FAMOUS

SHIPS

Having, just recently, had the privilege of going to Japan to visit the ROPE, our sister club in Japan, to attend the fine ship model exhibition that they had, I was also able to spend one day going aboard the MIKASA.  She was a predreadnought battleship that, all things considered, was in excellent shape and used now as a memorial and repository of many fine ship models.  She is much like the Queen Mary in that she is no longer floating in the water and most of her machinery has been removed, but the overall presentation is very good.

 Her dimensions are length, 432 feet; breadth, 76 feet; depth, 27 feet with a tonnage of 15,440.  She is steel hulled with an armament of four 12.2” main guns, fourteen 6.1” twenty 7.6cm, twelve 47mm and five 18” torpedo tubes.  She has a 9” armor belt with a 3” armored deck.  She was powered with vertical triple expansion engines that developed 15,000 ihp on 2 screws for a top speed of 18 kts.  She was built in England in 1896 as part of the effort by Japan to join the modern worlds navies.

 Japan began expanding its Navy in the early 1890’s, turning first to France and later England for large warships for which it did not have the industrial capacity.  In 1893 and 1894, the navy ordered six battleships from British yards, the largest of which was MIKASA, a ship similar in design to Britain’s own MAJESTIC-class battleships and, for a few months after her building, the largest warship in the world.  Although the original impetus for Japan’s military build-up had been friction with China, Japan defeated China at the Battle of the Yalu in 1894 and went on to occupy Korea and, briefly, Port Arthur in Manchuria.  Forced to relinquish this naval base by pressure from European countries, Japan was galled when Russia occupied the Liaotung Peninsula and Port Arthur (Lushun, China) in 1898.

 On February 8, 1904, MIKASA was Admiral Heihachiro Togo’s flagship during the Japanese surprise attack by destroyers on the Russian Far Eastern Fleet at Port Arthur.  This was followed the next day by a bombardment of the port, during which MIKASA was hit several times.  Although only three of eighteen torpedoes hit their targets, the Russians had lost the initiative.  On August 10, Admiral Vitgeft attempted a breakout to Vladivostok, on the Sea of Japan opposite Hokkaido.  Although MIKASA was hit twenty-three times and had to undergo extensive repairs, the Battle of the Yellow Sea was a clear defeat for the Russians.  Vetgeft was killed when his flagship TSAREVICH was hit by a 12-inch shell, and the Russian fleet quickly retired to Port Arthur in disorder.  (TSAREVISH escaped to the German-occupied port of Tsingtao, where she was interned.)  In December, the Japanese took Port Arthur from the landward side, and by the end of January 1905, the Russians had lost all seven battleships of the Far Eastern Fleet.

 Meanwhile, in September 1904 Admiral Zinovi Petrovich Rozhestvensky had left Kronstadt with the Baltic Fleet at the start of an 18,000-mile voyage round the Cape of Good Hope to Vladivistok.  As his fleet steamed through the narrow Korea Strait on May 27, 1905, the Japanese fleet near the island of Tsushima attached them.  Rozhestvensky’s force included four new and four older battleships, four coast defense ships, and six cruisers (including AURORA).  Togo had only four battleships, two armored cruisers, and six cruisers.  But what the Japanese lacked in numbers they made up for in speed, experience, and morale.

 Togo used his battleship’s six-knot superiority in speed to outflank the Russian fleet, concentrating first on the flagship.  KNIAZ SUVAROV was quickly knocked out of line and eventually sank.  Within five hours, the new battleships IMPERATOR ALEXANDER III and BORODINO were also sunk with the loss of all but one of their 1,692 crew, while OREL was captured.  Total Russian losses included ten ships sunk (including six battleships) and four captured; three ships were interned and one escaped.  The Japanese lost no ships, MIKASA was hit thirty-two times by Russian shells but suffered only eight dead.

 On September 12, a magazine explosion while in home port killed 114 of MIKASA’S crew and left her sunk at her moorings.  In August, 1906, she was refloated, but her fighting days were over.  On September 20, 1923, she was stricken from the list of commissioned ships and preserved as a memorial.  At the end of World War II, she was stripped of her fittings in a compromise between the USSR, who wanted her scrapped, and the United States.  Fifteen years later, she was restored as a memorial at Yokosuka, thanks in large part to help offered by Admiral Chester Nimitz, USN.

 I can attest to the fact that the MIKASA is still there – on the bridge they have indicated positions were Admiral Togo and his staff stood on the day in May, 1905, when the Japanese Fleet destroyed the Russian Fleet in one of the most lopsided victories ever fought at sea.