Books: Long Voyage to Death

THE FLEET THAT HAD TO DIE (212 pp.) —Richard Hough—Viking ($3.95).

After only four months, the Russo-Japanese war was turning into a Russian disaster. Banzai-shouting Japanese troops were pushing the Russians back in Manchuria; Port Arthur was cut off; and the proud Russian ships in the harbor were immobilized by the prowling warships of Japan’s Admiral Togo. At that point in June 1904, Czar Nicholas II decided on a last, desperate gamble to relieve the Russian forces; he ordered Vice Admiral Zinovi Petrovitch Rozhestvensky to sail four brand-new Suvoroff battleships at the head of a task force of some 40 ships from their Baltic home ports to the Sea of Japan, by way of the Cape of Good Hope. In this book London Editor Richard Hough tells how a fleet that should never have gone to sea made its way 18,000 miles to its rendezvous with death.

How to Die. Drawing on captured Russian letters and diaries, naval attaches’ dispatches and newspaper accounts, Author Hough manages to move ubiquitously around the fleet and delivers a harrowing, heroic account of the battleships’ most trying hours. “You wish us victory, but there will be no victory,” mumbled Captain Bukhvostoff of the battleship Alexander III. “But we will know how to die, and we shall never surrender.”

Watching the barely seaworthy fleet, so top-heavy that the lower guns rolled awash in a moderate sea, manned by semi-mutinous sailors and officered by incompetents, a staff officer groaned in despair: “This is simply nothing but a fraud—an infamous fraud.” It would have been, without Admiral Rozhestvensky, a towering, bearded figure who bellowed crews into submission, fired live ammunition at ships slow in answering signals, bullied Hamburg-Amerika colliers into following the fleet to coal at sea.

No Excuse. In the end, Rozhestvensky produced a feat of logistics perhaps unequaled until World War II: an unbroken journey of 4,500 miles from Madagascar to the coast of Cochin China, despite 39 stops to repair tow lines, more than 70 engine breakdowns. And it was with oxlike fortitude that he brought his two wallowing columns into battle off Tsushima (literally Donkey’s Ears Island). Maneuvering for position, Togo took his column through a perilous column turn and closed with nearly 500 guns blazing. The Russian ships, which had damaged three major enemy ships, failed to score a single hit after the first bloody half-hour. Only one Russian auxiliary cruiser—a converted yacht — and two small 350-ton destroyers made their way through to Vladivostok.

Japan could claim the most decisive naval victory since Trafalgar, ruled as a major seapower until her sun set in the flaming air-sea action of Leyte Gulf 40 years later. Admiral Rozhestvensky. saved when his officers carried him wounded and semiconscious from a disabled turret before the Suvoroff sank, had no excuses and offered none. On his way back to St. Petersburg for court martial (he was acquitted) and retirement, he said: “No, there was no treason. We just weren’t strong enough—and God gave us no luck.”