In the Yellow Sea naval battle, when the Beiyang Navy confronted each other, was it a "double horizontal line" or a "one-word battle"

Xu recently published an article in China Human Geography magazine, saying: "Ding not only adopted the wrong array and tactics in the Yellow Sea naval battle, but also did not explicitly appoint his own agent, especially the flagship agent, before the naval battle, which caused the defeat." Xu Hua's point of view represents the mainstream opinion of tactical analysis of the Yellow Sea naval battle. According to this opinion, before the start of the battle, beiyang fleet's attacking enemy formation was "embattled" (see right). At that time, the operational instruction issued by Ding was as follows: "(1) Ships of the same ship type must act in unison and help each other. (2) Always take the bow of the ship to meet the enemy and keep the position as the basic tactic. (3) Ships should follow the trend of the flagship as much as possible. " Under the formation of a row of ships advancing towards the enemy, all ships are required to "always advance towards the enemy" because of instructions; After the start of the battle, the closer the Japanese joint fleet is to the right of beiyang fleet's queue line, the ships on the left side of beiyang fleet will gradually turn to the right to ensure that the ships are heading for the enemy; The closer the ship is to the outer edge, the wider the turning range. In this way, the firing angle of beiyang fleet's ships is bound to be covered by its own neighboring ships, and the artillery attack power will be weakened. As a result, when the Japanese fleet approached the right wing of the Beiyang queue line, the firepower of the whole fleet could not advance except the right wing along the ship in beiyang fleet. Due to the instruction that "all ships should follow the flagship movement", Ding was seriously injured in the first round of artillery fire at the beginning of the battle because the podium collapsed, which seriously affected the wartime command. This led to the formation confusion after the development of the battle (see the left two pictures in this picture). However, there is another view. I have read articles from netizens on the Internet. Different from the mainstream view, this view analyzes the pre-war formation, and thinks that Ding's tactical thought before injury cannot be ruled out: cutting off the Japanese column by the center with a slightly curved formation, attacking the two Japanese ships in the north and south respectively with internal lines, and splitting the Japanese ships in two. After that, the ship will be cleared, and two teams will be formed for back-to-back side corner combat, which can give full play to the firepower on both sides. This view is not unreasonable. Judging from the situation at the beginning of the battle, beiyang fleet first started the artillery attack. Dingyuan ship in the middle of Beiyang formation attacked Matsushima ship, the first ship of Japanese rear team; The Yangwei ship on the far right of Beiyang attacked thousands of ships in front of the Japanese ship; In the formation at that time, it was not ruled out that beiyang fleet might adopt the following tactics: delaying the rear team of the Japanese ship to facilitate the penetration by relying on the long-range advantage, disrupting the formation of the front team of the Japanese ship by shooting with arrogance, and then encircling the front team of the Japanese ship with torpedo boats from the north to the south of the battlefield. However, due to Ding's injury, this tactic was not put into practice from the beginning. Judging from the pre-war formation, this tactic is not impossible. Re-analyzing the first point of Order Ding, it seems difficult to explain why "ships of the same type are required to act together" according to the above mainstream views. If the third order is integrated, it is understood that Ding intends to lead a team to insert the Japanese ship in Dingyuan and Zhenyuan in the middle of Beiyang formation, and then cut it and make a two-way circular motion around the Japanese ship to attack the Japanese ship (similar to the formation in which the Japanese ship attacked the Qing ship). In this way, "the ships cooperate with each other and help each other" and are prepared to "accompany the flagship movement as much as possible." This view is also self-evident. However, according to the record of the war situation since then, the key point that this statement is unlikely to be established is that if the ship is ready to carry out the interspersed movement, it must raise the fire in advance and speed up at the same time, but this record has not been found in historical materials. Even if this "ideal" tactic is deduced and further studied, there are specific problems in this tactic: according to the caliber and firing rate strength of both sides, beiyang fleet has a slight advantage in the caliber and range of artillery, but it is obviously at a disadvantage in the number of artillery, especially the firing rate. If the battle process really develops into interspersed and surrounded shooting, the Qing fleet moving horizontally and circularly will carry out artillery battle between the Japanese fleet moving vertically. When both sides shoot from the side, the advantage of melee artillery should be on the Japanese side with more guns and faster firing speed. To sum up, the best tactics that the Qing army can choose are: keeping the same distance from the Japanese ships, the whole fleet turns right (turning left is not in line with the Japanese direction and corresponding maneuver), giving full play to the advantages of artillery range and caliber, and then introducing torpedo attacks according to the battlefield situation.