The Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron - Voyage of the Damned

[Music] [Music] just a quick note before we go into the main topic of this week's video unfortunately there wasn't a fantastic amount of photographs taken of this particular voyage and the ships involved or at least if it was it went to the bottom of the ocean with most of the ships so unfortunately there's not a lot of extant photography available for it so the number of photos in this video will be somewhat limited compared to the regular amount that we have in various videos so I do apologize for that but hopefully it won't attract too much anyway so the first and spoiler alert last voyage of the Russian second Pacific squadron he is about as close a candidate to the appellation of voyage of the Damned as you ever likely to get but quite how did this floating disaster which literally drove some of the men involved insane and which would ultimately find its end at the Battle of Tsushima actually come about well with the outbreak of the russo-japanese war one of the first things that the Russians had found was that their pacific harbour at port arthur was actually more curse than blessing although it was a warm water port something that russia lacked in any great amounts it was relatively easily cut off from land-based support being right at the end of a peninsula and the hills surrounding the port allowed enemy artillery free range over the ships that should otherwise have been safe within or once those heights had been captured the shallow nature of the harbor mouth also meant that larger ships could only enter or exit on a high tide and to top it all off the officers present would not really fit to lead the warships stationed there into any kind of serious fight incidental losses to the Japanese fleet and mines laid by Japanese ships as well as a relatively poor start to the land campaign were painting a rather dismal picture after a few months in of the wars continuation in response the Czar Nicholas the second ascent Admiral Makarov a somewhat unconventional but a very capable and popular officer who was perhaps the best Admiral Russia had or indeed could ask for very quickly he started to turn things round and the future if not bright at least looked a lot more promising than it had but this all came to a screaming halt when the flagship of the Russian Pacific Fleet the Petropavlovsk hit a mine the explosion and flying debris decapitated Admiral Makarov and deprived Russia of one of its most capable battleships and it's best to naval commander at the same time five other Admirals had been in consideration for the role of commander of the Russian Pacific Fleet and since the Tsar was determined not to surrender Russia's hold in the Pacific to Japan he would need of course to appoint a new commander but with what was now effectively two naval squadrons in the Pacific trapped in Port Arthur and Vladivostok respectively and with both of them failing to break the Japanese blockade in order to link up at the cost of even more damaged warships it was clear that more ships would be needed as well as a new commander so the new Admiral could not simply be sent over the trans-siberian railroad as Makarov had done fortunately Russia actually had two other fleets the Baltic and Black Sea fleets and so it was from at least one of these that more warships would have to be assembled they would be named at the second Pacific squadron and then sent around the world to engage the Japanese fleet the minor issues of Russia not actually having any refueling or resupply bases in the intervening 18,000 miles the rules of war not really allowing neutral countries to provide aid on the scale that a fleet of this size would need the fact that Russia was not exactly the most popular country with most of the other imperial powers and especially with Britain which controlled most of the bases and had most of the ships that were along the projected fleet route and the fact that Russian warships were no way designed to sail this far all through tropical environments at all which of course they would encounter crossing the equator several times were to a large degree ignored and so Rear Admiral zinovy Petrovich rehearse events key was appointed to the second Pacific squadron All Things Considered he was probably the best choice the Tsar could have made although even less political than Makarov and given to furious fits of temper he was not corrupt which was itself exceptionally rare in the upper echelons of Russian naval officers at the time and remarkably fair if exceptionally demanding to his crews despite being disliked by many in the upper echelon of the Russian Navy the ships he'd commanded had always been well disciplined fast accurate with their gunnery and ready to go on a moment's notice a facts which hadn't escaped others are the fact that Roja svensk II had actually managed to impress kaiser wilhelm ii who of course had his own naval ambitions at the time during a visit to Russia also didn't hurt his chances for appointment and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more popular Admiral amongst the crews because although he was given to a beating crewman who disappointed him with his fists the crew also knew that pretty much the only thing keeping him from laying an equal smackdown on officers who disappointed him or mistreated their men was the fact that most of the upper echelons of russian naval officer ship at the time were connected in some way to the russian imperial court and so beating the ever living daylights out of them would be somewhat deleterious to anybody's careers a total of 45 ships from the Russian Baltic Fleet were being prepared a force that was on paper strong enough to break the Imperial Japanese Navy blockade and with it end the campaign since the invading Japanese troops were almost totally reliant on Seabourn resupply to address the issue of the ship's fuel supplies being hopelessly inadequate a plan was designed for freighters charted from the German Hamburg America line to refuel the ships either at sea or in neutral ports that could be persuaded to allow it the fact that coaling a ship was a difficult exhausting and hazardous task when tied up in dock and nobody had even tried refuelling an entire coal-powered fleet at sea was you guessed it ignored the ships themselves were also something of an odd mix many of them were influenced by French designs and had a pronounced tumblehome hull which was proven quite the stability concern across both French and Russian Navy's as the ships had come into service quite a number of them were also significantly overweight which had the effect of dropping the main armor belt largely below the waterline and the secondary and tertiary batteries then coming dangerously close to the water on a number of vessels work quality was also not exactly up to scratch the new battleship or yeol was fitting out in preparation for joining the second Pacific squadron until someone removed some of the sheathing forgot that battleships do actually need their hulls to be intact to float and went home for the day leaving the ship to sink whilst anchored in Kronstadt harbor which necessitated the ship being refloated and repaired before it was ready to depart some of the ships were new and untested whilst others were old and verging on obsolete still others were basically refitted aristocratic yachts and patrol vessels and auxilary cruisers entirely unsuited to war which had received a few random guns bolted on where they would fit anyway and any idea of asking for real for smuntz who was put off by the likely candidates even more obsolete ironclad vessels and coastal defence units which were swinging a tanker across the bay to compound matters russ has vents key was told his ships would receive enough ammunition for a major battle and a small amount of reserve but this would not be enough for gunnery practice on the way let's briefly take a look at some of the ships involved the primary assets of the second pacific squadron were five modern battleships the print Suvorov the Alexander the third the Borodino the RL and the Oh Celia paya the first four were brand new Borodino class battleships and all five of them were capable of 18 knots there were two older battleships Sicily velikiy and Navarre n which could make fifteen knots on a good day with a following wind there were four relatively fast modern cruisers the Oleg Aurora as M chug and he's a murad and the Dmitri Donskoy which was 21 years old and getting a bit long in the tooth Svetlana and Alma's were fairly new and fairly fast but they were the aforementioned converted aristocratic yachts and their armor was non-existent the protected cruisers were Ural kuben Tareq Ariane and type nur and were as the name suggests for steamers that had random gun slapped onto them nine torpedo boats a hospital ship several supply ships and an icebreaker were assigned to escort the larger vessels and while we're on the subject let's briefly discuss the names of the ships so the battleships as with most nations were usually associated with something grand and important prince Suvarov was named after a famous Russian general Borodino was named after a battle with Napoleon or silly abaya had in the name of a warrior monk back in the 14th tree the Alexander the third was the previous Czar or L meant eagle and of course eagle was the symbol of Imperial Russia and navarran was a named after a more recent naval battle against the Turks which had also been fairly successful and likewise for the cruisers Oleg had been one of the earliest Viking Prince's to rule Russia Aurora was of course the Greek goddess of dawn zem chug apparently means Pearl in Russian ISM Rood meant emerald and almas meant diamond and of course he had the dmitry donskoy who was a russian prince who defeated the Tartars again back in the 14th century the names of the torpedo boats were slightly different you can get an idea of the flavor of their names by looking at three of them blini missed three and Madhavi which meant wild fast and reckless I actually quite liked those names for destroyers with all that said the the list of issues with the ships didn't end with their age many of the rank-and-file were conscripts from central Russia and the fleet had obviously spent most of its winter locked in ice there was very limited time to train a crew base whose educational standards were not exactly brilliant to start with and many of whom until recently had never actually even seen the sea let alone imagined being locked in a gigantic metal box and taken away from land for months at a time one officer in the forming fleet complained that one half of this lot need to be taught everything because they know nothing and the other half also need to be taught everything because they forgotten everything and on the rare occasions they do remember anything it's obsolete and out-of-date and of course with a group of men this large in 1903 sure there were inevitably going to be some members of various revolutionary groups who tried to stir up unrest amongst the crews you might wonder why was the Russian Baltic Fleet in such a sorry state well it was because most of the experienced manpower in the Russian Navy was either down in the Black Sea Fleet or had already been sent to the Far East with the first Pacific squadron the officers themselves were scarcely any better in many cases with Ross has vents key who was one of the few men in the entire fleet who had even a little bit of warfighting experience upon seeing the magnitude of the task ahead and not entirely thrilled with the task assigned took two describing some of his senior subordinates as a manure sack and a vast empty space and this was before that even set sail the situation wasn't helped by a number of his officers being outright insubordinate as we said before Russ's vents key had in the past commanded very well disciplined ships some of the finest in the Russian Navy but now he had cruiser captains who were deliberately anchoring their ships in the shadow of other battleships relative to the flagship specifically so they could sneak off undetected to go and spend their nights ashore getting drunk this was therefore something of an uphill struggle when it came to actually getting anything done some months later just before the northern ice floes began to set in again the second pacific squadron would set sail the flavor of the voyage was set almost immediately as the flagship ran aground and one of the escorting cruisers lost its anchor and chain whilst the fleet waited for the flagship to refloat itself and for the cruiser to retrieve the misplaced anchor a destroyer accident he rammed one of the app other battleships and had to return to port for repairs with these minor issues overcome the fleet gradually made its way across the Baltic to the Danish coast where the first of many hilariously misinformed panics began to spread in this case hysterical sailors began to yell that they were all doomed correct because there was a fleet of Japanese torpedo boats waiting for them at the narrowest point between Denmark and Sweden incorrect the small matters that Japan didn't have enough torpedo boats to constitute a fleet and that torpedo boats weren't known for either speeds in excess of 300 knots nor a teen thousand mile operational ranges which would have been needed to get to this position at this time were again ignored in favor of what people wanted to believe a few days later the fleet damaged the Danish Collier's that had supplied them through collisions and inept manoeuvring and other ships davits broke off and it's Qatar fell overboard and sank whilst the icebreaker that had been assigned to the fleet was handled so poorly that Rosa's rensky actually fired several shots across its bow to make it stop after it refused to acknowledge the Admiral signals he then sent it home this voyage would be a unique personal hell for one eugene s poly Tov ski a very bright and responsible man who was serving as the fleet's chief engineer at the relatively young age of 30 he would now find himself crawling about in the hold of the briefs tree seeing two repairs throughout the whole voyage poor poly Tov ski would end up dealing with repairs nearly every day constantly moving from ship to ship holding on to ropes ladders and anything else he could get his hands on whilst boarding vessels in stormy mid-ocean seas often - very little gratitude seeing as he was after all a mere engineer and not one of the aristocratic officers further rumors began to spread the Japanese had mined the seas the Japanese submarines were nearby and so on fed up Rosa's rensky tried to calm them all down by issuing an order that no vessel of any sort must be allowed to get in amongst the fleet right on cue a small fishing boat carrying messages from the Tsar appeared the hysterical gun crews of course opened fire a short while later Rosa's Fenske was receiving the fisherman aboard his flagship who came with the news that for his troubles he had been promoted for fight to Vice Admiral the gunnery on the way in had been so bad that the combined firepower of dozens of warships had not so much as scratched the fishing boat at this point in our story we first meet the fleet repair ship Kamchatka who everyone would soon become regrettably familiar with her entry into our account here was her signal that she was under attack by torpedo boats when she was asked how many she replied about eight from all directions eventually someone twigged to the fact that absolutely nobody else could see so much as a seagull let alone any exceptionally lost Japanese torpedo boats and when nothing actually happened Kamchatka refused to say that it was a false alarm only that it had altered call and the torpedo boats had gone away having survived attacks from phantom Japanese torpedo boats and submarines and having negotiated a non-existent minefield the squadron sailed into the North Sea surely in this lovely expanse of open grey water nothing could possibly go wrong well it was at this point that they came across the whole trawler fishing fleet out on the dogger Bank clearly and the profiles on the slow-moving trawlers with their fearsome armament of fishing nets matched fast load torpedo boats and concluding that another fleet of Japanese torpedo boats was about to attack the Russians opened fire shells splashed down everywhere a number of Russian ships signaled that they've been hit by torpedoes and on one battleship some of the crew donned life belts and lay prone on the deck preparing to sink whilst others charged around madly swinging cutlasses and wielding pistols yelling that the ship was being boarded by the Japanese which caused even more panic the Russian battleships of course continued firing finally hitting something they managed to cause damage to four rather bewildered British trawlers and sank another one a column of seven battleships managed to completely ignore the trawlers and engage two of their own cruisers the Aurora and the Dmitri Donskoy eventually scoring a number of hits on the Aurora fortunately without too much effect although the ship's chaplain would later die of injuries rozhestvensky appeared to be the only one in the fleet who could recognize trawlers in the flagships searchlights and ran about the flagship the Suvorov frantically trying to get the various searchlights pointed skywards which was a signal not to engage but various gunners all over the ship were engaging at will and so calling off the assault took at sometime Dawn's light revealed that in the mass hysteria the Russians only saving grace was that their gunnery had been so appalling ly bad that the overall damage had been kept to a minimum a number of ships had fired off a good portion of their total shell stockpile without hitting anything the surviving trawler fleet presumably made good on any recently pulverized pie scenes for rather obvious reasons the Tsar was relatively quick to apologize but British public opinion and media were not so easily dissuaded they did not believe that such an assault could really be accidental and demanded war against Russia cruiser squadrons began to show up with alarming frequency all around the Russian fleet whilst the entire channel fleet itself larger than the entire combined forces of the Russian Navy was ordered to raise steam and prepare for action the entirety of the modern components of the Mediterranean fleet were also activated and ordered to move to the Straits of Gibraltar a combined force that outnumbered the russian ii pacific squadron four to one moving to trap the russians in a pincer between the mediterranean and channel fleets and having reviewed the horrible gunnery of the dog a bank incident Admiral Beresford was preparing an attack plan which he described in a letter as chivalrous proposing to make it a fair fight by only engaging the entire Russian force with four of his British battleships holding the others in reserve just in case some of his ships actually took a hit or two the Russian forces were also at this point somewhat divided with some of the older vessels planning to go via the Suez Canal so as not to further delay the more modern units which were capable of faster steaming now to be fair it wasn't completely unreasonable for an extremely paranoid captain or other officer to believe the Japanese could have tried to take some kind of action in the North Sea after all at this time most of the Japanese warships were built in British shipyards and passed through the channel to get to Japan and various Russian spies had been claiming to spot torpedo boats at sea for quite some time but the idea that the British had crash built an entire fleet of ships in a couple of months capable of challenging the entire second Pacific squadron then handing them over to the Japanese who somehow had teleported several thousand crewmen across half the planet was and still somewhat absurd furious diplomatic signals between the British and Russian government's narrowly averted the order to open fire but one of the concessions made was that Ross has vents key would have to dock before the fleet left European waters and leave behind the officers who had been responsible for attacking the British trawlers making the best of an opportunity he used these orders as an excuse to Beach one captain clay doe who had criticized his command all the way from Russia and despite being an officer Ross s Penske and clay doe had very nearly come to blows on the bridge of the flagship a few days previously since he'd been below decks and therefore not involved in the dogger Bank debacle clay dough was ordered to return to st. Petersburg to organize reinforcements but with any ships in the Baltic Fleet that had were worth sending and some that probably weren't worth sending anyway having already been dispatched this gave him the perfect excuse to start rounding up old obsolete vessels which had been rejected in the first place as being old tubs and designated by some of the less kind officers as the sink by themselves squadron this was a far cry from what Rosa's Penske had been promised by the Czar upon his suggestion which was for the Russian government to buy a small fleet of Mon cruisers from Chile and Argentina and send them across the Atlantic to join him if you've watched our video on the South American dreadnoughts you'll know why this was with Chile and Argentina having recently signed a peace treaty and disarmament treaty mediated by the British and so they had a fair number of relatively modern ships available for sale at the time be that as it may the main fleet finally cleared European waters with British Cruiser squadrons being the last to withdraw from shadowing them an officer aboard the cruiser HMS Diana noting that our assessment skis own squadron was notably superior to the others in the fleet expressing the opinion that it was in fact in the only one that could conceivably be said to be ready for war apart from the cruiser Aurora which had to be a shining example of good naval conduct in amongst well the rest of the second Pacific squadron below decks poor chief engineer pilot of ski getting a short break from repairs wrote lying on my back last night I watched the rats making themselves at home in my cabin I used to sleep with my feet towards the door but I've now put my pillow there the rats can jump from the writing-table onto the seti and could easily have jumped onto my head his reason for rest could have been related to the fact that the fleet had lost contact with the kamchatka for some days and was probably hoping that the ship was gone for good but the kamchatka eventually showed up with news whilst the main fleet had almost triggered a war with the British Empire she'd managed to outdo them all by reporting that not only had she fired 300 shells in an engagement with three Japanese ships but in fact had shot at a Swedish merchantman a German trawler and a French schooner putting the Russians at odds with almost every other major European fleet in existence fortunately everyone else seemed to cotton on to the truly appalling level of captaincy on the Kamchatka and those instants were quietly dropped this was coupled with the fact that Kamchatka x' truly appalling levels of gunnery prevented it from having started several new wars by not actually hitting anything to cap it all off it turned out that as the fleet had left Tangier one ship had managed to cut the city's underwater telegraph cable with her anchor which then prevented the port from communicating with Europe for four days Kamchatka was ordered to take the lead of the column of supply ships not because of any naval prowess or competency on the part of her captain but because roses Fenske did not trust her in the slightest and wanted the ship as close as possible so that he could keep an eye on it the ships were now reaching the end of the coal supplies that had been loaded in Russia and Denmark and needed to meet up with a convoy of German coal ships off West Africa to minimize the number of times that this needed to be done they were ordered to take on double loads of coal of course there wasn't enough space in the bunkers and so coal was stored everywhere else on deck in storerooms in the passageways etc this in turn resulted in the ships being covered in a fine layer of coal dust which in combat was about as beneficial as pouring petrol over every available surface and then trying to light a match as if accidentally turning their ships into a procession of fuel their bombs wasn't bad enough as the ships passed down the Africa coasts the coal-dust that was in the air combined with the humidity to coat everybody's throats and lungs with a thick black gunk which killed a number of seamen who were more vulnerable to respiratory issues some respite was bought when the fleet sailed into a storm the wind and water clearing the air at least but the kamchatka couldn't possibly allow even a small bit of fortune so when she was asked for her status as part of a general roll call instead of standing back the we are all right signal the message do you see torpedo boats was sent resulting in another panic as the fleet looked for more magical Japanese torpedo craft bobbing around in our antics storm rosettes Penske took out some of his frustrations by inventing new nicknames for various captains and ships which had annoyed him thus he found himself giving orders to the [ __ ] old geezer the polished fidget the brainless nihilist the guards uniform hanger and others but when he was beset by these fits of rage as he was finding was more and more appropriate as time went on he often would hurl his binoculars over the side of the ship aware of this habit from prior experience his staff had brought a box with no less than 50 pairs of binoculars with them occasionally when it got too much recessed vents key wood content himself by going out onto a bridge wing and screaming across the five miles that separated him from the lecherous [ __ ] which was his new designation for the kamchatka as the fleet neared Cape Town roses Minsky received a signal of that clay dough was sending the reinforcements of the third Pacific squadron to join him knowing that this would be a geriatric collection of truly obsolete vessels that would do nothing other than hinder him he resolved to avoid ami contact with them if at all possible and henceforth would refuse to share his position or progress with Central Command meanwhile a sarcastic British a fish official too the chance to cable the Russians to let them know that there was another British fishing fleet operating near Durban just in case morale however now take a huge blow when as they approached Madagascar they learned that Port Arthur had surrendered and the surviving vessels of the first Pacific squadron had mostly been sunk in port by artillery pieces that the Japanese had hauled up above the heights of the port upon their capture there was now a very real concern that some of the Russian battleships that had been present in the harbor might be refloated brought back into Japanese service and then used against the second pacific squadron if they didn't get into action fairly soon to lift their flagging morale of the crews collected exotic pets on shore visits but with the somewhat misguided idea of what was suitable for passage on a warship these included a crocodile own and a poisonous snake that caused something of a panic on one battleship when it wrapped itself around the main guns and then bit to the commanding officer when he tried to get it off albeit that the addition of a large venomous serpent to the particular ship in question probably increased to the offensive power of the ship considerably especially in any prospective boarding action somebody Centaurus has been ski a parrot which promptly began learning the Admirals vast and thorough vocabulary of Russian curses the flagship was also now overrun by chameleons which proved understand to be difficult to find whenever they escaped the crew of the aurora was so beset by various large predatory creatures that its officers had brought a board that they complained that they were now too scared to go to sleep as the animals wandered the deck looking for snacks the fleet had gone from a mad collection of questionable warships to a floating diplomatic disaster to a set of mobile fuel air bombs and was now taking a turn at being the world's largest seaborne zoo as a bewildering variety of birds and animals were generally left free to roam their ships and noticing that the wildlife was currently confined to the ships themselves the esperance the fleet's refrigerated supply ship decided to contribute to the collection by having its cooling plant break down the tons and tons of rotting meat that resulted being thrown overboard in the next few days and this completed DC Life exhibit as it attracted an interesting array of sharks having left the Atlantic behind and now in the Indian Ocean events would continue to take turns for the worst the strain of commanding this cavalcade of disaster was beginning to tell Admiral Rosa's Fenske was severely ill and remained confined to his cabin whilst his chief of staff had suffered a brain hemorrhage and became partially paralyzed as a result no one was really in command of the fleet and so they stayed in Madagascar and once the pet collection had been fully realized the crews decided that going ashore to enjoy the local facilities was a good idea with the inevitable breakout of malaria dysentery typhoid and every STD known to mankind during a funeral for one of her dead the kamchatka fired a salute but of course being the kamchatka they used a live shell which hit the cruiser Aurora which had already been the recipient of some of the small amount of accurate Russian gunnery that had been displayed so far and was now getting very fed up with being a gigantic steel pinata of course this being a Russian fleet the phrase and then things got worse was in full effect as waves of mental illness religious fervor mutiny and revolution began to sweep the fleet an old acquaintance of polytopes Keyes talk took to wandering around the various ships in the fleet half undressed asking people if they feared some of the worst offenders were rounded up and sent home Ezra suspense keys health began to recover but this further diminished the fleet's manpower and at the same time many of the officers were quite happily unaware that anything was going on having discovered that Madagascar did a roaring trade in various high-strength drugs one officer had brought two thousand cigarettes and they were found to all be filled with opium much to the joy of all those who could get their hands on them before they were confiscated the fleet also needed to be resupplied with ammunition since most of its limited supply had been fired at the British trawlers the spirits would lift when the supply ship tsch arrived supposedly carrying ammunition for the fleet opening the boxes they instead found 12,000 pairs of fur-lined boots and a matching number of winter coats perfect for operations in the equatorial seas as Ross has Fenske continued his recovery he ordered gunnery practice to try and restore some semblance of order none of the destroyers scored any hits on a stationary target that was left out for them of the battleships the flagship scored a single hit which was on the ship towing the target a destroyer squadron was ordered to sail in line abreast formation but instead scattered once they've been brought back into line they fired seven torpedoes one jammed three went wildly off course and two motored along at exceptionally slow speeds missing the target and the last one went round in a big circle causing the ships to scatter again getting into the spirit of things the kamchatka sent a signal to say that she was sinking upon much rejoicing throughout the fleet at this news she then investigated and found nothing more than a cracked steam pipe in the engine room much to everybody's disappointment matters were somewhat improved as the older detachment of the second Pacific squadron having successfully negotiated the Suez Canal arrived to join up with their fellow squadron mates after a somewhat less eventful voyage despite the wandering crocodiles snakes and lemurs aboard the Aurora proved itself once again to be one of the better ships in the fleet as it displayed the sole successful example of naval discipline hosting a small race between its many boats and in a great surprise none of them sank none of them shot each other and they all made it back to their mothership intact meanwhile back in European waters that the collection of aging scrap that formed the third Pacific squadron had set sail under the command of the equally geriatric Admiral Nabokov got off the Russian Admiralty of course ordered him to rendezvous with the main fleet you ought to join up with the Rosses renske they said but thanks to resist Minsky's best efforts to avoid that particular fate and they had to append whose route is unknown to us versus Penske of course had no intention of joining up with what he described as an archeological collection of naval architecture and he now took steps to increase his efforts to evade other parts of his own Navy the fleet would then cross the Indian Ocean the officers amusing themselves by organizing rat hunts with a limited degree of success on the other side they were met by the transport ship and Gorch chat cough spirits lifted in the hope that the ship had some long-overdue mail from home in fact the only mail on the ship was the letters that had been sent home from Madagascar a month before and the ship having got thoroughly lost trying to find its way home roses Vince key took a new approach whenever a ship fell out of line or otherwise broke orders he would now summon it to take station astern of the flagship where he would then berate the captain in front of the ship's entire crew using a megaphone on the 11th of May 1905 Ross's rent skis evasive efforts finally failed as the third Pacific squadron having made surprisingly good progress largely by cutting out Africa entirely and going via the Suez Canal as had the older ships in the second Pacific Lord squadron managed to find the main fleet over the coast of Indochina Ross's vents key hadn't used the canal for the bulk of his fleet because he saw it as hazardous any ships would be sitting ducks as they navigated this particular pinch point and he didn't want to risk his whole fleet as this was one of the few places that the Japanese could actually plausibly have sent a force to intercept him the other issue was that the bulk of the second Pacific squadron would have created a monumental traffic jam in the canal as it was when the two lesser squadrons of Russian forces had proceeded through obviously stopping to scan for enemy activity and putting all their Gunners on alert in case the Japanese had developed a sand going torpedo boat a long long line of deeply annoyed merchant ships had backed up behind the battleships horns blaring all the way deeply irritated Ross's rensky tendered his resignation but the Czar rejected it over in the Imperial Japanese Navy admiral togo had been monitoring at the Russians progress all along on May the 25th he learned that Ross's Fenske had sent away the Colliers that had arrived at Shanghai to meet the fleet with no resupply of coal this meant that the Russians must be planning on taking the shortest route through the Straits of Tsushima between Japan and Korea early on the morning of May 27th a lookout aboard the ural signaled that for unidentified ships had appeared behind the second Pacific squadron it was to be the beginning of the Battle of Tsushima and the end of the second Pacific squadrons voyage but that particular tail will be a story for another time that's it for this video thanks for watching if you a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for drydock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 1,205,435

Keywords: wows, world of warships, 2nd Pacific Fleet, Russo-Japanese War, Battle of Tsushima, Battle of the Yellow Sea, Kamchatka, Dogger Bank Incident, Zinovy Rozhestvensky, Admiral Rozhestvensky, Voyage of the Damned, Russian Imperial Navy, Baltic Fleet, Port Arthur

Id: 9Mdi_Fh9_Ag

Length: 42min 37sec (2557 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/J_G_E]

Greatest naval military campaign in history.
the encounters with japanese minefields and torpedo-boats in the North Sea are legendary.

[u/Calica_Dawn]

The Video that made me fall in love with Drachinfel's Channel. Hell, my wife watched it together with me and had a good laugh. She stills chuckles by the mere mention of the Kamchatka.
I value his insights and thorough research into naval history very much and his snarky britsh commentary puts it over the top. I was interested in the the topic before but i didn't imagine that i would actually listen to his 5hour+ monthly patreon Drydocks a couple of years ago.

[u/pier4r]

Summary: the channel is very interesting about naval history (and not only).

The episode tells the voyage of the 2nd russian squadron sailing from St. petersburg to the far east during the Russian-japanese war (1904-1905). The narrator put here and there some "light" comments, but in this case the incompetence of the officers/crew goes beyond any imagination.

There is a (newer) second part on the story, that is about the battle of battle tsushima where one can see that the russian sailors improved in the course of the voyage, from hitting nothing to hitting a battleship over 10 times.

A useful youtube comment says:

This is not just about the Russian Squadron, it is watching the collapse of the Russian Empire I’m microcosm. Corruption is rife, meritocracy is dead. Courtiers and distant relatives of the Royal Family, hold all the important positions by paying for them so as to be in a position to collect bribes that come with those posts, while possessing NONE of the ability to actually performs the duties required of that position should War occur. A system corrupt inside and out, from the highest rank to the lowest. That is survived until 1918 was a miracle.

[u/The_Viatorem]

Oh yes, the miss adventures of Kamchatka, aka Japan’s most effective warship

[u/LaKobe]

This is my favorite history/education YouTube series to fall asleep to. I wish I never started doing that because I can never get through an entire video with out crashing now. His voice puts right to bed.

[u/Quip_Soda]

AKA Kamchatka vs British trawlers, imaginary Japanese torpedo boat squadrons (in the North Sea, duh) and the other members of her own fleet.

[u/abuell]

Ha. "Mostly audio video" the uninitiated have no idea. They will be sucked into a Guide then Drydock by the Algorithm like the rest of us.

[u/CrashedMyTimeMachine]

That was completely bonkers. I'm now determined to resurrect "Kamchatka" as some sort of epithet.

[u/OneSilentWatcher]

MrBallen covered this. One bad thing after another.