At dawn on the morning of May 27, 1905 the newly invented wireless telegraph began to crackle and spit on a small Japanese warship: "The enemy's squadron has been sighted at point No. 203. The enemy is apparently steering toward the Eastern passage." About 2 p.m. a grizzled little man who had studied at Britain's Greenwich Naval College and well knew the Nelson tradition hoisted a fluttering ribbon of flags to the truck of his flagship:
"The existence of the Empire depends on this battle. Japan expects this day the courage and energy of every officer and every man in the fleet, Togo."
There began the greatest naval battle of modern times—a battle that for grand strategy surpassed Santiago seven years before, for decisiveness outclassed Jutland eleven years later. It was the kind of battle for which nations and navies build and spend and strive and dream for generations.
To attempt to recapture Port Arthur and replace Russia's already shattered Pacific fleet all that was left of the imperial Russian navy sailed from the Baltic under command of Admiral Ziniry Petrovich Rozhestvensky. One half cut through the Mediterranean while the other rounded the Cape of Good Hope. The halves met off Annam and crept cautiously up the China coast.
The Japanese commander-in-chief, Admiral Heihachiro Togo, knew that Admiral Rozhestvensky was a brave, capable and intelligent adversary. He knew that the Russian fleet was slightly superior numerically to his own: eight battleships, twelve cruisers, nine destroyers to five battleships, three second-line battleships, 23 cruisers and a flotilla of gunboats, torpedo boats and destroyers. But Admiral Togo also knew that Admiral Rozhestvensky's fleet was undermanned and under-provisioned, that all its bottoms were foul from its long sea voyage, that it could not carry enough coal to dodge all the way around Japan to Vladivostok with the possibility of being forced into an engagement on the way. With his fleet drydocked, scraped, painted, remunitioned and in review order, Admiral Togo waited confidently by the 122-mile Straits of Tsushima at the entrance to the Japan Sea.
After the wireless message and the Commander's message came the battle. Firing opened at 7,000 yards, the two fleets steaming in parallel columns like a classic exercise in an Annapolis textbook. In three quarters of an hour the leading Russian ships were out of action and Admiral Rozhestvensky gravely wounded. After nightfall when the Russian fleet was in hopeless disorder, the Japanese torpedo boats struck.