Transcription
Over 3,000 men are still trapped inside the largest battleship ever built. For 80 years, nobody has touched it. Not salvaged, not recovered, not even seriously attempted.
And this wasn't just any warship. The Japanese battleship Yamato was so large, so heavily armed that when it finally sank, the explosion was so violent, it created a mushroom cloud visible from miles away. A ship this big, this famous, this valuable should not still be sitting on the ocean floor. And yet, it is. So, the question is why?
Because the answer isn't simple. It involves a one-way mission that a fleet knew it would not return from, a catastrophic explosion that tore the ship apart, and over 3,000 men still sealed inside what remains of it. And even today, with modern technology capable of reaching the wreck, raising it may be completely impossible.
The Yamato was not just the largest battleship ever built. It was built in complete secrecy because Japan knew it could never match American ship building numbers. So, it decided to build something no American battleship could fight. Construction began in 1937 at the Kuray Naval Arsenal in Hiroshima. The dockyard had to be deepened by a full meter just to accommodate the hole. Special cranes capable of lifting 350 tons were installed. When the Yamato was finally launched in August 1940, workers erected screens and a canopy around the dry dock so that passing ships could not see what was being built inside.
The Finnish battleship displaced nearly 72,000 tons at full load, unprecedented and heavier than any warship before or since. The Yamato was 862 ft long. Its main armament was 98.1in guns arranged in three triple turrets, the largest naval guns ever mounted on a warship. Each gun could hurl a 1,460 kg shell over 42 km. Each turret weighed 2,774 tons, heavier than many of the destroyers the Yamato would sail alongside. No Allied battleship carried anything close.
The Yamato was commissioned in December 1941, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. For much of the war, the battleship served as the flagship of the combined fleet. In June 1942, Admiral Yamamoto directed the Battle of Midway from the Yamato's bridge, the battle that turned the tide of the Pacific War decisively against Japan. The Yamato was at Midway, but never fired a shot. The battleship spent much of the war moving between Japanese naval bases, too valuable to risk and consuming too much fuel to deploy freely.
This is the bit that got me when I was researching this. The most powerful battleship ever built spent most of the Second World War doing almost nothing because Japan could not afford to use it. The Yamato fired her main guns at enemy surface targets just once in her entire career at the Battle of Lee Gulf in October 1944.
By early 1945, Japan had lost its carrier aviation, most of its capital ships, and the war was effectively over. The Yamato sat at anchor at Tokyama, burning through fuel Japan could not replace, waiting for orders that had nowhere logical to go. Those orders came in April 1945. American forces had landed on Okinawa on April 1st. When Emperor Hiito was briefed on the army's plans to defend the island, he reportedly asked, "Where is the navy? What are they doing? Have we no more ships?"
Feeling pressured by the emperor, Japanese navy commanders conceived Operation Tang Go, Operation Heaven. The plan was brutally simple. The Yamato along with the light cruiser Yahagi and eight destroyers would sail to Okinawa with only enough fuel for a one-way trip. The battleship would beach itself on the shore and use its enormous guns as fixed artillery against the American invasion force until the ammunition ran out. The crews would then go ashore to keep fighting.
The mission was so clearly one way that Vice Admiral Seichiito, the commander chosen to lead it, initially refused. He called it futile and wasteful. Captain Tamichi Chihara of the Yahagi described it as throwing an egg against a rock. The ship captains who would carry out the mission were not even told the full details of the plan until April 5th, 2 days before departure. In the end, every one of them executed their orders. The crew were not given the option to leave except for approximately 80 men who were new, sick, or infirm and were ordered off the ship. 67 naval cadets from the Etima Naval Academy had arrived on the Yamato just 3 days earlier. They were sent home.
At 4 in the afternoon on April 6th, 1945, the Yamato and her escorts left Tokuyama. Every man on board knew the ship would not be coming back. In a quiet act of defiance, the fuel depot workers at Tokyama secretly gave the ships almost all of the remaining fuel in the port, ignoring orders to supply only enough for a one-way trip. It probably still was not enough for a return journey.
American submarines spotted the Japanese force almost immediately as it passed through the Bongo Strait between the Japanese home islands. Contact reports flashed to Vice Admiral Mark Mitcher, commanding Task Force 58, the American fast car carrier force. Mitcher had 15 carriers and nearly 900 aircraft at his disposal. Admiral Raymond Spruent briefly considered dispatching a battle line of six fast battleships to intercept the Yamato in a surface engagement. In the end, the decision was made to send the aircraft. The battleships were not needed.
On the morning of April 7th, American search planes found the Japanese force. At 10:00, Admiral Itto ordered a turn west as if withdrawing, a final attempt to buy time. By 11:30, with American aircraft shadowing the fleet continuously, the Yamato turned back toward Okinawa for the last time.
The attack came in waves. From 12:37 in the afternoon, aircraft from 15 American carriers swarmed the Yamato fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo planes. Nearly 400 aircraft in total. The Yamato had six fighters as air cover. In the damage control rooms, Japanese officers made desperate decisions, deliberately flooding their own starboard engine and boiler rooms to try to prevent the ship from capsizing at the cost of hundreds of their own crew trapped below.
By 223 in the afternoon, the Yamato had been hit by at least 11 torpedoes and six bombs. The battleship was listing heavily, speed reduced, fires burning from bow to stern. Then the fires reached the forward ammunition magazines. The resulting explosion sent a mushroom cloud 6 km into the sky. American pilots were watching from miles away. The explosion was so violent it registered on seismographs. Observers on the Japanese mainland could see it from over 200 km away. Of the 3,332 crew members aboard, 3,55 were lost. Around 270 survived. The Yamato never came within 100 miles of Okinawa.
The wreck was first located in August 1985 by a Japanese expedition using the submersible Pisces 2. It lies 290 km southwest of Kushu at a depth of 340 m about 1100 ft. The battleship is in two main pieces. The forward section lies on its starboard side showing clear torpedo damage. The stern section rests upside down. The main gun turrets, each weighing nearly 3,000 tons, broke free when the ship rolled over and are now lying sc the superructure is lying separately in the middle of the wreckage. What remains is an enormous field of shattered steel covering a wide area of the ocean floor.
So why has nobody salvaged the Yamato? There are several reasons and they all compound each other. The first is the depth. 340 m about,00 ft is not unreachable for modern technology, but it makes any salvage operation extremely complex and expensive. This is significantly deeper than most of the other wrecks we have covered on this channel.
The second is the condition. The Yato was not simply sunk. The magazine explosion at the end tore the battleship into pieces and scattered wreckage across a wide debris field. There is no intact hole to raise. A business group in Cure announced plans in 2009 to raise the main gun turrets in the forward section and estimated the cost would run into billions of yen. Nothing came of it. The technical difficulties were simply too great.
The third is what the wreck represents. 3,55 men are still inside the Yamato. In Japan, the battleship is not simply a piece of naval history. It is sacred ground. The word Yamato was historically used as a poetic name for Japan itself. The battleship represents something profound in Japanese culture. A symbol of sacrifice, of a nation that sent its greatest weapon on a mission it knew it would not return from, and of the men who sailed anyway.
In 2015, a group of Japanese lawmakers began formal meetings to study the feasibility of raising the ship to recover crew remains. The discussions produce no action. The political and cultural sensitivity around disturbing the wreck is enormous. And there is one final point. Even if Japan wanted to raise the Yamato, and there is serious disagreement about whether it should, no technology currently exists capable of lifting 72,000 tons of shattered steel from 1,100 ft of water.
The Yamato is not sitting there waiting to be raised. The Yamato is in pieces, scattered across the ocean floor, held together by nothing. The largest battleship ever built. The most powerful naval guns ever mounted on a warship. Sent on a one-way mission with only enough fuel to get there. Never even reached its destination. And it has been at the bottom of the East China Sea for 80 years with over 3,000 men still inside.