The Baltic Fleet - Tsushima

A Critical Review of "The Baltic Fleet - Tsushima":

Tsushima completes Tony Flanigan’s Baltic Fleet trilogy with a grimly poetic reckoning that directly echoes and amplifies the failures established in Dogger Bank and The Journey. Where the first story exposed the fleet’s incompetence through friendly fire, and the second chronicled its slow unraveling via absurdity and indiscipline, Tsushima reveals the ultimate cost: annihilation by an enemy the Russians never properly saw coming—because they were too busy hallucinating phantoms. The narrative cleverly inverts the earlier pattern: this time, the “enemy” is real, but disguised as friend, and the fleet’s fatal error isn’t firing too soon, but trusting too easily. The Japanese reconnaissance vessel masquerading as the auxiliary Ural is a masterstroke of historical irony, and Flanigan effectively dramatizes how the same cultural insularity, linguistic arrogance, and operational sloppiness that led to the Dogger Bank massacre now enable total strategic surprise.

Yet the story’s greatest strength—its continuity with Ivan’s voice—is also its limitation. True to form, Ivan is drunk during the pivotal deception, then half-conscious during the battle’s opening, recounting the catastrophe through fragmented memory and secondhand prison-camp lore. While this reinforces the trilogy’s central motif—that the Russian Empire was led by ghosts while its fate was decided by men wide awake—it distances the reader from Tsushima’s visceral horror. The deaths of Sergei, the sinking of the Borodino, the burning oil slicks—these moments land with less force than Pavel’s quiet demise in Dogger Bank, precisely because Ivan has become emotionally numb, not just to trauma, but to narrative responsibility. His refrain—“Pass the bottle”—now reads less as dark wit and more as evasion.

Still, Tsushima succeeds as a moral coda. The trilogy’s arc—from mistaken aggression, through institutional decay, to catastrophic vulnerability—is structurally sound and historically poignant. The final image of Ivan returning to a vodka-drenched silence as revolution brews at home ties personal and national collapse into one bleak continuum. For Gumroad readers who embraced the first two installments’ irreverent tone and historical vignettes, Tsushima offers a satisfying, if sobering, conclusion. But as literature, it leans too heavily on its established formula, sacrificing depth for consistency. Nevertheless, the trilogy as a whole stands as a compelling, if uneven, indictment of hubris—and a reminder that the greatest danger isn’t seeing enemies everywhere, butfailing to recognize them when they’re smiling.