The largest and most heavily armed warship to have ever been built was the Imperial Japanese Navy’s battleship Yamato, which sunk in an operation on April 7, 1945. The event brought to a close not only Yamato’s story but also that of battleships in modern naval warfare.
Launched in 1941, Yamato was meant to rebalance the numerical superiority of the U.S. Navy. Weighting the heaviest armament ever on a battleship, her nine 46 cm Type 94 main guns made her a floating fortress. At just under 72,000 tons and a real marvel of naval engineering, she was the symbol of Japan’s military ambitions.
Despite the fearsome design, Yamato saw little actual combat. She directly engaged enemy warships only one time, during the Battle of Samar, part of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. At this baThe little, Yamato managed to sink the enemy fleet carrier USS Gambier Bay, a Casablanca-class escort carrier, but she made little overall difference. Yamato and Musashi being both eventually sunk by aircraft from the other side truly erased any credibility of such a battle.
” Construction was made under tight secrecy, with high fences, protective roofing, and camouflage netting, to keep her hidden from prying eyes. The United States Navy did not realize the true size of the threat facing them until years later. Yamato served as the flagship of the pride of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and it was from her bridge that Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto directed the fleet during the Battle of Midway.
However, big guns and heavy armor for Yamato did not make her a winning vessel. The Imperial Japanese Navy was leery about sending the battleship Yamato into battle without air cover, which is one reason her service history was not one of great success. This, coupled with the ever-increasing great cost of the warship and the specialized ammunition she needed to fire her guns, made her less useful to the continually changing theaters of war.
Operation Ten-Go was Yamato’s final mission. She would beach the battleship on Okinawa and use it as an “unsinkable” gun emplacement. However, the message had been intercepted and decoded by the Allies, who were already informed of this operation. Instead of engaging Yamato with surface ships, U.S. Navy Admiral Raymond Spruance ordered carrier-based aircraft to strike.
The first American aircraft began rolling in on Yamato a little after 0800 hours on April 7, 1945. For hours, the vessel withstood one attack after another. From the initial bombing run at 12:37 to her final paralyzing blast at 14:23, Yamato took a minimum of 11 torpedoes and 6 bombs. The end was quick. The ship was sunk with the loss of approximately 3,055 of its 3,332-member complement, among whom was the fleet commander Vice-Admiral Seiichi Itō -.
The sinking of Yamato heralded the end of the age of the battleship. As she went to the bottom, so did the realization that big gun warship ages were over, and there could be but the aircraft carriers and their air power to be the lords of the seas indefinitely.