All battles change history. A scant few have world-historical impact. The Battle of Tsushima (1905) falls into the latter category. This encounter in the waters separating Japan from Korea pitted the Imperial Japanese Navy’s (IJN) Combined Fleet against the Russian Second Pacific Squadron, a.k.a. its Baltic Fleet. Tsushima delivered “command of the sea” to the victor, cementing Imperial Japan as Asia’s predominant indigenous power while sweeping Russian sea power from the Far East for generations to come. The battle also etched itself on IJN culture as the way to combat a stronger yet faraway foe. And, not least, Tsushima began reversing centuries of European imperial dominance of Asia.

This was a tectonic clash in both military and cultural terms.

First, the immediate results. Command of the sea, of course, is a phrase most commonly associated with nautical sage Alfred Thayer Mahan. Mahan defined command as “overbearing power on the sea which drives the enemy’s flag from it, or allows it to appear only as a fugitive; and which, by controlling the great common, closes the highways by which commerce moves to and from the enemy’s shores.” He concludes that “this overbearing power can only be exercised by great navies.” The Mahanian concept connotes permanent, absolute control of important expanses. A multitude of options come with command, from squelching a foe’s seagoing trade to bring the economic hurt, to mounting amphibious landings on hostile shores, to opening new combat theaters to stretch out, divide, and enfeeble defenders.

Winning command is a blessing.

Alongside the Royal Navy’s triumph at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), Tsushima set the gold standard for Mahanian maritime command. After the Russian Navy lost its Pacific Squadron to Japanese arms in the Yellow Sea in the summer of 1904, Tsar Nicholas II dispatched the Baltic Fleet on an epic 18,000-mile voyage from northern Europe to the combat theater via the Cape of Good Hope, the Indian Ocean, and the South China Sea. Impoverished of logistical support—Great Britain, which controlled the vast majority of naval coaling stations on the route to Asia, was an ally of Japan—the exhausted and dispirited Baltic Fleet arrived in the Tsushima Strait on May 27, 1905, only to confront a freshly refitted and well-rested IJN Combined Fleet prowling home waters. Overseeing the Japanese fleet was Admiral Heihachirō Tōgō, who ranks among naval history’s most famed commanders. Two days of gunfire and torpedo attacks left the vast bulk of the Baltic Fleet captured or strewn across the seafloor. Its few........

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