Post by randomizer on Jan 24, 2014 13:46:28 GMT -6
Players taking Russia's side in SAI-RJW are quickly finding that one key to victory in the game lies in conducting an aggressive war on Japanese commerce and trade. How valid is this view and why were the Russian Navy’s attempts at this method of warfare not expanded despite some significant successes? This opinion piece is an attempt to answer these questions.
First we should take a look at trade warfare of the period, often known by its French title of guerre de course but also Cruiser Warfare and commerce raiding; what follows will use the terms interchangeably for convenience. Collectively the entire strategy became doctrinal in the French Navy under the umbrella of the Jeune Ecole movement, which dominated that service from the 1880's until about 1902. Other navies took assorted bits and pieces from the guerre de course doctrine, as we'll see.
It is important to note that cruiser warfare bares little operational resemblance to unrestricted submarine warfare that would become a feature of 20th Century naval strategy but is more akin to the Confederate Navy's commerce raiding against the Union in America's Civil War, 1860-65 or the ill-prepared German effort in 1914. The aim was never to create a hermetic seal against trade but rather to inflate the cost of doing business for the belligerent to the point where captain's of industry and trade would impel their government to settle the issues that caused the war in the first place. Guerre de course as it evolved was very much linked to free-market capitalism and the target was the enemy's wealth as opposed to their stomachs. This should be kept in mind throughout what follows, it was never intended to be a strategy for total war or a national fight to the death but as an aid to facilitate winning a limited war by bringing the opponent to some favourable negotiated settlement.
The Anglo-French marriage of convenience during the Crimean War 1854-56 fell apart pretty quickly over a variety of issues; so much so that Great Britain stood by benevolently neutral to Prussia in 1870-71 as France’s Second Empire was crushed totally. The large and well-equipped French Navy had proved relatively useless and the close blockade of the Hanseatic ports was rendered irrelevant with the collapse of the French Army and the subsequent siege of Paris. In the post-war years the Navy struggled to find a role but it was also blessed with some skilled designers and forward thinking leadership. France led the way in the development of the submarine and torpedo craft as equalizers for the inferior force since they knew that the Royal Navy would always be materially stronger. To remain relevance, the French Navy needed an edge.
In 1884-85 France fought a successful but undeclared colonial war against Qing China, the prize would become French Indochina and include what is today all of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The Navy was responsible for security in the colonies and it was very much a naval war, which provided a generation of French naval officers with real combat experience against both ships and fortifications. Flushed with victory and sporting promotions newly won under fire, the Jeune Ecole grew out of a sense that the Navy was indeed relevant and could even contest against the greatest navy in the world, the British Royal Navy. But how?
Since technology was advancing in leaps and bounds, taking advantage of developments in the naval sphere was obviously important. The British government had intentionally had adopted a low-risk industrial strategy to manage technological change in the defence sectors with the result that British private enterprise was frequently selling arms to foreign powers that were superior to those sold to the Crown. This was evident in the reversion to muzzle-loading guns in the 1850's until the 1878 Thunderer accident caused Britain to finally adapt reasonably mature breech-loading technologies. The principle was based on the assumption that Britain's wealth and industrial capacity always allowed it to successfully play catch up as when HMS Warrior had trumped the French l'Gloire in 1861 at the dawn of the ironclad era. However, the Royal Navy showed very little interest in technologies that diverged from the big-gunned ironclad battleship so France largely cornered the market on the development of Robert Whitehead's locomotive torpedo, the fast torpedo boat, the electrically powered, torpedo-armed sous-marin and so the Jeune Ecole was born. The essence of the strategy was that clouds of torpedo boats and stealthy submersibles would attack the blockading British fleets and allow the escape of purpose-built cruisers to get on Britain's sea lanes and make the cost of doing business in wartime unsustainable - a trade war or guerre de course.
There were two major strategic goals of guerre de course:
1. Shipping losses would compound maritime insurance rates to the point where ship-owners needed to keep their ships in port OR charge such premiums that inflation and increased costs would wreck foreign trade; and
2. Trade would very quickly flee from British-owned shipping to neutral ships depriving the Crown of considerable tax revenue.
However, the existent Prize Rules potentially made carriage of belligerent goods by neutrals an expensive prospect even if the cargo did not meet the test for contraband. Contraband at that time was ill defined and essentially exempted food stuffs but any neutral ship carrying goods bound for a belligerent port could be legally seized and sent to a prize court for adjudication. Even if subsequently released and allowed to proceed to the destination, the delays involved would increase costs of the goods dramatically and it was believed that an effective guerre de course campaign would soon effectively destroy British overseas trade. With domestic shipping tied up due to prohibitive insurance costs and neutral carriers unwilling to carry British goods, a reasonable peace could be concluded. This was the theory behind the guerre de course.
To that end, in addition to torpedo boats and submarines for harbour defence France embarked on a building program of large, fast and long-range armoured cruisers starting around 1890 with Dupuy de Lome, named for a famous French naval architect. At 6300 tons and 20-kts she was superior to any of the Royal Navy's Naval Defence Act cruiser designs and her role was guerre de course. Other, more advanced designs would follow but the Navy was handicapped by a bewildering succession of governments and naval ministers that made long term planning and building programs impossible. So the fleet that evolved largely consisted of one-off designs with different capabilities and characteristics. Other nations saw the potential of the guerre de course as a counter to the expanding Royal Navy after the 1889 Naval Defence Act defined the Two-Power Standard and one of them was Russia. Not yet an ally of France, in 1890 Russia ordered Rurik, which with France’s Dupuy de Lome caused the British to build two massively expensive white elephants, HMS Powerful and Terrible for trade protection.
Focused on the battleship, the British identified three counters to what Professor Marder called the “Guerre de Course Nightmare”. These were:
1. Cruisers capable of engaging and destroying any raiders;
2. Government underwritten war insurance; and
3. Convoys.
The Admiralty was wary of escalating warship size as larger displacements brought increased costs and fewer ships could be purchased with the Naval estimates. Fallout from the Victoria/Camperdown disaster of 1893 coupled with a global economic slump for much of the decade also meant that building big, fast, well-armed cruisers to hunt the French guerre de course armoured ships proved difficult to incorporate into the naval estimates, dominated as they were by the Revenge and Majestic battleship orders. So the first option did not really start to bear fruit until the Bacchante class of 1898 and by the time they entered service with the Fleet, a political rapprochement with France was on the horizon.
The other options met spirited resistance at the level of the Board of Trade, MP’s and ship owners alike. Owners felt that government insurance meant that the government would have a say in the movements of privately owned vessels with a consequent impact on revenue. Convoys required long delays where loaded ships produced no revenue and were thought to reduce imports/exports by up to 25% (in WW1 the figure was closer to 33% at times). The Admiralty however was keen on both schemes at least in part because the protected cruisers of the Naval Defence Act programs were of little use actively hunting commerce raiders due to deficiencies in speed and range. Efforts to create the government insurance scheme foundered in parliament and without cooperation of the Board of Trade and ship owners alike; there was no practical means of preparing to run convoys before a war with France (and Russia after 1894 the Franco-Russian Alliance). During the Fashoda Crisis of 1898, there was a very real fear at Whitehall that a French guerre de course could effectively nullify the huge material superiority of the Royal Navy. In the event the French Navy suffered an internal meltdown starting in 1902 and largely abandoned both the Jeune Ecole and guerre de course and by April 1904 Britain and France were best buddies.
In Russia, the Navy had a tradition of coast defence so Rurik and the follow-on armoured cruisers Rossyia, Gromoboi and later Bayan did not really fit into the battleship-centered, coastal defence oriented Fleet. Lacking a reasonable role in the Baltic or Black Sea it was probably inevitable then that these big, long ranged and powerful cruisers ended up in the Far East for the war with Japan. It is difficult to determine what wartime role was intended for the cruiser squadron at Vladivostok. Is it significant that the Russian Navy had 100-admirals on the books in 1904 and yet chose a mere Captain 1st Rank to command this powerful, independent squadron? Only after Captain Reytsenshteyn had scored some early successes raiding in the Sea of Japan was a flag officer, RAdm Karl Jessen sent to command the Vladivostok cruisers. This may be reading too much into the slender evidence trail but it certainly can be interpreted that nobody wanted to attempt guerre de course operations until somebody junior took the risks and proved them effective. Thereafter senior admirals flocked to Vladivostok to partake in a cruiser sortie and claim success for their feats while Jessen carried the weight and as events demonstrated, the responsibility.
In any case, the limited trade war in the Sea of Japan certainly caused the Japanese much grief and treasure. A foray to raid the Japanese east coast and the western Pacific in July 1904 closed maritime traffic into Tokyo and Yokohama for a time, sent maritime insurance rates spiraling upwards and gave Japan’s creditors the jitters. It should also be noted that the Battle of Ulsan on 14 August 1904 was not the result of Russian commerce raiding but came about from an entirely conventional support sortie that demonstrates the shallowness of Russian naval thought at the time. RAdm Jessen was ordered to meet RAdm Vitgeft’s Pacific Squadron, which was known to have sailed from Port Arthur on 10 August but whose fate was unknown. Any sort of rational analysis of the situation would have determined that Vitgeft's sortie even if successful, would have drawn VAdm Kamimura’s force into the Tsushima Straits at precisely the time and place where Jessen was ordered to go. Outnumbered, outgunned and slower than Kamimura’s Second Fleet (when Rurik was present) it is difficult to see how the Cruiser Squadron could provide decisive support to Vitgeft’s survivors. On the other hand a simultaneous raid by Jessen’s force on Hokkaido (for example) rather than a sortie into the Korea Straits might have drawn off Kamimura at this vital point in time. Of course this did not happen and Jessen sailed right into the arms of a superior force, which effectively ended the guerre de course campaign in the Sea of Japan.
Could an extensive and deliberate guerre de course campaign have defeated the Japanese?
This is a difficult question to answer but it should be noticed that the guerre de course strategy was predicated on a number of assumptions that could not be guaranteed in the event of war. The countermeasures as noted above were reasonably straightforward and fitted well with the Royal Navy’s trade protection role. The next war would show that one of the very first acts of parliament in August 1914 was the institution of government underwritten maritime insurance and the ship owner’s fears of the Trade Division of the Admiralty micromanaging their business never materialized. Also the Admiralty was quick to institute convoys or hold shipping in port until escorts could arrive in the face of a proximate surface threat. War did not cause neutrals to abandon British shipping and the tonnage loss to surface raiders in 1914 was less than the tonnage acquired from seizing Austro-German shipping at the start of the war.
However, Japan in 1904-05 was not Great Britain of 1914 and the Japanese situation was far different with regards to the nature of her overseas trade and merchant marine and the perceived roles of the Navy. The vast majority of Japanese flagged merchant shipping assets were small, coastal vessels, generally less than 1000 GRT. These ships constituted the majority of the victims of the Russian raiders with some significant exceptions. Most Japanese trade was carried on foreign, primarily British ships and a significant percentage of the naval transports were chartered from non-Japanese lines. An effective and prolonged guerre de course effort may well have caused the neutrals to abandon high-risk operations in Japanese waters particularly as there were legal issues with insurance brokers as to whether coverage would be provided in a war zone (it was but at greatly increased premiums). The loss of foreign shipping may well have paralyzed the Japanese economy, forcing Japan to the bargaining table at a disadvantage. Ironically, this might have occurred in spite of military success on land since the major movements of ground forces into Korea and Manchuria were closely escorted by elements of Third Fleet.
It is often written that the Japanese Navy mimicked the RN or adapted the dogma of Mahan with whole-hearted abandon but these are difficult points of view to sustain in the period up to and following the Russo-Japanese war. Rather the ever-pragmatic Japanese took what they liked from other navies and incorporated their own requirements, culture and history to create something entirely unique. For example it can be argued that due to the overall failure of the Russian attacks on Japanese commerce in 1904 they essentially rejected trade protection as a principle role for the Navy while considering that initial, decisive action to pin an enemy to their bases was a prerequisite for successful war. Tactical speed and the biggest practical guns (as demonstrated at Ulsan) were the main attributes of the successful capital ship design and night fighting with the torpedo (as at Tsushima) was the equalizer when facing a superior or disorganized enemy. All of these lessons were derived from Japan’s two naval wars and would come home to roost when Japan’s faced off against the USN in 1941.
As for the Russian’s, it would appear that they may have missed a tremendous opportunity by failing to understand Japan’s potential vulnerability to guerre de course. The Admiralty in St. Petersburg failed to appreciate that they had many of the tools and that taking the risks inherent to a war on trade might have brought great operational rewards. There was little or no training, logistical or doctrinal preparation for a guerre de course and it is mostly to the credit of a handful of comparatively junior officers, largely making it up as they went along that there was any success at all. Defeat and disaster in the RJW doomed the Russian Navy after 1905 and not until deep into the Soviet era did the Navy finally get an achievable role along with the doctrine, training and assets to fulfill it.
Thanks for reading.
References consulted include:
The Anatomy of British Sea Power 1880-1905 - Arthur Marder
The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery - Paul Kennedy
Power at Sea Vol 1: The Age of Navalism 1890-1918 - Lisle Rose
Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy 1887-1941 - DC Evans & MR Peattie
The Russo-Japanese Naval War - Piotr Olender
And others…
First we should take a look at trade warfare of the period, often known by its French title of guerre de course but also Cruiser Warfare and commerce raiding; what follows will use the terms interchangeably for convenience. Collectively the entire strategy became doctrinal in the French Navy under the umbrella of the Jeune Ecole movement, which dominated that service from the 1880's until about 1902. Other navies took assorted bits and pieces from the guerre de course doctrine, as we'll see.
It is important to note that cruiser warfare bares little operational resemblance to unrestricted submarine warfare that would become a feature of 20th Century naval strategy but is more akin to the Confederate Navy's commerce raiding against the Union in America's Civil War, 1860-65 or the ill-prepared German effort in 1914. The aim was never to create a hermetic seal against trade but rather to inflate the cost of doing business for the belligerent to the point where captain's of industry and trade would impel their government to settle the issues that caused the war in the first place. Guerre de course as it evolved was very much linked to free-market capitalism and the target was the enemy's wealth as opposed to their stomachs. This should be kept in mind throughout what follows, it was never intended to be a strategy for total war or a national fight to the death but as an aid to facilitate winning a limited war by bringing the opponent to some favourable negotiated settlement.
The Anglo-French marriage of convenience during the Crimean War 1854-56 fell apart pretty quickly over a variety of issues; so much so that Great Britain stood by benevolently neutral to Prussia in 1870-71 as France’s Second Empire was crushed totally. The large and well-equipped French Navy had proved relatively useless and the close blockade of the Hanseatic ports was rendered irrelevant with the collapse of the French Army and the subsequent siege of Paris. In the post-war years the Navy struggled to find a role but it was also blessed with some skilled designers and forward thinking leadership. France led the way in the development of the submarine and torpedo craft as equalizers for the inferior force since they knew that the Royal Navy would always be materially stronger. To remain relevance, the French Navy needed an edge.
In 1884-85 France fought a successful but undeclared colonial war against Qing China, the prize would become French Indochina and include what is today all of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The Navy was responsible for security in the colonies and it was very much a naval war, which provided a generation of French naval officers with real combat experience against both ships and fortifications. Flushed with victory and sporting promotions newly won under fire, the Jeune Ecole grew out of a sense that the Navy was indeed relevant and could even contest against the greatest navy in the world, the British Royal Navy. But how?
Since technology was advancing in leaps and bounds, taking advantage of developments in the naval sphere was obviously important. The British government had intentionally had adopted a low-risk industrial strategy to manage technological change in the defence sectors with the result that British private enterprise was frequently selling arms to foreign powers that were superior to those sold to the Crown. This was evident in the reversion to muzzle-loading guns in the 1850's until the 1878 Thunderer accident caused Britain to finally adapt reasonably mature breech-loading technologies. The principle was based on the assumption that Britain's wealth and industrial capacity always allowed it to successfully play catch up as when HMS Warrior had trumped the French l'Gloire in 1861 at the dawn of the ironclad era. However, the Royal Navy showed very little interest in technologies that diverged from the big-gunned ironclad battleship so France largely cornered the market on the development of Robert Whitehead's locomotive torpedo, the fast torpedo boat, the electrically powered, torpedo-armed sous-marin and so the Jeune Ecole was born. The essence of the strategy was that clouds of torpedo boats and stealthy submersibles would attack the blockading British fleets and allow the escape of purpose-built cruisers to get on Britain's sea lanes and make the cost of doing business in wartime unsustainable - a trade war or guerre de course.
There were two major strategic goals of guerre de course:
1. Shipping losses would compound maritime insurance rates to the point where ship-owners needed to keep their ships in port OR charge such premiums that inflation and increased costs would wreck foreign trade; and
2. Trade would very quickly flee from British-owned shipping to neutral ships depriving the Crown of considerable tax revenue.
However, the existent Prize Rules potentially made carriage of belligerent goods by neutrals an expensive prospect even if the cargo did not meet the test for contraband. Contraband at that time was ill defined and essentially exempted food stuffs but any neutral ship carrying goods bound for a belligerent port could be legally seized and sent to a prize court for adjudication. Even if subsequently released and allowed to proceed to the destination, the delays involved would increase costs of the goods dramatically and it was believed that an effective guerre de course campaign would soon effectively destroy British overseas trade. With domestic shipping tied up due to prohibitive insurance costs and neutral carriers unwilling to carry British goods, a reasonable peace could be concluded. This was the theory behind the guerre de course.
To that end, in addition to torpedo boats and submarines for harbour defence France embarked on a building program of large, fast and long-range armoured cruisers starting around 1890 with Dupuy de Lome, named for a famous French naval architect. At 6300 tons and 20-kts she was superior to any of the Royal Navy's Naval Defence Act cruiser designs and her role was guerre de course. Other, more advanced designs would follow but the Navy was handicapped by a bewildering succession of governments and naval ministers that made long term planning and building programs impossible. So the fleet that evolved largely consisted of one-off designs with different capabilities and characteristics. Other nations saw the potential of the guerre de course as a counter to the expanding Royal Navy after the 1889 Naval Defence Act defined the Two-Power Standard and one of them was Russia. Not yet an ally of France, in 1890 Russia ordered Rurik, which with France’s Dupuy de Lome caused the British to build two massively expensive white elephants, HMS Powerful and Terrible for trade protection.
Focused on the battleship, the British identified three counters to what Professor Marder called the “Guerre de Course Nightmare”. These were:
1. Cruisers capable of engaging and destroying any raiders;
2. Government underwritten war insurance; and
3. Convoys.
The Admiralty was wary of escalating warship size as larger displacements brought increased costs and fewer ships could be purchased with the Naval estimates. Fallout from the Victoria/Camperdown disaster of 1893 coupled with a global economic slump for much of the decade also meant that building big, fast, well-armed cruisers to hunt the French guerre de course armoured ships proved difficult to incorporate into the naval estimates, dominated as they were by the Revenge and Majestic battleship orders. So the first option did not really start to bear fruit until the Bacchante class of 1898 and by the time they entered service with the Fleet, a political rapprochement with France was on the horizon.
The other options met spirited resistance at the level of the Board of Trade, MP’s and ship owners alike. Owners felt that government insurance meant that the government would have a say in the movements of privately owned vessels with a consequent impact on revenue. Convoys required long delays where loaded ships produced no revenue and were thought to reduce imports/exports by up to 25% (in WW1 the figure was closer to 33% at times). The Admiralty however was keen on both schemes at least in part because the protected cruisers of the Naval Defence Act programs were of little use actively hunting commerce raiders due to deficiencies in speed and range. Efforts to create the government insurance scheme foundered in parliament and without cooperation of the Board of Trade and ship owners alike; there was no practical means of preparing to run convoys before a war with France (and Russia after 1894 the Franco-Russian Alliance). During the Fashoda Crisis of 1898, there was a very real fear at Whitehall that a French guerre de course could effectively nullify the huge material superiority of the Royal Navy. In the event the French Navy suffered an internal meltdown starting in 1902 and largely abandoned both the Jeune Ecole and guerre de course and by April 1904 Britain and France were best buddies.
In Russia, the Navy had a tradition of coast defence so Rurik and the follow-on armoured cruisers Rossyia, Gromoboi and later Bayan did not really fit into the battleship-centered, coastal defence oriented Fleet. Lacking a reasonable role in the Baltic or Black Sea it was probably inevitable then that these big, long ranged and powerful cruisers ended up in the Far East for the war with Japan. It is difficult to determine what wartime role was intended for the cruiser squadron at Vladivostok. Is it significant that the Russian Navy had 100-admirals on the books in 1904 and yet chose a mere Captain 1st Rank to command this powerful, independent squadron? Only after Captain Reytsenshteyn had scored some early successes raiding in the Sea of Japan was a flag officer, RAdm Karl Jessen sent to command the Vladivostok cruisers. This may be reading too much into the slender evidence trail but it certainly can be interpreted that nobody wanted to attempt guerre de course operations until somebody junior took the risks and proved them effective. Thereafter senior admirals flocked to Vladivostok to partake in a cruiser sortie and claim success for their feats while Jessen carried the weight and as events demonstrated, the responsibility.
In any case, the limited trade war in the Sea of Japan certainly caused the Japanese much grief and treasure. A foray to raid the Japanese east coast and the western Pacific in July 1904 closed maritime traffic into Tokyo and Yokohama for a time, sent maritime insurance rates spiraling upwards and gave Japan’s creditors the jitters. It should also be noted that the Battle of Ulsan on 14 August 1904 was not the result of Russian commerce raiding but came about from an entirely conventional support sortie that demonstrates the shallowness of Russian naval thought at the time. RAdm Jessen was ordered to meet RAdm Vitgeft’s Pacific Squadron, which was known to have sailed from Port Arthur on 10 August but whose fate was unknown. Any sort of rational analysis of the situation would have determined that Vitgeft's sortie even if successful, would have drawn VAdm Kamimura’s force into the Tsushima Straits at precisely the time and place where Jessen was ordered to go. Outnumbered, outgunned and slower than Kamimura’s Second Fleet (when Rurik was present) it is difficult to see how the Cruiser Squadron could provide decisive support to Vitgeft’s survivors. On the other hand a simultaneous raid by Jessen’s force on Hokkaido (for example) rather than a sortie into the Korea Straits might have drawn off Kamimura at this vital point in time. Of course this did not happen and Jessen sailed right into the arms of a superior force, which effectively ended the guerre de course campaign in the Sea of Japan.
Could an extensive and deliberate guerre de course campaign have defeated the Japanese?
This is a difficult question to answer but it should be noticed that the guerre de course strategy was predicated on a number of assumptions that could not be guaranteed in the event of war. The countermeasures as noted above were reasonably straightforward and fitted well with the Royal Navy’s trade protection role. The next war would show that one of the very first acts of parliament in August 1914 was the institution of government underwritten maritime insurance and the ship owner’s fears of the Trade Division of the Admiralty micromanaging their business never materialized. Also the Admiralty was quick to institute convoys or hold shipping in port until escorts could arrive in the face of a proximate surface threat. War did not cause neutrals to abandon British shipping and the tonnage loss to surface raiders in 1914 was less than the tonnage acquired from seizing Austro-German shipping at the start of the war.
However, Japan in 1904-05 was not Great Britain of 1914 and the Japanese situation was far different with regards to the nature of her overseas trade and merchant marine and the perceived roles of the Navy. The vast majority of Japanese flagged merchant shipping assets were small, coastal vessels, generally less than 1000 GRT. These ships constituted the majority of the victims of the Russian raiders with some significant exceptions. Most Japanese trade was carried on foreign, primarily British ships and a significant percentage of the naval transports were chartered from non-Japanese lines. An effective and prolonged guerre de course effort may well have caused the neutrals to abandon high-risk operations in Japanese waters particularly as there were legal issues with insurance brokers as to whether coverage would be provided in a war zone (it was but at greatly increased premiums). The loss of foreign shipping may well have paralyzed the Japanese economy, forcing Japan to the bargaining table at a disadvantage. Ironically, this might have occurred in spite of military success on land since the major movements of ground forces into Korea and Manchuria were closely escorted by elements of Third Fleet.
It is often written that the Japanese Navy mimicked the RN or adapted the dogma of Mahan with whole-hearted abandon but these are difficult points of view to sustain in the period up to and following the Russo-Japanese war. Rather the ever-pragmatic Japanese took what they liked from other navies and incorporated their own requirements, culture and history to create something entirely unique. For example it can be argued that due to the overall failure of the Russian attacks on Japanese commerce in 1904 they essentially rejected trade protection as a principle role for the Navy while considering that initial, decisive action to pin an enemy to their bases was a prerequisite for successful war. Tactical speed and the biggest practical guns (as demonstrated at Ulsan) were the main attributes of the successful capital ship design and night fighting with the torpedo (as at Tsushima) was the equalizer when facing a superior or disorganized enemy. All of these lessons were derived from Japan’s two naval wars and would come home to roost when Japan’s faced off against the USN in 1941.
As for the Russian’s, it would appear that they may have missed a tremendous opportunity by failing to understand Japan’s potential vulnerability to guerre de course. The Admiralty in St. Petersburg failed to appreciate that they had many of the tools and that taking the risks inherent to a war on trade might have brought great operational rewards. There was little or no training, logistical or doctrinal preparation for a guerre de course and it is mostly to the credit of a handful of comparatively junior officers, largely making it up as they went along that there was any success at all. Defeat and disaster in the RJW doomed the Russian Navy after 1905 and not until deep into the Soviet era did the Navy finally get an achievable role along with the doctrine, training and assets to fulfill it.
Thanks for reading.
References consulted include:
The Anatomy of British Sea Power 1880-1905 - Arthur Marder
The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery - Paul Kennedy
Power at Sea Vol 1: The Age of Navalism 1890-1918 - Lisle Rose
Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy 1887-1941 - DC Evans & MR Peattie
The Russo-Japanese Naval War - Piotr Olender
And others…
