Thursday, October 18, 2007

Yamato and her sister ship the Musashi.







The yamato and the Musashi where the biggest Battleships ever built. The Yamato was completed in 1941 with the Musashi being finish in 42. Both had a speed of 27 knots,Displacement coming in at 71,659 tons. Main guns where ,three 46 cm L/45 triple barreled guns. Secondary guns ,four 15.5 cm triple barreled gun. High angle guns ,six 12.7 double guns. machine guns four 13mm double guns. The only difference between the ships Where the caliber of the machine guns...The musashi Had 130.25 mm machine guns. Both ship had a crew of 2,500 men. Those ships were design for a knock down fight. I don't know why those two ships have always been my favorites. I have allways liked the way that Japanese ship bridges looked. I would have loved to watch those main guns in action(who need porn this is better). The Imperial Japanese navy main battle plan was to draw the American navy into one final gun battle. Dueling Battleship to decide the outcome of the war. This was not to be. The battleship at this stage of the century had become a dinosaur. Now most of the battles in the Pacific were being decide by aircraft carries. The battleship be allocated to secondary rules. Such as fire support for the landing force. The Yamato never get a chance (lucky for us) to use her main guns to affect. How BIG was the Yamato you ask? She weighted more then all of the U.S.Fleet combind, she was sent to attack. Most of the U.S. fleet was destroyers,destroyers escorts,carries escorst. Thats still a big ship, one of her main turret weighted more then one of the U.S. destroyers alone. On April 7 1945 early in the morning the Yamato was spotted by one of our planes. By noon on that same day over 300 of our planes pounced on her. Take no less then ten torpedoes,eight bombs to sink her. With a loss 2,498 of her crew.The musashi met her end on the 24 October 1944. She was attacked by several U.S. aircraft from four aircraft carries. Sustained 20 aerial torpedo and 17 bomb hits plus 16 damaging near missies. Four and half hours after this last attack she sank. I always wonder why the Yamato went on to such notoriety and the Musashi slipped into obsurity. The death of the Yamato was the swansong for the Imperial Japanese navy. If they had survived the war they would have been cut up for scrap or use for the atomic testing that went on in the pacific after the war. To me they were beautiful ships. The picture on the bottom is the Yamato. The picture in the middle is The Musashi. The last picture is of the Yamato as she lay today.....broken.

5 comments:

tina FCD said...

Wow! I really truly enjoyed that! It was like listening to Discovery channel. That ship WAS HUGE! One turret weighing as much as a battle ship? Freakin' awesome. I'm more into airplanes but this post was cool! Hey, I have a Nintendo game named "Musashi". You definitely need to get DSL, I wouldn't mind watching a few video's on this stuff, as long as they are not too long. :)I would even post a few vids on it.

Pyramidhead said...

Not a battleship but a destroyer. It's a smaller ship. But thats still a huge turret.

tina FCD said...

Hell yeah it is.

SouthLoopScot said...

Nice post, I enjoyed it a lot!

Unknown said...

Yeah, that was a good post Bob.