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Concept
Dogger Bank incident
Summary
The Dogger Bank incident (also known as the North Sea Incident, the Russian Outrage or the Incident of Hull) occurred on the night of 21/22 October 1904, when the Baltic Fleet of the Imperial Russian Navy mistook a British trawler fleet from Kingston upon Hull in the Dogger Bank area of the North Sea for Imperial Japanese Navy torpedo boats and fired on them, also firing on each other in the chaos of the melée.
Two British fishermen died, six more were injured, one fishing vessel was sunk, and five more boats were damaged. On the Russian side, one sailor and a Russian Orthodox priest aboard the cruiser Aurora caught in the crossfire were killed.
"Damage to the Aurora was concealed...and only discovered by the deciphering of a wireless message intercepted at [the British] Felixstowe station. It was also considered highly significant that no officer from that ship appeared before the Commission, nor were their logs produced." The incident almost led to war between the United Kingdom and the Russian Empire.
The Russian warships involved in the incident were en route to the Far East to reinforce the 1st Pacific Squadron stationed at Port Arthur and later Vladivostok during the Russo-Japanese War. Because of the fleet's alleged sightings of balloons and four enemy cruisers the day previously, coupled with "the possibility that the Japanese might surreptitiously have sent ships around the world to attack" them, Russian Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky called for increased vigilance and issued an order that "no vessel of any sort must be allowed to get in among the fleet".
It was known that enemy intelligence had been heavily active in the region. Torpedo boats, a recent development of the major navies, had the potential to damage and sink large warships and were very difficult to detect, which caused psychological stress to sailors at war.
While en route, Rozhestvensky received an intelligence report from the Russian transport Bakan in the Langeland Belt of "four torpedo-boats which only showed lights on the mizenmast-head so that at a distance, they might be taken for fishing boats".
Official source
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