Captain Mahan contributes to the Times of Thursday an interesting
summary of the battle of the Sea, of Japan, and the deductions to be drawn from it It is in the nature of an interim report, since, as he admits, the data are still very confused and scanty. He points out that Togo's strategy must be considered as the conclusions which a great master of naval warfare has drawn from his experience, and has been enabled to use with a free hand. Dealing with the details of the battle, he thinks that on the evidence which is available at present Togo did not attack with torpedoes till after nightfall, when he had already broken up the Russian line by gun-fire. It is interesting to find that the Japanese Admiral's own report, .published in Friday's Times, fully bears out Captain Mahan's conjecture. The Japanese success was "a triumph of greater numbers, skilfully combined, over superior individual ship power, too concentrated for flexibility of movement." The result shows that the " superiority of the battleship and of the. gun for the main purposes of naval warfare has not been shaken." It was the shooting of the guns which won the battle, the destroyers acting the part of cavalry, rounding up an already beaten foe. The gun is, therefore, in general a superior weapon to the torpedo, and the big battleship is not discredited, though in this case it proved useless owing to the inferior nature of the general Russian strategy.
