THURSDAY, JUNE 8, 1905. THE LESSON OF TSUSHIMA

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 23, 8 June 1905, Page 17

THURSDAY, JUNE 8, 1905. THE LESSON OF TSUSHIMA

Mjisffi CRAP by scrap the details of the great naval (|||l||s battle of Tsushima keep coming over the sub«g|||S»' marine wires. In time we shall be able to Ijjjlgjjp P iece tne fragments of information into a W«§y dread mosaic of what was, in armament and *Ts|fft destructive energy, the greatest sea-fight in <!/* history. But the details that will round off that red story of the sea can add but little to accentuate the great outstanding features of the gigantic .struggle that lined the floor of the Korean Channel with the sheer hulks of so many ponderous mcn-oVwar. Perhaps the most conspicuous lesson of that great encounter was the value of trailing and s' ill in the man behind the gun. That, with its inclusive element of good leadership, was what decided the result of the battle of Tsushima before a shot was fired. Nelson's motto ran thus : ' Close with a Frenchman, and outmanoeuvre a Russian.' Togo combined both methods of strategy in his historical encounter with Ro/hdest\ens>ky in the narrow seas between Korea and Japan. The Japanese onslaught recalls, in its fury, though not, of course, in its details, the days of the boarding-pike and cutlass. At the outset of the war, the Japanese fleet put eleven Russian war-vessels out of action or blew them to the floor of the Yellow Sea. In the Straits of Tsushima it wiped Russia out of the list of the great naval Powers— after the responsible heads 01 the Muscovite dominions had sacrificed the Empire's na\al position in the West in a wild 'plunge' to restore the lost balance of fighting efficiency in the Distant East. The uoild has, peihaps, seldom in its history recvned so \l\ld and sensational a lesson in the \ital necessity of na\al preparedness and high training for the n.aiit'iine tountiics Hut aic to be sur\i\ors in the great international struggle for existence. Ivan dc Bloch, the gieat Russo-Polish military writer, is a seer of the front ivjik in all that relates to the art of war. But eve;i he had no adequate conception of the readiness and hit-ting-powcr of the na\ y and army of Japan. The Tsar and his Ministers committed the fatal error of holding 1 the little monkeys ' of the Far East too cheaply in I'KU. Do Bloch lull into the same error when, in 1599, lie wrote of Russia in lv-> Warfare of the Future ' : ' From the direction of Janan there can be no serious danger ' , and again : * There is not one of Russia's vital interests which Japan could damage. ' In the same year Admiral Lord Charles BeresforS \isited Japan as the representathe of the Associated Chambers of Commerce in England He passed through the country with his ears wedged open and his eyeballs skinned. He was thus in a position to gi\e a truer estimate of the bustling young land of the Rising Sun than the great Russian soldier-author. He expressed his surprise at the commercial and industrial energy and progress of the nation, at the mechanical perfection of the magazine and quick-firing guns turned out in the Military Arsenal of Nagasaki, the admirable training given in the Tokyo Military College and the Central Military School, and

* the complete state of efficiency ' which he found ' in all the naval and military establishments in Japan.' And he considered that ' the naval and military forces of Japan will have to be reckoned with when solving the problems connected with the future development of trade and commerce in the Far East.' All this sufficiently explains the results of the struggles at Liaoyang and on the Shaho, as well as on the waters of the Straits of Tsushima. The Queen said to Alice in Wonderland . ' There's a moral in everything — if you can only find it.' There is no difficulty in finding the moral of the battle of Tsushima. And the nations that are wise will take it promptly to heart. * Russia never possessed the heavy sea-borne trade that is the T)est stimulus to a nation to become a great naval Power. Its navy, such as it was, originated with Peter the Great. He left his throne for a time, and, under the name of Peter Timmerman, wrought for a time as a shipwright, first in Holland, and afterwards in England, varying his hours of toil and observation with fierce carouses of sack, sherry, and heavy doses of hot pepper and brandy, A corps of some five hundred British shipbuilders, brought by him to Russia, gave the Muscovite dominions' their first fighting fleet of long, light galleys. Russia's best victories — such as they were — on the water were achieved! for her by British officers during the eighteenth century. She defeated Sweden— in the days of Sweden's decadence. In 1827 she took a minor part, with the British and French fleets, under the command of Sir Edward Codrington, in sending the Turkish and Egyptian navies to the bottom of the Bay of Navarino. In 1833 Russia ha.'! an easy task in battering the wretched Turkish fleet to bits in sight of the old ruined walls of Sinope. Russia's serious effort to blossom into a first-class naval Power dates from the close of he* war with Turkey In 1878. Her vast— and, indeed, menacing — expenditure on her floating fortresses gave many a nightmare to sundry British naval writers. It was, we believe, in great part responsible for an important plank in the naval policy of Great Britain— to keep her fleet at least equal to that of any two of the European Great Powers. But now the alarm-clock writers can rest quietly o' nights. The costly armada from the Baltic has turned out . to be, after all, a fighting machine of comparatively little value ; and most of the ships of war of a Power, that has long been one of the chief disturbing factors in the peace of West and East, have been sunk or captured by the sturdy little men whom it compelled, eighteen months ago, to fight, in effect, for their separate existence as a nation.