Mikasa

The pre-Dreadnought battleship Mikasa was the flagship of Admiral Togo when he destroyed the Russian Baltic Fleet at the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905.  Visiting Kagoshima in January we had come across a plaque commemorating Togo and decided to try to see his old ship if plans to visit Tokyo later in the year fell into place.  Happily they did, and early one morning my son and I slipped away to catch the train to Yokosuka where the ship is to be found.

Plaque to Tojo in Kagoshima

From the railway station at Yokosuka we walked through Verny Park - named after the French naval engineer who in the 1870s helped construct the naval yard still used by the Japanese Maritime Defence Force and the US 7th Fleet - to the place where the Mikasa is to be found.

Modern warships seen from Verny Park

The Mikasa is the only pre-Dreadnought battleship to survive, but has done so only by the skin of her teeth.  She was in the thick of the fighting at both the Battle of the Yellow Sea, when she took heavy damage, and at Tsushima where she was hit over 40 times and suffered about 15% of the total casualties taken by the Japanese fleet that day.  Having survived the Russians, she was then accidentally blown up and sunk by her own sailors six days after the end of the Russo-Japanese war.  Refloated and returned to service a couple of years later, she narrowly escaped being blown up again by one of her sailors in 1912, then ran aground off Vladivostok in September 1921 during the Japanese intervention in Siberia during the Russian revolution.  She was saved from being scrapped under the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 by a special clause allowing her to be preserved as a museum ship, at the cost of having her guns and engines removed.  At the end of World War II further indignity was inflicted on the hulk, with the masts and upper decks having to be removed, leaving her as little but an empty razee.  According to the retired Japanese naval officer who attached himself to us during our visit, the American Admiral Nimitz rejected Soviet demands that the ship be destroyed and ensured that the parts removed were kept beside the ship.  However, much of the steel was later sold as scrap, meaning that when restoration work began in the 1950s the work had to be done with parts cannibalised from other ships, or with replicas.  Only about 40% of the original structure remains.

A statue of Togo stands in front of his old flagship

The museum ship as seen from the seaward side, from the ferry by which one can travel out to Sarushima Island where one can find impressive remains of the coastal batteries that used to defend the port.

The Starboard secondary battery of 6" guns and tertiary battery of 3" quick firers.

A trophy from Tsushima.  Damaged 6" gun shield from the Russian cruiser Bayan

Reconstructed main armament : the aft 12" gun turret

Reconstructed radio room.  Japanese advances in radio communication were key to co-ordinating the fleet movements leading up to and during the course of Tsushima.

Model crew for one of the 6" guns

3" Quickfirer

Full 3" battery on the upper gun-deck

Protected helm position.  All the writing on the brasswork is in English.  The ship was built for the Japanese navy at Barrow-in-Furness.

Barr & Stroud Rangefinder

Cut-away model of the lower decks - which are not open to visitors - showing the torpedo tubes

The Admiral's main cabin

Looking forward along the upper deck

The forward main turret

On the main deck the cabins have been used for extensive displays about the battle of Tsushima, the Russo-Japanese War, the lead up to WWII and the modern Japanese navy.  For anyone interested in the period, there is plenty to learn from a visit.  What most struck me was how small the pre-dreadnoughts are compared with what was to follow.