The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎585r] (60/239)

THE BATTLE OF THE SEA OF JAPAN.
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China coast. This officer had with him the second-class battleship
Nicholas an old armoured cruiser, the Vladimir Monomach,
and the three coast defence ships Admiral Seniavin, Admiral
Oushakoff, and Admiral Apraxine. These last four vessels were
so old, so unsuited to the battle line in all respects, that in the
great struggle they could neither fight effectively nor run away;
two of them were sunk and the other twm, with the Nicholas L,
surrendered. When we get the full story of the battle it will prob
ably be found that these vessels, owing to their poverty in fighting
power and in mobility, not only added nothing to the strength of
the Russian Fleet, but contributed materially to the disorder
and demoralisation. He will be indeed a courageous critic of
Admiralty policy who will now join Sir William White in
defence of the obsolete and inefficient, or express agreement with
the anonymous writer The lowest of the four classes into which East India Company civil servants were divided. A Writer’s duties originally consisted mostly of copying documents and book-keeping. in Blackwood in the claim “ that the work
(of the Fleet) will be so multifarious that place will always be found
for every ship which carries a gun.” In judging the efficiency of
this mythical and typical ship we should want to know something
of the ” gun ” and its power, of the engines and boilers, and the
quality of the armour, if it has any. The British men-of-war
which have been struck off the “war list ” have been weighed
in this way, one by one, and condemned, and the lesson which
Admiral Rojdestvensky’s debacle conveys is that in this policy
the Admiralty have been right. We cannot afford to send British
officers and men, highly trained at great expense, and therefore
valuable national assets, to sea in a ship the only justification for
which is that it ” carries a gun.” Such action would be inhuman,
apart from its imbecility.
(2) The Value of Speed.
What advantage did Japan gain from the possession of superior
speed? Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge and Rear-Admiral Sir R. N.
Custance have no belief in speed. In the Naval Annual for
the present year, the former Commander-in-Chief of the British
China Squadron condemns the big armoured cruiser, holding that
” a true conception of cruiser tactics indicates that multiplicity
rather than a small number of powerful individual ships would be
needed.” Again, ” that no great value as a factor in tactics could
be assigned to speed superiority had long been suspected by officers
who had made a close study of tactical questions.” And Sir
Cyprian even minimises the strategical importance of high speed;
he holds that ” speed is of small tactical or strategical value.”
No one can read the story of the battle of the Sea of Japan and
fail to recognise how completely Sir Cyprian Bridge’s conclusions