The Japanese, which had lost no heavy ships, had 117 dead. Russian casualties were high, with more than 5,000 dead and 6,000 captured. Eight auxiliaries and one destroyer were disarmed and remanded at Shanghai by China. Three cruisers were interned at Manila by the United States until the war was over. Only a few warships escaped, with one cruiser and two destroyers reaching Vladivostok, and two auxiliary cruisers as well as one transport escaping back to Madagascar. At night, Japanese destroyers and torpedo boats attacked the remaining ships, and Admiral Nikolai Nebogatov surrendered in the morning of 28 May.Īll 11 Russian battleships were lost, out of which seven were sunk and four captured. Rozhestvensky was wounded and knocked unconscious in the initial action, and four of his battleships were sunk by sunset. The Russians were sighted in the early morning on 27 May, and the battle began in the afternoon.

The Russian fleet had a large advantage in the number of battleships, but was overall older and slower than the Japanese fleet. The Russians hoped to reach Vladivostok and establish naval control of the Far East in order to relieve the Imperial Russian Army in Manchuria. The battle involved the Japanese Combined Fleet under Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō and the Russian Second Pacific Squadron under Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky, which had sailed over seven months and 18,000 nautical miles (33,000 km) from the Baltic Sea. The battle was described by contemporary Sir George Clarke as 'by far the greatest and the most important naval event since Trafalgar'.

A devastating defeat for the Imperial Russian Navy, the battle was the only decisive engagement ever fought between modern steel battleship fleets and the first in which wireless telegraphy (radio) played a critically important role. The Battle of Tsushima ( Russian: Цусимское сражение, Tsusimskoye srazheniye), also known in Japan as the Battle of the Sea of Japan ( Japanese: 日本海海戦, Hepburn: Nihonkai kaisen), was the final naval battle of the Russo-Japanese War, fought on 27– in the Tsushima Strait.

Ghost of tsushima map size