Phil Carradice describes himself as a "storyteller" rather than a historian. This may ring alarm bells with some who do not like his drama-documentary style of writing. However, to the best of my knowledge, there are no events in this book that did not happen. To quote one of the UK's greatest contemporary historians, Michael Wood, writing just this month in the BBC History magazine, "Stories are what history is about."
Personally, I don't mind a little imagination being added to the descriptions, as happens almost on the first page of this book when Carradice describes the feelings of the future Czar Nicholas II on being confronted by a would-be assassin during what should have been a leisure trip to Japan. This incident, thirteen years before the battle took place, is considered key to Nicholas's subsequent attitude to Japan, and certainly much of the blame for the disastrous (for the Russians) battle which is the subject of this book rests at the czar's door.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, Russia was a massive empire largely governed by high-born incompetents and heading for trouble, whilst Japan was a small, mysterious nation emerging from centuries of isolation and not taken seriously by the western world. The czar's word was law, and Nicholas was no military tactician. After a series of defeats for his Pacific fleet, he insisted on a large force of unsuitable ships being sent out from the Baltic to Vladivostok to replace them, firmly believing that quantity was a substitute for quality.
Throughout the narrative, we are treated to intriguing stories - stories about the admiral of the Russian fleet, Zinovy Petrovich "Mad Dog" Rozhestvensky, a man who did his best with the sub-standard raw materials allotted to him, threw his binoculars overboard whenever thwarted, and frequently retreated to his cabin to wallow in deep depression. It seems miraculous that he and his ships ever arrived in the Tsushima Strait, let alone put up any kind of fight against the better-equipped Japanese fleet, with its more highly-skilled and better-trained crews, and led by the enigmatic Admiral Togo. No wonder the battle ended with around 5000 Russian lives lost, compared with less than 200 Japanese.
As one might expect in a book of this kind, there are many names - of ships, people and places - that are unfamiliar to an English-speaking reader and difficult to memorize. It is thus a major frustration that there is no index. As far as I can make out, most of Pen & Sword's excellent non-fiction works have one, and I can only assume that this is an oversight by the editors (who, sadly, don't seem to have expended much effort on proof-reading either).
The major service this book does (and the reason I'm reviewing it here) is that it puts the Battle of Tsushima in its historical context. Phil Carradice ably shows how preceding events led up to it, and also how it led indirectly to Russia's involvement in the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and Japan's subsequent rise to a position of world power that was not easy to control. Russia's opinion of herself, and Japan's growing confidence, were affected for many decades to come. Thus a battle that may, taken in isolation, seem unconnected with the world conflicts of the twentieth century, is shown to be very relevant and well worth writing and reading about.
Phil Carradice, The Battle of Tsushima. Pen & Sword, 2020. ISBN 978-1526743343
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