Dogger Bank incident

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, during the Russo-Japanese War, when the Baltic Fleet of the Imperial Russian Navy mistook civilian British fishing trawlers 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 were killed by friendly fire. The incident almost led to war between the United Kingdom and the Russian Empire. An international commission of inquiry based on the Hague Convention was set up and Russia voluntarily paid compensation of £66,000 to the fishermen.

Prelude

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. The various Russian intelligence agencies were not well coordinated and were prone to producing poor or false reports. Prior to the fleet setting off, Russian intelligence agents had been claiming that there were Japanese officers around the Baltic Sea with torpedoes and that Britain had built Japan six torpedo boats. 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.