Transcription
259 aircraft attacked a single battleship. They hit it with 19 torpedoes and 17 bombs over the course of nearly 7 hours. The Musashi still did not sink until half past 7:00 in the evening. Few warships in history have ever absorbed that kind of punishment, but here is what makes this even stranger.
What is left of the Musashi is still sitting on the ocean floor today. Nobody has ever seriously tried to recover it. So, there are actually two questions worth asking. How did the Americans finally sink it? Why is it still down there?
The Musashi was one of only two ships ever built to the Yamato class design, the largest and most heavily armed battleships ever constructed. Nearly 73,000 tons at full load, 862 ft long, nine [music] 18.1 in guns, the largest ever mounted on any warship. Built in complete secrecy at the Mitsubishi shipyard in Nagasaki starting in 1938. When the Musashi was launched in November 1940, the sheer weight of the hull displaced so much water in the harbor that it created a small wave flooding nearby land and capsizing some fishing boats. The shipyard workers had signed secrecy oaths. The specifications were so sensitive that the Japanese government officially listed the battleship as carrying nine 16 in guns, not 18 in guns, to hide the true capability from foreign intelligence. The Americans did not learn the actual specifications until after the war ended.
Commissioned in August 1942, the Musashi briefly served as the flagship of the Japanese Combined Fleet. But like her sister ship Yamato, she spent most of the war sitting at anchor, moving between bases, calls, and consuming fuel Japan could not afford to waste. The most powerful battleship Japan had ever built was burning through resources just by existing. The Musashi fired her enormous main armament at enemy vessels exactly once in her entire career. Once. That opportunity came at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. It was the largest naval battle in history. American forces had landed on the Philippines. Japan committed almost everything it had left to stop them. The Musashi sailed with Admiral Kurita's Center Force, the most powerful surface fleet Japan had assembled since the beginning of the war. >> [music] >> The Americans knew they were coming. On the morning of October 24th, 1944, American carrier aircraft found the Japanese fleet in the Sibuyan [music] Sea. The pilots could see the Musashi from miles away. She was simply too large to miss.
What followed was one of the most extraordinary [music] feats of endurance in naval history. The first wave of aircraft hit the battleship at around 10:00 in the morning. One torpedo struck. One bomb struck. >> [music] >> Damage control flooded compartments to correct the list. The Musashi kept moving. The second wave arrived around midday. Three more torpedoes struck. Two more bombs struck. The ship was down at the bow, listing slightly, but still [music] making 22 knots, still fighting. The third wave came an hour later. Four more bombs struck. Three more torpedoes struck. At this point, it should have been over. A 16-year-old sailor who served in the meteorological department recalled that the sound of the explosions was so powerful, it blew crew members off their feet throughout the ship. And yet, the Musashi kept going. By the afternoon, any other ship in the world would have been gone, but the Musashi was still there.
Then the fourth and fifth waves arrived together. 13 bombs and 11 torpedoes in a single attack. >> [music] >> This is where it stops making sense. The battleship's speed dropped to six knots. The steering was temporarily jammed. She was listing badly to port. Admiral Inoguchi ordered the crew to [music] counter flood the starboard compartments, deliberately flooding their own ship to try to stay afloat. Hundreds of men were trapped below as the compartments filled. It was not enough. By early evening, the Musashi had taken 19 torpedoes and 17 bombs from 259 aircraft in six waves. The bow was underwater. At 19:15, the order was given to abandon ship. 15 minutes later, the list reached 30° and she capsized. >> [music] >> At 7:36 in the evening, the largest battleship Japan ever sent into battle slid beneath the Sibuyan Sea. Admiral Inoguchi chose to go down with the ship. Over 1,000 men went down with the Musashi, many of them still inside the wreck today. 1,376 survivors were pulled from the water by Japanese destroyers.
The battleship was gone and for over 70 years, nobody could find it. This is the part of the story that surprises most people. >> [music] >> The Musashi sank in a known location in the middle of the largest naval battle in history. Dozens of ships and hundreds of aircraft were present, and yet for more than seven decades, every attempt to locate the wreck failed. Shipwreck hunters searched repeatedly. All of them came back empty. Part of the reason was that Japanese warships did not carry their names on their hulls, which made identification far harder for anyone surveying the seafloor. Part of the reason was that the Sibuyan Sea had four different recorded sinking positions in historical documents. The Japanese Navy record, the American Navy record, the log of a Japanese destroyer standing by during the rescue, and a drawing made by a survivor. All four positions were different and nobody knew exactly where to look.
Then Paul Allen got involved. Allen was the co-founder of Microsoft, one of the wealthiest men in the world, and a lifelong obsessive about the Second World War, inspired by his father's service in the US Army. His team had already found the USS Indianapolis and the USS Lexington. The Musashi was next on the list. The search took 8 years. It drew on historical records from four different countries and detailed underwater topographic maps of the Sibuyan Sea. They swept a search area of 360 square nautical miles using the most advanced underwater survey technology available. On March 1st, 2015, they found [music] it.
The found moment answered years of questions. The wreck lies in the Sibuyan Sea at a depth of around 900 m, just under 3,000 ft. When the submersible footage came back, researchers immediately understood why every previous search had failed. The Musashi had not sunk in one piece as everyone assumed. The battleship had exploded underwater as it descended, scattering debris across the ocean floor over a vast area. The bow section is sitting upright on the seabed. The stern is upside down. Turrets, catapults, anchors, and thousands of pieces of wreckage are spread across a huge debris field. One survivor watched the live footage from his home in Japan. Shigeru Nakajima was 94 years old. He had jumped overboard when the abandon ship order was given 71 years earlier. When he saw the anchor and the Imperial Seal in the footage, he said he was certain it was the Musashi. He said the crew members who went down with the ship must be delighted their resting place had finally been found. Over 1,000 of them are still there.
The wreck lies in Philippine waters and the Philippine government has jurisdiction over the site. The National Museum of the Philippines stated after the discovery that any further activity would be governed by established rules and regulations. Japan considers the site a war grave. There's no serious plan to raise it. Given the condition of the wreck, blown apart by an underwater explosion and scattered across the seafloor, raising it is not even technically possible. So, the Musashi is still there because it was destroyed so completely that what remains cannot be recovered, because it lies in waters belonging to another country, >> [music] >> because over 1,000 men are still inside it, and because even if none of those things were true, the technology to raise 73,000 tons of shattered steel from 3,000 ft of water simply does not exist. The battleship that took 19 torpedoes and 17 bombs and still refused to sink for nearly 7 hours is now in so many pieces on the ocean floor that it can never be brought back up.
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