Yamato

1945

Operation Ten-Go, the one-way voyage Location: East China Sea, SW of Kyushu, Japan · Coordinates: 30.75°N 128.05°E · Casualties: 3,055 · Survivors: 277 · Depth: 340 m · Cause: aerial attack · magazine explosion — Sent on a one-way mission to Okinawa in Operation Ten-Go on 6 April 1945 with fuel for only half the voyage. Intercepted the following afternoon by 386 American carrier aircraft of Task Force 58. Struck by approximately ten torpedoes and nine bombs over two hours; her forward magazine detonated at 14:23. · Fate: located 1985 · protected · Type: battleship · Yamato class · Tonnage: 72,800 tons · Crew: 3332 · Flag: Empire of Japan · Launched: 1940 Flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy, the largest battleship ever built alongside her sister Musashi. Sent on a one-way mission to Okinawa in Operation Ten-Go on 6 April 1945 with fuel for only half the voyage, intercepted by 386 American carrier aircraft the next afternoon. Her forward magazine detonated after ten torpedoes and nine bombs; the mushroom cloud was visible from Kyushu, 200 kilometres away. 3,055 dead of 3,332 aboard; the Imperial Japanese Navy never sortied again. The Vessel The Yamato was the lead ship of her class, the largest and most heavily armed battleships ever built by any navy. She was laid down at the Kure Naval Arsenal on 4 November 1937 under the strictest secrecy in the history of Japanese warship construction: even the senior naval officers who oversaw her construction did not have complete drawings, and the Kure construction docks had been covered with roofs to prevent aerial reconnaissance by foreign powers. She was commissioned on 16 December 1941, nine days after Pearl Harbor, displacing 72,800 tons at full load, with a principal armament of nine 46-cm (18.1-inch) guns in three triple turrets, each gun firing a 1.46-tonne shell to 42,000 metres. Her displacement, her gunnery, and her armour were all records that have never since been exceeded. Her sister Musashi was her equal; a third sister Shinano was converted mid-construction into an aircraft carrier; a fourth, projected as Warship Number 111, was never laid down. The three Yamato-class battleships represented the Imperial Japanese Navy's central bet on the dreadnought concept at a moment when the rest of the world's principal navies were moving decisively toward aircraft carriers. Yamato was the largest capital-ship commitment the Japanese naval staff ever made, and she was commissioned into a war in which her primary theoretical opponents were aircraft. She served as the flagship of the Combined Fleet under Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto from February 1942 until his death in Apr The Disaster The first American carrier strike reached Yamato at 12:32 on 7 April 1945. Mitscher's Task Force 58 deployed 386 aircraft from eight carriers (Hornet, Bennington, Belleau Wood, San Jacinto, Essex, Bunker Hill, Hancock, Bataan): 280 torpedo, dive, and fighter aircraft, supported by 106 additional fighter escorts. Yamato's defensive armament consisted of 150 anti-aircraft guns of six calibres, her fire controllers directed by four radar sets, a formidable defensive battery against any contemporary attacker. Against 386 aircraft operating from horizons in three directions, it was insufficient. The American strike developed in waves over two hours. The first wave (12:32-12:50) concentrated on her starboard side and delivered five torpedo hits, jamming her starboard steering and starting a 5-degree list. The second wave (13:35-14:00) delivered a further five torpedo hits on her port side and three 500-pound bomb hits on her amidships superstructure. The third wave (14:00-14:15) attacked through the smoke of the first two and added three more torpedo hits. Yamato was, by the end of the third wave, listing 28 degrees to port with her deck edge under water, her main fire control disabled, and her torpedo-protection systems exhausted. At 14:23 on 7 April 1945, the combined hydrostatic pressure on her already-shattered forward magazine bulkhead exceeded the structural limit. Her forward magazine detonated. The explosion generated a mushroom cloud approximately 6 kilometres high that wa