A large warship sinks rapidly after detonating a sea mine. Unwary crewmen are swept from her deck as a water spout erupts at her bow and the ship lists sharply to starboard. Below can be seen the remnants of the mine and the mortal wound its explosive charge has made in the hull. Aspects in the illustration of the ship; its fighting tops and bow scroll mark this as a pre-dreadnought design, and the ship’s nationality is given away by the large cross of St. Andrew fluttering forward; the ensign of the Tsar’s Imperial Navy. The style of the painting is obviously Japanese and its lengthy title is self-explanatory but for the name of the vessel involved: “Picture of the Eighth Attack on Port Arthur. The Flagship of Russia was destroyed by the torpedo of Our Navy and Admiral Makaroff Drowned”. That vessel was the battleship Petropavlovsk and her loss was one of the turning points in the Russo-Japanese War as it deprived the Russian navy of its most gifted commander.
Stepan Osipovich Makarov was 55 years old when he assumed command of Russia’s Pacific Fleet. The son of a petty officer, he had first gone to sea at 14 as a naval cadet. Makarov’s military reputation rested primarily on his role in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. An early advocate of torpedo weaponry, Makarov had commanded the Grand Duke Konstantin, a passenger steamship converted to his own designs as mother-ship to four small torpedo boats. These vessels, armed with spar and, later, self-propelled torpedoes, launched a number of daring raids on Turkish ports in the Black Sea, and played a critical role in restricting the actions of its powerful ironclad fleet, for which the commander was promoted and decorated. Makarov circumnavigated the world in the late 80s, aboard the old screw corvette Vitiaz, and did so again in 1895, by which time he was the Russian Navy’s youngest Admiral and Chief of Fleet Training.
A man of ‘colossal energy’, Makarov had gained recognition for his inventiveness at an early stage, having designed a prototype for a collision mat while still a junior officer. This thirst for technical innovation continued throughout his career. His self-patented ‘Makarov tips’ were an early form of armour-piercing shell. He supervised the design and construction of the Ermak, the world’s first Polar ice-breaker, which he also commanded on Arctic voyages in 1899 and 1901, and it seems likely he’d contributed to the development of the Amur and Yenisei, the world’s first purpose-built mine-layers, completed during the same period [1]. As renowned for his scholarship as much as his seamanship, Makarov published numerous academic papers throughout his career on oceanography, hydrology, naval training, and military strategy. He set out his own tenets for steam-age warfare in a book called Discussion of Questions of Naval Tactics, published in 1897. The book included axioms such as “the maintenance of proper spirit on shipboard is a matter of the highest importance” and “firing without aiming is the best way to lose”. Makarov also adhered to Nelson’s observation before Trafalgar that “No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy”, and Napoleon’s that “you must tell cowards that they are brave men if you wish them to be so.” [2]. He was to live and die by these tenets at Port Arthur.
Port Arthur was named after the British frigate captain William C. Arthur, who had put into the tightly enclosed, well-protected anchorage during the 2nd Opium War. Port Arthur lies towards the end of what is today the Liaoning Peninsula in China, which separates the Sea of Bohai from the Yellow Sea. It is only a few miles south of the city of Dalian, which under Russian occupation was known as Dalny.
The Liaoning Peninsula had been captured by the Japanese in 1895, but they had been forced to relinquish control of the area after diplomatic pressure from the Great Powers, who had their own designs on the region. After the Japanese forces vacated Port Arthur, much to their chagrin, the Russian Navy moved in; eager for an ice-free port in the East. (Vladisvostok could only be kept ice-free in winter with the use of ice-breakers.) By the end of the century, Britain, France and Germany had all followed Russia in occupying strategic parts of the Chinese coast. Japanese resentment at its own exclusion from ‘slicing the Chinese melon’ was the primary cause of the new conflict a decade later, by which time the rising Asian nation had a squadron of British-built battleships powerful enough to challenge the Russians, commanded by a veteran of the earlier war, Admiral Heihachiro Togo.
By the time of Makarov’s arrival at Port Arthur on 7th March 1904, the Russian Pacific Fleet had already suffered a number of operational setbacks. On 9th February, a flotilla of Japanese torpedo boats had carried out a surprise night-time attack on the port, which had seriously damaged the battleships Retvisan and Tsarevich. Further losses had befallen the fleet the next day in an action off the Korean port of Chemulpo, in which a cruiser and gunboat had been scuttled to avoid their capture by a Japanese amphibious force. A self-inflicted disaster had occurred shortly afterwards. In an attempt to deter further Japanese naval attacks, the minelayer Yenisei had been sent out in company with the small cruiser Boyarin to mine the approaches to Dalny Bay. However, in an effort to avoid a mine that had broken loose, the ship inadvertently veered into her own minefield. A resultant catastrophic explosion sank the 3,000t vessel in only 20 minutes, and while attempting to rescue survivors, the Boyarin also detonated a friendly mine and was eventually lost.
Further catastrophic losses were only prevented by Port Arthur’s formidable array of gun batteries that had been sited on the hills enclosing the harbour. These weapons, which had a range of 6-7 miles were a powerful deterrent to Togo, who being anxious to protect army supply lines to the east from a potential Russian naval sortie, opted to block the entrance with a handful of old merchant ships. This operation, codenamed ‘forlorn hope’ in Japanese, met strong resistance, with none of the block-ships being scuttled in the right place. Nevertheless, the loss of the destroyer Vnushitelni two days later brought to eight the number of Russian ships lost or disabled during the opening 17 days of conflict, and led Makarov’s predecessor, Admiral Oskar Victorovich Stark, to adopt a ‘risk nothing’ policy. Stark, who had reportedly been celebrating his wife’s birthday aboard his flagship Petropavlovsk at the time of the first Japanese attack, was made the scapegoat for these early Russian losses.
The Petropavlovsk, which had been launched at St. Petersburg in 1894 was commissioned in 1899 shortly after Tsar Nicholas II’s ‘Programme for the Needs of the Far East’ had been announced, authorising an expansion of the Pacific Fleet. Accordingly, this 12,000t ship and her two sisters; Poltava and Sevastopol; spent almost their entire careers in the Far Eastern theatre and formed the backbone of the 1st Pacific Squadron based at Port Arthur. The Petropavlovsk Class was based on contemporary foreign designs. Their gun layout was modelled on that of the American Indiana Class, and their secondary armament of twelve ‘quick-firing’ 6-inch guns had been designed by the French engineer Gustave Canet. The Class also had relied on foreign suppliers for its protection, the name-ship being fitted with inferior nickel-steel armour as there was an insufficient amount of the more effective Harvey and Krupp armour available for all three units.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 