to evade a fight were soon shattered. The ensuing clash—the first between fleets of modern steel battleships—was to be as much of a defining moment in naval, political and diplomatic history in the 20th century as the Battle of Trafalgar had been a century earlier. By the time the smoke cleared, imperial Russia had involuntarily ceded both its naval dominance and considerable political influence in the Far East to a newly resurgent and expansionist imperial Japan.
The February 1904 to September 1905 Russo-Japanese War centered on rival expansionist ambitions, erupting over which nation would dominate Manchuria and Korea. Russia was desperate to acquire a warm-water port of its own in the Pacific, while Japan wanted to expand its sphere of influence north of its home islands.
Negotiations between the two nations—which proposed Russian control of Manchuria and Japanese hegemony over Korea—ultimately collapsed, sparking the first major war of the 20th century. Hostilities commenced when the Japanese made a surprise attack on, sought to blockade and then laid siege to the Russian base at Port Arthur, on the Liaodong Peninsula. Subsequent naval clashes—all won by Japan—culminated in the Aug. 10, 1904, Battle of the Yellow Sea, a strategic victory for Japan, albeit tactically
