Battleship Yamato - a deadly threat combat power of the United States

A few years after the end of World War I, naval authorities around the world began talking about battleships. It was widely believed that these warships still constituted the backbone of any navy.

A battleship is designed to fight in close formation. Its offensive and defensive capabilities are balanced in the most efficient manner: artillery, armor, and unsinkability come first, while speed and range come second. The requirement for the greatest possible simultaneous enhancement of offensive and defensive capabilities is easier to achieve the larger the warship, as a larger vessel can allocate a significant percentage of its total mass to these capabilities. This explains the increase in battleship displacement over the course of their evolution.

Having set a course for strengthening its armed forces, Japan in 1934 decided to abandon the 1930 London Naval Armament Limitation Agreement and adopted the so-called Marusai Program, which called for the construction of a number of new warships for the Imperial Navy, including several battleships, with primary importance given to the quality of the new combat equipment, rather than quantity.

The development of the new battleships was based on the idea of superiority over similar American ships, which, according to Japanese experts, were required to pass through the Panama Canal, with limited performance characteristics: a displacement of no more than 63,000 tons, guns no larger than 406 mm in caliber, and a speed of up to 23 knots. The lead ship was to be the battleship Yamato.

The construction of the battleships Yamato and Musashi was carried out in the strictest secrecy. High fences were erected around the slipways, covered with camouflage netting, and the windows of nearby buildings facing the shipyard were bricked up. Shipbuilders were required to sign non-disclosure agreements regarding the specific facility they were working on. Furthermore, the work was organized so that no worker had a complete picture of the facility, and even the designers were given only selected parts of the design documentation. Only a select few had full knowledge of the project. The battleship Yamato was launched on August 8, 1940, and entered service in December 1941.

The legendary Japanese battleship

The combat careers of this class of battleships are uneventful. The battleship Yamato, Admiral I. Yamamoto's flagship, withdrew from the battle during the Battle of Midway Atoll after receiving word of the defeat of the Japanese carrier forces, never firing her massive guns. The battleship Musashi flew the flag of Admiral M. Koga, who became commander of the Combined Fleet after the death of I. Yamamoto. Both warships spent most of their time off Truk Island.

On December 25, 1943, while north of the island, the battleship Yamato was hit by a torpedo from the American submarine USS Skate. This incident prompted improvements to the mine protection on ships of this class.

During the Pacific War, when aviation began to convincingly prove its leading role in naval operations, the massive guns proved useless, and both Japanese battleships were soon sunk by American carrier-based aircraft.

From November 23, 1944, the battleship Yamato was based in Japan, from where it departed for its final patrol in April 1945. It took part in Operation Tenichigo. The operation's goal was to reach the American landing site on Okinawa, where American forces invaded on April 1. During a collision with American aircraft, the battleship was hit by three torpedoes. The auxiliary steering gear was damaged. The battleship Yamato shot down one torpedo bomber. Some time later, two more torpedoes hit the warship, damaging its electrical equipment and rendering some of its artillery inoperable. The ship's situation had not yet reached critical point, but its survivability and stability reserves were on the verge of being exhausted. Then the final attack began, during which the ship was hit by at least four torpedoes. At this point, only one propeller shaft was operating on the battleship Yamato, and soon all boiler rooms were flooded and abandoned by the crew. The ship immediately lost propulsion. Its list to port reached 15-16 degrees.

When the battleship Yamato rolled over with a list of approximately 80 degrees, a monstrous explosion was heard for miles around. The reflection of this explosion was seen on ships of the American force stationed several dozen miles from the site of the tragedy on Kagoshima Island. A column of smoke rose 6 kilometers above the warship, resembling a nuclear mushroom cloud. The flames from the explosion rose 2 kilometers. Undoubtedly, only a magazine explosion (approximately 500 tons of explosives) could have produced such an effect, but what caused the explosion remains unknown. Some American experts believe the explosion was caused by an armor-piercing bomb hitting the turret and then penetrating into the main magazines. The explosion resulted in horrific losses among the battleship Yamato's crew. Of the 2,767 crew members, 2,498 were killed, including the task force commander and the ship's captain. In addition to the battleship Yamato, a battlecruiser and four destroyers were destroyed in the battle, with 3,665 crew members killed or drowned. In her final engagement, the battleship Yamato shot down only five aircraft and damaged twenty, while the task force destroyed ten aircraft in total: four dive bombers, three torpedo bombers, and three fighters.

The battleship Yamato's main weakness was its weak anti-aircraft defenses, despite its large number of anti-aircraft guns. During its final engagement, only 10 enemy aircraft were shot down. This can be attributed to three factors: first, the poor training of the gun crews (due to a shortage of ammunition, they practiced firing at slow-moving balloons); second, the very small mass of the 25mm anti-aircraft shell—250 grams; and third, its low muzzle velocity, only six times greater than that of American aircraft, proved clearly insufficient.

Battleship Yamato - computer graphics