Re: OT-Wrong port arthur

Actually, I believe that the fleet actually is the baltic fleet. Tsar
Nick 
himself saw it offf, as most of St. Petersburg fell under a strike
behind 
him, he was in his royal barge.

A quote from a book on Rasputin, that happens to have some information 
about this fleet:

"A catastrophe in the making [the naval expedition]. Rarely-never? - has
a 
naval expedition been so botched. The commander, aging Vice Adm. Zinovy 
Roxhdestvensky, called his number 2 "the sack of shit". The equally
obese 
commander of the cruisers was known as "the vast space." Three ships 
collided almost at once, and the funeral party for a dead petty officer
was 
unable to fire a last salute because they did not know how to load their

rifles. Paranoia sailed with them. ... Six days out the Russians mistook

British herring smacks in the North Sea for Japanese torpedo boats.
Their 
gunnery was so poor that they missed most of the trawlers but put six 
shells into one of their own cruisers. The nearest Japanese warship was 
more than ten thousand miles away."

It goes on to say, in the second paragraph how they conducted no gunnery

drills because the coal was piled so high on the decks due to the fact
that 
the commander was worried about running out fuel.

The baltic fleet was two weeks out of Port Arthur when Port Arthur 
surrendered because of the lopsided Japanese victory over the Pacific
fleet.

While I don't have any specific evidence either way, the Pacific fleet
must 
have been in a similar state in order to suffer so large a defeat.

On another note, I believe the loses included at least on destroyer on
the 
Japanese side during the Port Arthur engagement, and I believe the
Russian 
flagship struck a Japanese mine and sunk, and another battleship may
have 
as well.