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Yamato Battleship.
It is dangerous to call a ship with the name of the country; Yamato battleship is a proof to these words. This monster was designed so that none could equal her – and none could indeed. Even now it still is the world’s biggest battleship. The thickness of her armor and the sheer power of her artillery were unrivalled. The Japanese engineers had calculated that the biggest American ship that still could pass the Panama Canal could have a displacement of no more than 58.000 tons. So Japanese decided to build a battleship with a displacement of nearly 73.000 tons! The battleship was launched on August 8, 1940, and was enlisted in the navy in 1941.
The Japanese were building the ship in the utmost secrecy. The Americans, despite all the achievements of their intelligence, learned of the “Yamato” parameters only after the war. This secrecy only brought harm to the Japanese navy: would the Americans have learnt more of this floating monster, they would have avoided meeting her in a battle.
But the era of the battleships was coming to an end. The Japanese Naval Commander-in-Chief Admiral Yamamoto considered Yamato – class battleships to be useless, and said he would rather build 6 carriers instead of 2 battleships. He was right, as always: even though the Japanese flagship participated in many battles, she had hardly ever damaged the enemy. In the end, she was sunk by the American marine air forces during the attempt to break the siege of Okinawa. It took 200 aircraft, which struck Yamato with eight bombs and ten torpedoes.
The Lucky Crane met her end during the attempt to destroy the American landing party at Leyte
Bay, when the carrier posed as a bait within Admiral Ozawa’s squadron. After three waves of attacks by the American aircraft, which pummelled the carrier with a torpedo and three bombs, and then again with five torpedoes and four bombs, the “lucky” carrier succumbed to destruction.
Yamato Battleship in the "Pacific Storm"
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