The Fate of the Battleship Yamato

We explore the origins, and the end of the most powerful battleship ever built.  And what lessons Yamato might have for us today.  

Transcript

The Fate of the Battleship Yamato

August 2025

“In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain, I will run wild and win victory upon victory. If the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.”

Isoroku Yamamoto

“The battleship is an allegorical figure of war itself, in its splendor and its squalor, its heroism and its waste”. 

Jan Morris

“Countless are the mountains in Yamato

But perfect in the heavenly hill of Kagu

When I climb it and survey my reams

A beautiful land it is, the land of Yamato”

Emperor Tenji of Japan

I would love to say that my first encounter with the Battleship Yamato was through some well-researched historian’s account of the world’s largest Battleship, but the reality is I first heard the name from a converted Japanese Anime TV show named Star Blazers.  Having grown up on Looney Tunes, Super Friends, and even the animated Star Trek show (with original cast voiceovers), Star Blazers was a revelation.  Characters were killed, there were love affairs, and the captain was an old man lowered into the bridge on a chair.  Moreover, at the center of it was the Space Battleship Yamato, which I later learned was the real name of the show.  No doubt the Americans who dubbed the show in the 1970s would have changed the name of the ship, but it was written on the hull, so it was my first encounter with the name.  

The plot was simple. Evil aliens attack Earth, but good aliens give us plans for a spaceship to fight back. Being born in Japan, the logical hull for this was the Battleship Yamato, which lies exposed at the former bottom of the ocean location where she was sunk in World War II. 

Furthermore, this began my journey to learn about the real-life Yamato, which raised many initial questions.  I was aware of the Bismarck’s fate, but then I discovered that the Yamato (and her sister ship Musashi) were 27% larger. It took nearly the entire British Atlantic fleet, along with some planes, to sink her. So, how could anything possibly handle the Yamato?  How many battles was she in? What was the size of her crew and so forth?  Moreover, most importantly, how did she come to be at the bottom of the ocean?   

A few Yamato specifications:

Laid Down: March 1938 

Commissioned: 16 December 1941

Length: 862′ 10″ (263m)

Beam: 121′ 1″ (36.9m)

Armament? Wow.

3 × triple 46 cm (18.1 in) guns (the USS Iowa had 16” main guns)

4 × triple 15.5 cm (6.1 in) guns

6 × twin 12.7 cm (5 in) DP guns

Displacement: 64,000 Long Tons (Full Load: 71,659 Long Tons), Bismarck’s was 51,000 full load and the only Battleship in history to get close was the USS Iowa at 56,000, still less than 79% of the Yamato’s size.

The ship’s propulsion system required four massive steam turbines connected to three propeller shafts, which generated a combined 150,000 shaft horsepower. The name Yamato was taken from a province in Japan that also spawned historical kingships in the ancient and medieval Japanese history (the Musashi was also named for an ancient Japanese province). As the centuries went by, Yamato began to become a broader designation for the whole of Japan, and thus the poetic name used in our introduction.  

Yamato’s primary purpose was to give Japan naval superiority over the United States Pacific Fleet.  Because the US had more ships, the thinking was to build a super battleship with superior strength and firepower.  For example, at the climactic battle of Tsushima in 1905, the Russian fleet had 11 battleships to the Japanese 4.  However, the Japanese battleships were far superior to the Russians, and they lost all their heavy ships.  

The Japanese wished to repeat Tushima and decisively defeat the American fleet in a single, climactic battle, a strategy known as Kantai Kessen or decisive battle doctrine.   It was not just Togo, the revered admiral at Tsushima, whom the Japanese studied by Alfred Thayer Mahan, a United States Navy officer and historian, whom John Keegan called “the most important American strategist of the nineteenth century.

Here we come to a mystery.  After World War I, France built the Maginot Line, a series of fortifications meant to stymie any intruding army.  The Maginot Line took the lessons of trench warfare in World War I and built upon that, creating essentially a super trench or fortifications.  The problem was that mechanization during the intra-war years had developed to a point where entrenched defense was now a liability.  Tanks, trucks, and planes changed the calculus on land.

Furthermore, at sea, the advent of the aircraft carrier equally altered tactics on the oceans.  The Days of battles such as the Falklands or Jutland in World War I, where it was just ship to ship, were over.  What is odd is that, unlike the French, the Japanese were well aware of the change from strictly bombardment ships to carriers and acted accordingly.  

Hajime Fukaya writes in the US Naval Institute, “Japan began the war with six fleet carriers, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu, Shokaku, and Zuikaku, and two lighter carriers, Hosho and Ryujo. They were a formidable array and, since American carrier strength numbered only seven vessels, were sufficient to enable the Japanese army and navy to overrun vast areas in the Pacific and to inflict great damage on the Allied forces.” 

Take one example: the Akagi (named after Mount Akagi). It was an aircraft carrier built for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN). Though she was laid down as an Amagi-class battlecruiser in the 1920s, Akagi was converted to an aircraft carrier while still under construction to comply with the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty. The ship was rebuilt from 1935 to 1938, with her original three flight decks consolidated into a single, enlarged flight deck and an island superstructure.  This carrier was present at Pearl Harbor and was one of the four heavy carriers sunk at Midway.  

So why build her at all?  Even though the Japanese knew of the power of the carrier, they knew there was still a role for battleships as enforcers and protectors of amphibious operations, which is what many American battleships, such as the USS Wisconsin and the USS Iowa, were designed for.  Also in the 1930s, Japan’s WWI-era Fuso class battleships were becoming obsolescent.  Because they knew they could not build MORE battleships than the US, they had to build better ones.  Additionally, Japan was conducting a war in China throughout the late 1930s, which required at least 500 aircraft and trained pilots.  They could have built carriers instead of the Yamato, but they may not have had enough pilots to staff more than the roughly six heavy and several light carriers upon which Japan began the war.  

Because of the nature of Pacific warfare, the Yamato made many journeys between 1942 and 1945, but only one was combat-related until her final voyage.  In June 1942, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto directed the fleet from her bridge during the Battle of Midway, a disastrous defeat for Japan. Musashi took over as the Combined Fleet flagship in early 1943, and Yamato spent the rest of the year moving between the major Japanese naval bases of Truk and Kure in response to American threats. In December 1943, Yamato was torpedoed by an American submarine, which necessitated repairs at Kure, where she was refitted with additional anti-aircraft guns and radar in early 1944. Although present at the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, she played no part in the battle.

The only time Yamato fired her main guns at enemy surface targets was in October 1944, when she was sent to engage American forces invading the Philippines during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. While threatening to sink American troop transports, they encountered a light escort carrier group of the US Navy’s Task Force 77, “Taffy 3”, in the Battle off Samar, sinking or helping to sink the escort carrier USS Gambier Bay and the destroyers USS Johnston and Hoel. The Japanese turned back after American air attacks convinced them they were engaging a powerful US carrier fleet.

The reality is that the primary carrier force, the third fleet under Admiral William Halsey, was far to the North trying to destroy the primary Japanese carrier force.  The problem was, unbeknownst to Halsey, that the carrier force was a decoy containing few planes.  

Later, in a desperate attempt to slow the Allied advance, Yamato was dispatched on a one-way mission to Okinawa in April 1945. Called Operation Ten-Go, the Yamato would be accompanied by Japan’s remaining surface strength.  Nine escorts (the cruiser Yahagi and eight destroyers) would sail to Okinawa and, in concert with kamikaze and Okinawa-based army units, attack the Allied forces assembled on and around Okinawa. In concert with kamikaze and Okinawa-based army units, attack the Allied forces assembled on and around Okinawa. Yamato would then be beached to act as an unsinkable gun emplacement and continue to fight until destroyed. Though the ship was equipped with a full complement of ammunition, there was only enough fuel for the one-way trip.  Though we tend to think of Kamikazes today in terms of aircraft, it was not about a machine but a mindset.  It was not that the Japanese held life less dear than an American.  Instead, they were trained from birth to believe that the sacrifice for one’s ruler and country was the highest ideal. 

However, the Allies had intercepted and decoded their radio transmissions, learning the particulars of Operation Ten-Go. Further confirmation of Japanese intentions came around 20:00 when the Surface Special Attack Force, navigating the Bungo Strait, was spotted by the American submarines Threadfin and Hackleback. Both reported Yamato’s position to the main American carrier strike force.  

The task force was spotted south of Kyushu by US submarines and aircraft, and on 7 April 1945, she was sunk by American carrier-based bombers and torpedo bombers with the loss of most of her crew. In all, from the first attack at 12:37 to the explosion at 14:23, Yamato had been hit by at least 11 torpedoes and six bombs.

In 1949, Mitsuru Yoshida wrote Requiem for Battleship Yamato. It tells the story of Operation Ten-Go in 1945, not as a historian but a first-person descriptor because 22-year-old Yoshida was on board her final mission. It was first published in 1949. Americans partially censored the book during the occupation of Japan.  It was later rewritten several times and published in various forms. The book became influential and became the basis of the 1953 film Battleship Yamato.  In Requiem, Yoshida speaks of Tokko, or special attack.  Though Yoshida did not die in the attack, he was meant to; in a sense, this book is about a kamikaze.  

Yoshida states, “Each one of us has come to that point bringing with him twenty or thirty years of life, but in the end, in the crucible of nothingness we call battle, all vanished like foam.” He adds of the Kamikaze mission, “Why did this man become a career officer? Why did he pursue this sort of death?  If society had not demanded of him this role, what sort of person might he have become?” 

It is here that what makes the story of the Yamato unique and haunting.  The Bismarck was destroyed after annihilating a British Battle Cruiser (the HMS Hood) early in the war: Yamato’s sister, Musashi, was sunk in the Philippines in what was truly the IJN’s last offensive.  Bismarck’s sister ship, Tirpitz, was ignominiously destroyed in a 1944 British raid after only firing her main guns a single time.   Of these, only the Yamato was meant as a grand suicide mission.  

I started this podcast talking about the Maginot Line, but military history is replete with commanders fighting the last war. The Macedonian phalanx put an end to large, polyglot Persian armies and conquered Alexander II, a massive empire stretching from Greece to India.  Then its rigidity could not cope with the flexibility of the Roman Legion.  Even the legions would at times succumb to the recurve bow of the Parthian horse archer.  

The Yamato was a military construction out of time.  Had she been at Jutland, on either side, she could have made the difference, but in the carrier era of World War II, she was practically a relic, which brings up my thoughts on carriers today.  Like the Yamato, they are not just a machine of war but a source of national pride.  Seeing the USS Abraham Lincoln, the Gerald Ford, or the Ronald Reagan, it is hard not to feel a small amount of patriotism for these incredible ships.  One incisive comment about why, over four years, the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet so little encountered each other is that part of it was far less the desire to destroy the enemy fleet than to save one’s fleet.  Both nations knew the destruction of these sources of national pride might far outweigh the military loss.  Napoleon could lose his fleet at Trafalgar and still carry on, but the British could not endure the loss of their WWI version.  Are we building carriers because of military exigencies or because they look really cool? 

My question is around viability.  In an era with smart missiles, B2 bombers, and massive drone attacks, are the projections of American (and now Chinese) power, or are they sitting ducks like the Yamato off of Okinawa?  Hopefully, minds more powerful than mine, and the decision makers in the 1930s Japanese Imperial Navy, are considering this situation.