Japanese battleship Yamato
Encyclopedia : J : JA : JAP : Japanese battleship Yamato
 Yamato on trials, 1941 | |
| Career |
|
|---|---|
| Ordered: | March 1937 |
| Laid down: | 4 November 1937 |
| Launched: | 8 August 1940 |
| Commissioned: | 16 December 1941 |
| Fate: | Sunk 7 April 1945 North of Okinawa |
| General Characteristics | |
| Displacement: | 65,027 tonnes (empty, including 21,266 tonnes of armor); 72,800 tonnes (estimated, full load) |
| Length: | 256 m (800.5 ft) water-line 263 m (862.5 ft) overall |
| Beam: | 36.9 m (121 ft) |
| Draft: | 11 m (36 ft) maximum |
| Propulsion: | • 12 Kanpon boilers, driving 4 steam turbines • 150,000 shp (110 MW) • Four 3-bladed propellers, 6.0 m (19.7 ft) diameter |
| Speed: | 27 knots (50 km/h) |
| Range: | 11,500 km at 16 knots (30 km/h) |
| Complement: | 2,750 |
| Armour: | • 650 mm on face of turrets • 410 mm side armor, inclined 20 degrees • 200 mm armored deck |
| Armament: (1941) | • 9 × 46 cm (18.1 inch) (3×3) • 12 × 15.5 cm (6.1 inch) (4×3) • 12 × 12.7 cm (6×2) • 24 × 25 mm AA (8×3) • 4 × 13 mm AA (2×2) |
| Armament: (1945) | • 9 × 46 cm (18.1 inch) (3×3) • 6 × 15.5 cm (6.1 inch) (2×3) • 24 × 12.7 cm (12×2) • 162 × 25 mm AA (52×3, 6×1) • 4 × 13 mm AA (2×2) |
| Aircraft: | 7, 2 catapults |
Yamato (大和), named after the ancient Japanese Yamato Province, was a battleship of the Imperial Japanese Navy. She was the first built (the lead ship) of the Yamato class. She and her sister ship Musashi were the largest, heaviest battleships ever constructed, weighing 65,027 tons. She carried the heaviest armament ever fitted to a battleship: nine 460 mm (18.1 inch) guns.
Construction
The Yamato class were designed in the post Washington Naval Treaty period. The treaty had been extended by the London Naval Treaty of 1930 which limited the signatories to no battleship production before 1937—the Japanese withdrew from the Treaty at the Second London conference of 1936. Design work on the class began in 1934 and after modifications the design for a 68,000 ton vessel was accepted in March 1937. The Yamato was built in intense secrecy at a specially prepared dock to hide her construction at Kure Naval Dockyards beginning on 4 November 1937. She was launched on 8 August 1940 and commissioned on 16 December 1941. Originally it was intended that five ships of this class would be built, but the third ship of the class, Shinano, was converted to an aircraft carrier during construction after the defeat at the Battle of Midway, the un-named "Hull Number 111" was scrapped in 1943 when roughly 30% complete, and "Hull Number 797", proposed in the 1942 5th Supplementary Program, was never ordered. Plans for a "Super Yamato" class, with 50.8 cm (20 inch) guns, provisionally designated as "Hull Number 798" and "Hull Number 799", were abandoned in 1942.
The class was designed to be superior to any ship that the United States was likely to produce. The 46 cm (18.1-inch) main guns were selected over 40.6 cm (16 inch) because the width of the Panama Canal would make it impracticable for the U.S. Navy to construct a battleship with the same caliber guns without severe design restrictions or an inadequate defensive arrangement. To further confuse the intelligence agencies of other countries, her main guns were officially named as 40.6 cm Special, and civilians were never notified of the true nature of the guns. Their budgets were also scattered among various projects so that the huge total costs would not be immediately noticeable.
At the Kure Navy Yard where she was built, the construction dock was deepened, the gantry crane capacity was increased to 100 metric tonnes, and part of the dock was roofed over to prevent observation of work.
Arc welding, a relatively new procedure at that time, was used extensively during construction. The lower side-belt armor was used as a strength member of the hull structure. The undulating line of the main deck forward saved structural weight without reducing hull girder strength. Tests of models in a model basin led to the adoption of a semitransom stern and a bulbous bow, which reduced hull resistance by 8%. The ship had one single large rudder (at frame 231), which gave it a small (for a ship of that size) turning circle of 640 meters. By comparison the US Iowa class fast battleship had one of over 800 m. There was also a smaller auxiliary rudder installed (at frame 219) which was virtually useless. The steam turbine power plant was a relatively low powered design (25 kgf/cm² (2.5 MPa), 325 °C), and as such, their fuel usage rate was very high. This is a primary reason why they were not used during the Solomon Islands campaign and other mid-war operations. There were a total of 1147 watertight compartments in the ship.
Combat
Yamato was the flagship of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto from 12 February 1942, replacing Nagato. She took part in the Midway operation in June, 1942, but took no active part in the Battle of Midway. She remained the flagship for 364 days until February 11 1943, when the flag was transferred to her sister ship Musashi. From 29 August 1942 through to 8 May 1943, she spent all of her time at Truk, being underway for only 1 day during this entire time. In May 1943, she returned to Kure where the two wing 15.5 cm turrets were removed and replaced by 25 mm machine guns, and Type-22 surface search radars were added. She returned to Truk on 25 December 1943, and on the way there, she was damaged by a torpedo from the submarine USS Skate, and was not fully repaired until April 1944. During these repairs, additional 12.7 cm anti-aircraft guns were installed in the place of the 15.5 cm turrets removed in May, and additional 25 mm anti-aircraft guns were added.
She returned to the conflict and joined the Japanese fleet in the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944. In October, she participated in the Battles of Leyte Gulf and Samar, during which she first fired her main guns in anger, and she received two bomb hits from aircraft which did little damage. She returned home in November and her anti-aircraft capability was again upgraded over the winter. She was attacked in the Inland Sea on March 19 1945 by carrier aircraft from Task Force 58 as they attacked Kure. She suffered little damage during the engagement.
Her final mission was as part of Operation Ten-Go following the invasion of Okinawa on 1 April 1945. She was sent on a suicide mission (commanded by Admiral Seiichi Ito) to attack the US fleet supporting the US troops landing on the west of the island. On 6 April Yamato and her escorts, the light cruiser Yahagi and 8 destroyers, left port at Tokuyama. They were sighted on 7 April by American submarines as they exited the Inland Sea southwards. The U.S. Navy launched 386 aircraft to intercept the task force, and the planes engaged the ships starting at 12:30 that afternoon. Yamato took 8 bomb and 10 torpedo hits before, at about 14:23, she capsized to port and her aft magazines detonated. She sank while still some 200 km from Okinawa. Of her crew 2,475 were lost, and the 269 survivors were picked up by the escorting destroyers. Some reports claim that a number of survivors were machine-gunned in the water by U.S. aircraft."Then the Americans started to shoot with machine guns at the people who were floating, so we all had to dive under." However, other Japanese survivors reported that U.S. aircraft temporarily halted their attacks on the Japanese destroyers during the time that the destroyers were busy picking up survivors from the water.
The wreckage lies in around 300 meters of water and was surveyed in 1985 and 1999.
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References
- Yoshida Mitsuru, Requiem for Battleship Yamato. A detailed description of the ship's final voyage; Mitsuru was the only surviving bridge officer.
- Janusz Skulski, The Battleship Yamato. A highly detailed book on every aspect of the ship.
- Russell Spurr's A Glorious Way To Die. A description of Yamato’s final days as seen from the perspective of not only her officers and men, but also the accompanying ships of her task force and the American forces who destroyed her.
- Siegfried Breyer, Battleships and Battlecruisers 1905–1970 (Doubleday and Company; Garden City, New York, 1973) (originally published in German as Schlachtschiffe und Schlachtkreuzer 1905–1970, J.F. Lehmanns, Verlag, Munchen, 1970). Contains various line drawings of the ship as designed and as built.
- Robert Gardiner, ed., Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1922–1946, (Conway Maritime Press, London, 1980)
- William H. Garzke, Jr., and Robert O. Dulin, Jr., Battleships: Axis and Neutral Battlehips in World War II, (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1985)
- James D. Hornfischer, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors : The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Finest Hour, (Bantam; Reprint edition, 2005). Detailed story of the Battle off Samar (although light on details from the Japanese perspective) and the most intensive treatment available of Yamato’s only surface action.
- — One-hour documentary on Operation Ten-Go
Trivia
- Yamato was said by her crew to be "more beautiful than a woman".
- In 2005, a museum about Yamato opened in Kure, Hiroshima. A 1/10 model can be seen there.
- There is a film based on the exploits of the Yamato and her crew: Otoko-tachi no Yamato, made in 2005.
- In a futuristic anime television and movie series Space Battleship Yamato, broadcast in the US as Star Blazers, humanity salvages the wreck of Yamato from the evaporated ocean floor and refits it as a spaceship which saves the Earth and its people from toxic radiation which is ravaging the planet, due to alien bombardment.
- The historical fiction anime series Zipang features Yamato prominently in the early episodes of the series.
- An episode of the 1980s cartoon Rambo and the Forces of Freedom featured an attempt to raise Yamato.
- USS Yamato is the name of one of the Galaxy Class sister ships to the USS Enterprise on .
- Now defunct Interplay Entertainment's starship combat simulation game, , features a class of superheavy dreadnaughts fielded by the United Federation of Planets called the Yamato class.
- The RTS game StarCraft, from Blizzard Entertainment, features a game unit called the Terran Battlecruiser with a special attack called "Yamato Cannon" probably in homage to Space Battleship Yamato 's Wave motion gun.
- In the game Starlancer, based around space fighter combat, there is a large space battleship on the player's side called the 'Yamato'.
- The Capcom arcade game features the Yamato as an end-of-level boss.
- In the game Metal Slug 2 by SNK, there is an end of level boss that looks suspiciously like the Yamato. But after taking out the main guns and the AA turrets, it pulls out a monster gun that seems more like a tribute to Starblazers.
External links
- [IJN Yamato: Tabular Record of Movement]
- [Yoshida Mitsuru, Requiem for Battleship Yamato] book review
- [Russell Spurr, A Glorious Way To Die] book review
- [Pictures of Yamato Wreck]
- [Yamato Museum official site] (Japanese with some English)
- [Yamato Museum] (description from Kure city guide, in English)
- [Images of 1/10-scale Yamato model at Kure Yamato Museum]
- [Site of the Japanese film based on the exploits of the Yamato]
- [Yamato the Ultimate Battleship] A website dedicated to Battleship Yamato
- [NOVA:Sinking the Supership] show website
- [Maritimequest Yamato Photo Gallery]
- [Battleship Yamato Memorial Tower]
| Yamato-class battleship |
| Yamato | Musashi |
| Shinano-class aircraft carrier |
| Shinano |
| List of ships of the Japanese Navy |
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