Epic of Defeat

TSUSHIMA --A. Novikoff-Priboy --Knopf ($3.50).

Tsushima is a word that means more in the Eastern than in the Western Hemisphere. To Japanese it stands for the same thing that Trafalgar means to the English, to Russians, what Waterloo means to the French. Greatest naval battle since Trafalgar, and one of the four greatest of all time,* Tsushima (1905) was the knockout blow by which Admiral Togo won the Russo-Japanese War, set all Japan in a roar of Banzai! History has written down Togo as hero of the fight, but last week a footnote to history gave the other side of the story.

Novikoff-Priboy was a paymaster's steward on the Russian battleship Oryol, captured at Tsushima. To while away the long months of imprisonment in Japan he wrote down his eyewitness report of the battle, gathered enough material from fellow-eyewitnesses to fill a trunk. When these notes were all burnt in a riot, he set to and did the job a second time. Back in Russia after the war, Novikoff-Priboy became a known revolutionary, had to flee the country. He left his Tsushima notes with his brother, who hid them so well he forgot where he had put them. After the Revolution, Novikoff-Priboy returned to Russia. One day when his nephew was clearing out an old shed he found his uncle's missing papers, tucked away in a beehive. After 22 years they had not lost their sting; Novikoff-Priboy set to for the third time, at last got his report of Tsushima written.

In the fall of 1904, Russia's Far Eastern campaign against Japan was not going very well. The first Russian Pacific squadron had already had one mauling, and the Russian army was on the defensive in Manchuria. So the Baltic Fleet was given sailing orders for the Pacific. The long cruise did not start auspiciously. The Oryol, Novikoff-Priboy's ship, ran aground shortly after leaving harbor. Before the fleet had rounded Denmark there were several false alarms about Japanese torpedo boats. In the North Sea some British fishing smacks were mistaken in the darkness for enemy destroyers. In a wild outburst of Russian firing the cruiser Aurora was hit (luckily by duds) and several of the fishing boats sunk with their hapless crews. In the excitement no one stopped to pick up survivors. That hysterical episode quickly became a diplomatic incident of grave importance; only after thoroughgoing apologies and explanations was the Baltic Fleet allowed to proceed.

It took the Russians eight months to steam the 18.000 miles to their rendezvous with Togo and Death. Long before they got there they knew they were heading for destruction. Less than halfway came the news that their squadron at Port Arthur had been wiped out, the remnants of the Pacific Fleet bottled up at Vladivostok. With every sea-mile it became more apparent that their own hastily-assembled armada was in no shape for a cruise, let alone a fight. Many of their ships were obsolete, the crews ignorant, ill-fed, mutinous. The commander, Admiral Rozhestvensky, an egotistical apoplectic, kept the air blue with curses, insults, frantic orders, all to no avail. The fleet did its poor best, shrugged its shoulders, called him "the mad admiral."

At Madagascar, Rozhestvensky held his first fleet for two and a half months while he waited for reinforcements, tried to whip his command into shape. To his purple-faced disgust he found that after a four-months' cruise it took his flagship an hour to up anchor, that "in an hour ten ships did not succeed in forming line, although the leading vessel went dead slow." In final target practice, after a furious fusillade, the target was unscathed. The morale of the fleet was not improved by these revelations, nor by the increasingly bad food, which caused a successful mutiny.

After they left Madagascar and headed east across the Indian Ocean the Russians daily expected an attack, but it was not until they were only three days from their goal, Vladivostok, that the blow fell. By that time they were in such a fatalistic frame of mind that the battle was almost a relief. Rozhestvensky's plan was rigidly simple--to force his column, battleships in the lead, through the Straits of Tsushima, head for Vladivostok. Since Togo's average speed was six knots faster, he had no trouble heading off the Russian column, kept pounding each leading ship in turn till it fell out of line.

Steward Novikoff-Priboy's battle-station on the Oryol was in the sickbay. When the big guns started, "the heavens resounded like an iron dome struck by Titans' hammers." The Russian shells were armor-piercing but often nonexplosive; the Japanese shells exploded on contact, started hundreds of fires on the Russian ships, which were heavily overdecorated with woodwork. The Japanese gunners concentrated their aim at the leading Russian ships; the Russians shot at anything they could see. First casualty was the Oslyabya. Pounded by six Japanese cruisers, her guns went silent one by one. The jar of each Japanese hit was like "hundreds of iron rails . . . dropped from a great height upon the deck." As she heeled over, her captain, his bald head bleeding, shooed his men overboard, roared at them to swim away from the ship. He was still on the bridge when she turned turtle.

The Suvoroff, Rozhestvensky's flagship, was soon put out of action. The hail of shell-splinters flying into the conning tower thrice wounded Rozhestvensky. Soon no one knew who was in command of the Russian fleet. All that could be done was to follow the ship ahead, until it sank or fell out of line, turning in helpless circles. By nightfall (the action began at 2 p. m.) the Russians were trying only to escape. Till midnight they were harried by torpedo attacks. Next morning brought the main Japanese fleet again to mop up the survivors. By then most of the Russian ships had had enough, struck their colors. Rozhestvensky had been carried off the burning wreck of the Suvoroff--sunk by torpedoes shortly afterwards--to a destroyer, the Buinyi. Next day he was transferred to the destroyer Bedovyi which surrendered to a Japanese destroyer, whose commander grinned and hissed with delight when he saw what he had captured.

When Tsushima's terrible two days were over, the Russian fleet had been annihilated. Out of 38 ships, three somehow got through to Vladivostok; three more limped into Manila, were interned. Five thousand Russian seamen went down with their ships; 115 Japanese went with them.

* Others: Salamis (480 B.C.); Lepanto (is?1), Trafalgar (1805).

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