The Story of The Battleship Yamato, The Most Powerful Ship In World War II History (2024)

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The Story of The Battleship Yamato, The Most Powerful Ship In World War II History? ›

She was laid down in 1937 and formally commissioned a week after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Throughout 1942, she served as the flagship of the Combined Fleet, and in June 1942 Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto directed the fleet from her bridge during the Battle of Midway, a disastrous defeat for Japan.

Yamato 's Last Voyage. On her last morning, before the first American planes intercepted her, Yamato would have appeared indestructible. After all, she was the heaviest and most powerful battleship ever built, carrying the most formidable guns ever mounted at sea.

The largest and most powerful battleships ever built, Japan's Yamato and Musashi, were constructed secretly. These behemoths carried nine 18-inch/45 guns, the largest caliber guns ever mounted on a battleship, and their broadside weight was more than twice that of the Bismarck's guns.

If greatness can be measured by size, Yamato was indeed the greatest battleship ever built. Her hull was 863 feet long—longer than all but America's Iowa-class ships. Fully loaded, Yamato displaced about 70,000 tons of water, outweighing even the biggest Allied battleships by more than 20 percent.

In October 1944, as part of Vice-Admiral Takeo Kurita's Center Force for the Battle of Leyte Gulf, she used her naval artillery against an enemy vessel for the only time, helping sink the American escort carrier Gambier Bay and the destroyer Johnston before she was forced away by torpedoes from Heermann, which put her ...

A powerful representation of Germany's rise from the ashes of the First World War, it was a fearsome combination of size, swiftness and firepower. Bismarck was nominally meant to be 35,000 tons to meet the stipulations of the Washington Naval Treaty [which placed limits on the size of battleships].

Bismarck had the newest and most advanced fire-control systems. Hood's only advantage was in the weight of her armor-piercing projectiles, which weighed 1,900 pounds as compared to her opponent's 1,800-pound shells. Yet even with heavier shells, Hood's 29,000-yard maximum range was 6,000 yards less than Bismarck's.

A 3:1 engagement would then subject a Yamato to nearly 150,000 pounds of shot each minute, while each Iowa would only be subjected to about 19,000 pounds of ordnance in return. Ceteris paribus, U.S. battleships would quickly win such an encounter.

Bismarck had a higher top speed, capable of reaching approximately 30 knots, compared to Yamato's top speed of around 27 knots [2].

What destroyed Yamato? ›

Torpedoes explode against Yamato's port side as she turns to avoid the onslaught from bombers. While the Americans' 1,000-pound bombs held fearsome destructive power, as seen in this one exploding off Yamato's port bow, it was their air-launched torpedoes that ultimately led to the supership's demise.

No single carrier sunk Yamato. Yamato was sunk by combined strikes from three carrier task groups from TF 58. The groups included the fleet carriers Hornet, Yorktown, Intrepid, Bennington, Essex, Bunker Hill, and Hanco*ck, and the light fleet carriers Belleau Wood, San Jacinto, Langley, and Bataan.

The Yamato wreck was discovered in waters over 1,000 feet deep, 180 miles southwest of the island of Kyushu, in 1982. At the time, it was unclear if the wreckage was, in fact, the remains of the Yamato, but a second exploration in 1984 confirmed it.

The Yamato class participated in three battles. None were the great battleline fleet where they would annihilated the US battleships they were designed for.

The Japanese force was attacked by U.S. carrier-borne aircraft before it could reach Okinawa; Yamato and five other Japanese warships were sunk. The battle demonstrated U.S. air supremacy in the Asiatic-Pacific Theater and the vulnerability of surface ships without air cover from aerial attack.

The unique feature of the battleship Yamato was her eighteen-inch guns. Until then the largest naval guns of the modern type ever mounted aboard a man-of-war were of the sixteen-inch size.

Le Fantasque was powered by two Rateau-Bretagne geared steam turbines, each driving one propeller shaft, using steam provided by four water-tube boilers. The turbines were designed to produce 74,000 metric horsepower (54,000 kW; 73,000 shp), which would propel the ship at 37 knots (69 km/h; 43 mph).

USS Missouri (BB-63)