Tsushima 1905, Italian technology in the secret of the Japanese victory

There was a hint of Italian excellence in Japan’s dazzling victory over Russia in the naval battle of Tsushima (27-28 May 1905). It is known that the armored cruisers «Kasuga» and Nisshim» were hulls of the Garibaldi Class, designed in Italy and built in the Ansaldo shipyards of Genoa-Sestri a few years earlier, at the end of the nineteenth century; much less known, however, is that one of the keys to Admiral Togo’s resounding success was the result of Italian high technology. Count Sigmund Fago Golfarelli, a general decorated with a silver medal for military valor who passed away in 2005, revealed in 1995 that among the heirlooms received from his family he kept two very precious vases sent to Rome by Emperor Mutsuihito who had given them as a thank you for having contributed to that victory which revealed the Rising Sun as a world power after emerging from a medieval structure a few years ago. The war against Nicholas II’s Russia had flared up from the conflict of expansion on the eastern chessboard. At the time Japan was not credited as militarily competitive, and the Petersburg strategists too late realized the mistake of having entered a collision course with the fearsome empire of the Rising Sun.

The impossible task of bringing aid to Port Arthur starting from the Baltic

With the strategic base of Porth Arthur, in the Korean Channel, attacked and besieged by the Japanese, who would have destroyed the entire Tsarist Pacific Fleet there, the Russians found nothing better than to send the Baltic Fleet to the rescue in the autumn of 1904 under the orders of Admiral Zinovij Rožestvenskij. An epochal undertaking: one part had entered the Mediterranean from Gibraltar and then headed for Madagascar through the Suez Canal; another had rounded the Cape of Good Hope to circumnavigate Africa. At the beginning of January 1905, one hundred and twenty years ago, Rožestvenskij off the coast of Madagascar had reconstituted the powerful formation, an expression of the fifth navy in the world, with 7 battleships, 2 armored and 6 light cruisers, 9 destroyers and support vessels. The news of the end of the siege of Port Arthur with the Russian surrender on January 5 made that gigantic mission pointless, which had been plagued by all kinds of problems from the beginning, starting from having shelled harmless English fishing boats, irritating London up to the threshold of open conflict , difficulties in supplying coal and fresh food, poor coordination between ships and crews, approximate combat preparation and a disconnect between officers and crew. Even maintenance was a challenge, due to the heterogeneity of the vehicles. The very long navigation times, then, had shattered every cohesion and every concept of war efficiency. The Russians could maintain on average a cruising and maneuvering speed that was half that of the Japanese fleet, modern and well trained, as well as excellently commanded by Admiral Togo who had trained in the West.

The relentless precision of batteries and target practice against the Russian navy

From Singapore, to reach Vladivostok, the only base in the Pacific available, Rožestvenskij was forced to force the Japanese blockade hoping to be able to go unnoticed in the Korean Canal, and of the three possible routes he chose Tsushima: it was the most logical option, but also the one that Togo considered the most probable. It was a hospital ship that was intercepted by Japanese reconnaissance and triggered the battle, which Togo managed masterfully with exemplary maneuvers and precision shooting that left the Tsarist ships in ruins. And precisely on precision, in addition to accurate training, came the contribution of Count Fago Golfarelli, who had developed a cutting-edge pointing system created by Officine optici Galilei. It had been offered to the Royal Navy to equip its artillery, but it declined; Japan, however, did not miss the invention and equipped the Togo fleet with it (4 battleships and 26 cruisers), together with a new explosive created by the Americans. The battle became a giant target practice. When the cannon stopped thundering, the Baltic Fleet no longer existed: 21 ships sunk by Japanese batteries, 13 captured and disarmed. About ten thousand Russian losses, including sailors killed and wounded, ten times more than the Japanese, who also did not complain of any sinking. Rožestvenskij himself had been seriously wounded in the fighting, and Togo had behaved chivalrously towards him by welcoming him on the flagship “Mikasa”. Tsushima would be the last major naval battle between battleships.

The emperor’s gratitude and gift to Count Fago Golfarelli

The tsarist disaster had raised the alarm in Western chancelleries, also because it was the first time that a power had been defeated and humiliated by a nation from the Far East, and one that had recently modernised. Diplomacies took action to limit the damage, including to the image, and the repercussions. The Treaty of Portsmouth, with the interested mediation of US President Theodore Roosevelt and Great Britain, was brazenly on the side of Petersburg, reducing Japanese success and mitigating its claims of territorial expansion under the pretext of wanting to safeguard China’s rights. In the Land of the Rising Sun the victory, which had revealed its military power, had had a high cost in human lives and had opened a chasm in public finances; but at the same time the shock had driven the revolutionary wedge even deeper into the society of tsarist Russia, with the mutiny of the cruiser «Potemkin», the military and peasant revolts suppressed in blood, and the uprising of Moscow and other smaller cities destroyed by force. However, the Japanese emperor had not forgotten how precious the contribution of the precision optics made in Italy had been and ordered two very ancient artistic vases to be sent to the palace of Count Fago Golfarelli in Rome as a tangible sign of his gratitude.