Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The Battle of Tsushima" video.

You forgot to mention (or maybe ran out of time) the reason why the Russian Pacific Squadron was forced to take their round the world voyage. As the squadron sailed into the North Sea, they had received reports of the Japanese torpedo boats laying in wait for them. These bogus reports may have been placed in Russian hands by Japanese intelligence, but how Japanese torpedo boats could have gotten to the North Sea undetected was never explained. The Russians were on high alert while passing through the area of the Dogger Bank, off the northeast coast of England. Somehow, British fishing trawlers commonly in the Dogger Bank, were misidentified as Japanese torpedo boats, and the Russians opened up with everything they had. They not only sank one fishing boat and damaged at least seven others, they also damaged two of their own cruisers and killed a number of Russian sailors. It took Admiral Rozhestvensky almost 20- minutes to get everyone to cease firing due to the poor communications of the fleet, something that would later haunt them again. The fact that so few trawlers were sunk or damaged and no British fishermen were killed was solely due to the horrible gunnery skills of the Russians, another thing that would later haunt them. The British were furious, and it was only the intervention of France that stopped the Royal Navy from sinking the the Russian fleet in the English Channel. The Russians had to leave behind several high ranking officers to answer for the outrage and agree to pay reparations for the lost and damaged boats. The whole mess cost the Russians about two weeks time, and alerted the Japanese that the Russians were headed their way. The British, who almost entered the war on the side of Japan, believed something amiss was up with the Russian and forbade them the use of the Suez Canal. That lead to the necessity of sailing all the way around the Cape of Good Hope. The amazing thing about the battle of Tsushima was not that the Russians lost, it was that the Russians showed up at all. The Russians only had four recently built battleships of the Borodino class, the first built in Russia, although they were fairly close copies of the Tsesarevich. The Tsesarevich was a design with a heavy roll when doing fast turns or in cross running seas. The Borodino class made several changes to the armament that made that worse, and there were several times on the epic voyage where it was feared one or more of the vessels would capsize. The older vessels were even less seaworthy, and the whole squadron never averaged more than seven knots through the stormy seas around the Cape. All the Russian ships consumed prodigious amounts of coal due to their leaky stacks and boilers, and they had to be rebunkered a grand total of 65 times during the voyage. This was all done by the sailors on each ship transferring coal a bag at a time from accompanying colliers, and many ships just loaded the coal on the decks, shoving it down into the bunkers as needed. That's why the Russian ships's decks were covered in coal when they met the Japanese. The Russian sailors had already heard of the Fall of Port Arthur, and that meant an even longer sail to try to get to Vladivostok, the only remaining Russian port in the Far East. The material condition of the ships was poor after sailing for 16,000 miles and almost four months at sea, and the Russian sailors were demoralized and exhausted. The Japanese has been training and refitting their ships for the previous three months, and they were in top form by the time the Russians showed up. The outcome of the battle was never in doubt.
2