Britain nearly got involved with a USS Liberty style attack on a British ship by the Rusian navy.Britain didnt do anything due to Russia being a strategic ally but you could make it so that they could enter the war.
Red,
Oh. My. God. Is that what you believe happened? And you're British too.
A USS
Liberty type attack? You believe that when the panicked, incompetents making up most of the crews aboard the Rozhdestvenski's 2nd Pacific Squadron thought they saw Japanese torpedo boats 20,000 nm away from Japan and opened fire on the Hull fishing fleet as they steamed across Dogger Bank at night it was just the same as a daylight Israeli fighter-bomber and torpedo boat attack on an already identified US naval ELINT vessel 25 nm north of the Sinai? Really?
Or that the Anglo-Russian Entente, which was signed in
1907, somehow lessened tensions after the fishing vessels were fired on in
1904?
Getting back to the OP's question; The Russo-Japanese War is one of the few modern wars in which personalities loom large. It was a very near run thing for Japan, she was essentially bankrupt by 1905 and Russia knew it. Japan may have one the war but, thanks to Witte, Russia won the peace negotiations. Japan got little but territorial concessions and her people rioted when they heard the terms.
Keeping the Russian Admiral Makaroff alive would have very serious consequences for the Japanese. He was far more active the cabal of boobs commanding Port Arthur. He would have made life miserable for both Togo and the Japanese fleet and Nogi and the Japanese 3rd Army besieging the port.
Togo had already lost two battleships to mines, something the Japanese were able to hide during the war, and his control of the seas an thus control of Japan's supply lines depended more on bluff and Russian inaction than anything else. A Makaroff who actively sortied from Port Arthur and who was going to be reinforced from Europe was the last thing Togo needed.
Nogi was an interesting personality too. In some ways he foreshadows the various incompetents that would appear on WW1's Western Front. He knew just enough to get his job leading the 3rd Army and far too little to actually lead it effectively. Oyama attempted to have Nogi removed several times during the course of the war, but Nogi was a favorite at Court and he remained in a command he was ill suited for.
He took Port Arthur mainly because the Russian commanders were more incompetent than he and he rang up a huge butcher's bill in doing so. Even his greatest triumph, taking 203 Meter Hill from which the shelling of the harbor could be observed, was more due to Russian failings than Japanese operations. Nogi's impact on the war wasn't only in with wasting the lives of the 3rd Army, however.
Oyama's preemptive strike against Kuropatkin's own planned offensive at Mukden, which was the last significant land battle of the war, depended greatly on a wide flanking movement by the Nogi's 3rd Army to the west. If Nogi had still been in front of a competently defended Port Arthur; in the OTL the port was surrendered on 2 Jan 1905 and the Mukden battle began on 27 Feb 1905, Oyama would not have had the troops in hand to even attempt his preemptive strike.
Without that preemptive strike, Kuropatkin's own offensive would have occurred and it may have given Russia her first victory on land of the war to date. A victory would have somewhat damped down revolutionary mutterings in European Russia, kept Russia in the war longer despite the loss of Rozhdestvenski's 2nd Pacific Squadron, and bankrupted Japan. Japan would have been even more eager for a peace conference than in the OTL and would have left such a conference with far less than in the OTL.
Bill