On A Lighter Note, Mikasa!

I don't suppose many people have heard of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, and I don't suppose that many who do really care very much. Just another filthy, muddy squabble over incomprehensible political objectives that got a few hundred thousand young men killed while the men really responsible for the war sat on their butts in Moscow and Tokyo and wrote moving speeches.

But the war did have a bit of drama. The Japanese managed to neutralize the Russian fleet in the Pacific early on, and the only chance for Russian success in the war lay in having their Baltic Sea Fleet steam all the way around the world, eighteen thousand miles, defeat the Japanese Combined Fleet, and then drive away the Japanese merchant ships so the Japanese troops in Manchuria and Korea would be cut off.

This is a bold decision, especially when your fleet consists of slow and relatively unseaworthy battleships known collectively as pre-dreadnoughts. That means all sorts of nautical goofiness, like reciprocating machinery, mixed-caliber main armament, strange notions on armor thickness, and lots of men stained pitch-black from shoveling coal.

The Russians were doomed. They had to steam 18,000 miles to get to the battle site, and without the benefit of friendly ports along the way (they mostly replenished coal supplies by transferring coal from freighters). By the time the Russian fleet got there, their hulls were so fouled with marine growth they could barely manage a speed of nine knots, their ships were in serious need of maintenance, and crew morale had fallen to about as low as it can get before officers start being thrown overboard. Meantime the Japanese Combined Fleet rested in its anchorage at Pusan, the men rested and fit, the ships clean and well-maintained, and the fleet extensively exercised in long-range gunnery.

In the resulting battle, the Japanese lost three torpedo boats, while the Russians lost pretty much the whole schmeer. Three ships managed to get through the Japanese and reach port at Vladivostok, and a few others managed to retreat to Manila. The rest went to the bottom or surrendered to the Japanese, whose gunfire on that day was accurate and devastating.

Flagship of the fleet under Admiral Heihachiro Togo was the battleship Mikasa. It survived the battle but went on to a rough life afterwards, suffering a magazine explosion and a serious grounding, and the Japanese could have been pardoned for just scrapping the goddamned thing once and for all. But they finally gave it a thorough restoration in the 1960s and remains today the only fully restored example of a pre-dreadnought battleship in existence.

But all of this is really prelude to a bad joke that keeps circulating in my head. Every time I read about the Battle of Tsushima Straits and see the battleship Mikasa mentioned, I read it as Mikasa Sukasa.