Latest news with #Tsar
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
The first modern steel battleship to be sunk by gunfire was an Imperial Russian flagship
The Russian battleship Oslyabya had a grand legacy. Named for a Russian hero, the vessel was little more than two years old when it went into battle against the Japanese in the Russian Far East. It would end up making history, but not for the reasons the Russian Empire would hope for. Its first naval engagement would be its last. Steaming into the 1905 Battle of Tsushima against the Imperial Japanese fleet, it would become famous as the first modern steel battleship to be sunk solely by enemy guns. The Battle of Tsushima went about as well for Russia as the rest of its ill-fated war against Japan, which is to say: not at all. On paper, the war shouldn't have been such a complete drubbing for the Russians. Both sides utilized similar, modernized technology, had a roughly similar number of troops available to fight and as a result, inflicted a horrendously similar number of casualties. But in naval terms, the number of Russian ships in its various fleets should have outmatched the Japanese – but that did not happen. In fact, the opposite happened. Twice. Japan was a relative newcomer to the modern world, but its military modernized and grew at a rapid pace, and that includes its leadership. Japan rocked China's world in the First Sino-Japanese War that ended in 1895, acquiring control of Korea and the Liaodong Peninsula with its warm water port of Port Arthur. Russia, Germany and France forced the Japanese out of China, and that's when Japan got the idea that the Europeans weren't taking their empire seriously and had to be taught a lesson. When Japan offered to recognize Russian dominance in Manchuria in exchange for Russian recognition of Japan's dominance of Korea, the Russians not only rejected it but suggested that Japan cede Korea. That's when Imperial Japan went for the sucker punch it would soon be famous for. It launched a surprise attack on Port Arthur in February 1904 and then laid siege to the city. In a war that would see upwards of 200,000 Japanese killed or wounded and 250,000 Russians killed or wounded, the Russian leadership would not win a single battle. Despite the Russian Empire's massive population, large military and nearly unlimited resources, all of that stuff was in Europe and the railroad to the Pacific wasn't finished yet. When the Japanese crippled the Russian Far East Fleet at Port Arthur, Tsar Nicholas II had to send his largely untested Baltic Sea Fleet to the Pacific. Under the command of Adm. Zinovy Rozhestvensky, the Baltic Fleet almost immediately fired on ships it thought were Japanese torpedo boats… in the North Sea. Those enemy warships turned out to be British fishing boats. Two British sailors were killed along with two Russians (somehow). The Russians even managed to mistake their own ships for Japanese vessels and fired on each other. The British would decide not to go to war over it, but the new Russian battleships opted to go around Africa's Cape of Good Hope, rather than steam through the British-controlled Suez Canal. The Baltic Sea Fleet's mission to relieve the Siege of Port Arthur would ultimately fail, mostly because it took seven months to get to the Sea of Japan. The city had fallen to the Japanese by then, and the battleships in port were sunk by Japanese land artillery. After steaming 18,000 nautical miles to the theater of war, the Russians weren't really in the best shape to do battle with Japan's veteran sailors and battleships. They were poorly maintained, many were old, and almost all of them were gathering microorganisms on their hulls, slowing them down and reducing their maneuverability. To be fair, they weren't looking to fight; they wanted to slip past and head to Vladivostok to regroup – but they tried the fastest, shortest, and most dangerous route past Japan: the Tsushima Strait. So, of course, a Japanese cruiser caught them, then sent a telegram to Adm. Tōgō Heihachirō, who went to sea with his entire fleet. It took six hours to catch up to the Russian fleet and less than an hour for Japan to cross the Russians' T, which meant the Japanese could fire full broadsides while the Russians could reply only with their forward batteries. Just 90 minutes into the battle, the Oslyabya, flagship of Rear Adm. Baron Dmitry von Fölkersam, was sunk by Japan's guns, the first modern steel battleship to go down that way. Fölkersam went down with the ship, which is probably another historic first. By the time the sun went down on May 27, 1905, Adm. Rozhestvensky was unconscious and the Russians had lost four battleships. Torpedo boats and destroyers harassed the Russians throughout the night (because the Russians decided to use their searchlights to try to find the enemy, giving away their positions in the dark). The next morning, what was left of the Russian ships tried to retreat but they were outclassed. They surrendered. Along with the Oslyabya, the Russians lost five more battleships during the Battle of Tsushima, as well as a littoral battleship and 14 other vessels. Two battleships, two coastal battleships, and a destroyer were captured, and more than 11,000 Russian sailors were killed or captured. The Battle of Tsushima also featured the first time wireless telegraph was a decisive part of the battle, as it signaled the Japanese fleet the Russians were present. The defeat forced Russia to sue for peace, setting the stage for Japan's rise as a true imperial power.
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Why enemy armies formed the ‘Wolf Truce' in the middle of World War I
In the winter of 1917, Russian and German troops on the Eastern Front of World War I were not only fighting each other, they were also trying to stay alive amid the blistering cold, starvation and, surprisingly, large packs of wolves. It's a well-known historical fact that citizens of the Russian Empire were starving by the winter of 1917. It was one of the many reasons for the downfall of Tsar Nicholas II and the rise of the Soviet Union. But German civilians and military personnel, too, were starving. An allied enemy stranglehold on German shipping, combined with a poor harvest in 1916 led to a period of food scarcity now known as the 'Turnip Winter.' It turns out that food shortages were just bad all-around, because even the wolves had trouble finding their next meal. A communique from Berlin in February 1917 reported that large packs of wolves had begun migrating from the forest of modern-day Lithuania, Poland and Belarus as their food supplies and habitats were increasingly threatened by the war. The animals soon began to find their way to the front lines. At first, they stuck to easier prey: cows, chickens, sheep, goats and other livestock being raised by the locals. Then they turned to an even easier prey, the wounded troops of World War I. Many areas of the front lines began reporting the large concentrations of wolves appearing in the combat zones. A war dispatch from the Russian Imperial capital of Petrograd (what is today St. Petersburg) reported that, on more than one occasion, the Russian and German troops had to cease their combat operations to focus on killing a common enemy. It seems the wolves stopped waiting for a lull in the fighting; they were so hungry they began taking down men in the middle of battles for a quick meal. The two sides decided to put their war on hold to go and hunt down the wolves. 'Parties of Russian and German scouts met recently and were hotly engaged in a skirmish when a large pack of wolves dashed on the scene and attacked the wounded,' One post from the a 1915 edition of The Oklahoma City Times printed. 'Hostilities were at once suspended and Germans and Russians instinctively attacked the pack, killing about fifty of the wolves.' After the brief 'Wolf Truce,' the dispatch continued, the two sides went back to their respective trenches while sniper fire, machine guns and other offensive operations were put on hold. The incident reported from Petrograd wasn't the only instance of this kind of timeout. Reportedly, the wolves threatened outposts and fortified locations held by both armies. The coming of summer brought no end to the wolf threat, either. In July 1917, the New York Times again reported that the wolves were a 'veritable plague' in Lithuania and an offensive had to be halted so that the two enemies could hunt down the wolves, this time killing several hundred of the hungry beasts. 'Poison, rifle fire, hand grenades, and even machine guns were successively tried in attempts to eradicate the nuisance. But all to no avail. The wolves – nowhere to be found quite so large and powerful as in Russia – were desperate in their hunger and regardless of danger. Fresh packs would appear in place of those that were killed by the Russian and German troops. As a last resort, the two adversaries, with the consent of their commanders, entered into negotiations for an armistice and joined forces to overcome the wolf plague. For a short time there was peace. And in no haphazard fashion was the task of vanquishing the mutual foe undertaken.' Fighting between Russia and Germany would only continue until December of 1917, as the Bolsheviks came to power in the October Revolution of that year and signed a separate peace with the Germans.
Chicago Tribune
08-03-2025
- General
- Chicago Tribune
Today in History: Religious education classes during school hours struck down in Champaign
Today is Saturday, March 8, the 67th day of 2025. There are 298 days left in the year. Today in history: On March 8, 1948, the Supreme Court, in McCollum v. Board of Education, struck down religious education classes during school hours in Champaign, Illinois, public schools, saying the program violated separation of church and state. Also on this date: In 1917, protests against food rationing broke out in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), triggering eight days of rioting that resulted in the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the end of the Russian monarchy. In 1965, the United States landed its first combat troops in South Vietnam as 3,500 Marines arrived to defend the U.S. air base at Da Nang. In 1971, in the first of three fights between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, Frazier defeated Ali by unanimous decision in what was billed as 'The Fight of the Century' at Madison Square Garden in New York. In 1983, in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals convention in Orlando, Florida, President Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire.' In 1988, 17 soldiers were killed when two Army helicopters from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, collided in mid-flight during a night training mission. In 2008, President George W. Bush vetoed a bill that would have banned the CIA from using simulated drowning and other coercive interrogation methods to gain information from suspected terrorists. In 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, a Boeing 777 with 239 people on board, vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, setting off a massive and ultimately unsuccessful search. Today's birthdays: Author John McPhee is 94. Songwriter Carole Bayer Sager is 81. Actor-musician Micky Dolenz (The Monkees) is 80. Baseball Hall of Famer Jim Rice is 72. Singer Gary Numan is 67. TV journalist Lester Holt is 66. Actor Aidan Quinn is 66. Actor Camryn Manheim is 64. Actor Freddie Prinze Jr. is 49. Actor James Van Der Beek is 48. Songwriter-producer Benny Blanco is 37. Tennis player Petra Kvitová is 35. Actor Montana Jordan is 22. Actor Kit Connor is 21.
