Yamato and Musashi riding at anchor off of Truk
"I am aware it is not the soundest of plans. But the Naval Chief of Staff was asked by our Emperor, 'Have we no more ships?'"
From Otoko-tachi no Yamato
Operation Ten-ichi-go / Operation Heaven One
After the Battle of Leyte Gulf in late 1944, the Imperial Japanese Navy effectively ceased to exist as a cohesive fighting force. With the loss of four heavy and light aircraft carriers, three battleships, ten cruisers, eleven destroyers, and the security of movement the Philippines once offered for warships and merchantmen going from Indochina and the Netherlands East Indies to Japan, there would be no more sorties for the once-mighty Combined Fleet.
Chronic fuel shortages were only exacerbated by the loss of the last oil shipments from Sumatra and Borneo, and warships that had retreated to ports like Singapore and Brunei were totally isolated from the Japanese Home Islands (Kyushu, Honshu, Hokkaido, Shikoku). American bombers operated from airfields increasingly close to Japan as the island-hopping campaign progressed with vigor while submarines and aircraft torpedoed, bombed, and mined Japan's shipping tonnage into dust.
This shattering of empire did not just prevent Japan from supplying her forces abroad in Asia. It also prevented Japan from feeding herself. Domestic agricultural output in the Home Islands had been cut to half of its pre-war level by 1945. At the same time, her crucial rice imports - which in 1937 accounted for well over 20% of the total supply - went from 2,173 tons to 268 in the same span. Total losses of shipping and naval tonnage amounted to over ten and a half million tons.
So we are faced with a country that has no fleet, no food, no oil, and no substantial defense against the thousands of heavy bombers razing its cities to the ground. Then, in March 1945, reports come in of an American fleet massing for an assault on Okinawa, an island with a major civilian population dangerously close to Kyushu and the rest of the Home Islands. It represents the beginning of truly Japanese land and a terribly convenient base for American bombers.
Emperor Hirohito was briefed by his staff on the military's plan to defend the island with air and ground forces. When he noticed that the navy had no major role in the plans, some sources claim he asked, "But what about the Navy? What are they doing to assist in defending Okinawa? Have we no more ships?"
Admiral Toyoda Soemu as commanding officer of the Combined Fleet (at that stage of the war little more than a title) immediately directed the planning of an operation to escort the super-battleship Yamato to Okinawa, where she would be beached and used as an artillery platform until destroyed, at which point her sailors would join up with the Imperial Japanese Army and continue to resist the American landings.
Yamato was one of Japan's last major surface combatants, and one of even fewer combatants in fighting condition. Yamato and her sister ship Musashi - lost at Leyte Gulf - were the centerpieces of the Kantai Kessen doctrine, which called for a decisive battle involving battleships to decide a war in the Pacific. For this reason, Japan's most senior admirals, including Isoroku Yamamoto, had carefully preserved the battleship fleet in preparation for such a moment. This focus became more important as the war dragged on and Japan lost more and more of her aircraft carriers in pursuit of such an engagement, slowly building pressure to send out the battleships to do what they were built to do. Yamato and Musashi, the biggest battleships in the fleet and considered especially precious for being named after some of Japan's greatest feudal heroes had been considered the most valuable components of the navy.
Now, the IJN was preparing to sortie out Yamato with almost no air cover and only eight destroyers and a single old light cruiser in a suicide run to Okinawa. The entire Japanese naval staff was united in objecting to the plan until they learned that the Emperor himself had requested IJN involvement in Okinawa's defense. Upon that realization, the staff relented and made preparations, forcing Vice Admiral Seiichi Ito to pull the trigger and set sail for Tokuyama for final preparations (Ito had previously refused to order his ships to Okinawa).
To understand what came next, one must appreciate Yamato in April 1945. She boasted three triple turrets of 46 cm Type 94 primary guns, each turret heavier than your average destroyer-sized vessel and larger than any naval gun... ever. Additionally, she had two triple 15.5 cm guns, three double 127 mm guns, and an incredible 52 triple 25 mm anti-aircraft guns (however, this gun's shell was lighter than the standard American Bofors mount and had a lower rate of fire because it could not operate while being reloaded). Her armament was rounded out by two double 13.2 mm mounts, leaving Yamato with a total of 187 guns of all sizes. She had the thickest armor in the world with a main belt of sixteen inches and up to nine inches of solid deck armor and could steam at just above 30 mph. At full combat load she was somewhere in the range of 70,000 tons. For perspective, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Nimitz displaces 100,000 tons as of today.
Yamato set off with her escorts on April 6th, only loaded with enough fuel to make a one-way trip to Okinawa. Tokuyama's dock workers had defied their orders and loaded Yamato with all of the fuel oil at the port, but this was still only a measly 2,500 barrels and not nearly enough to make it to Okinawa and back.
It did not take long for Yamato to be spotted, and at noon on April 7th hundreds of American carrier aircraft swarmed and battered her and her escorts for two and a half hours. In her fight, Yamato had changed course repeatedly to dodge bombs and torpedoes, fired off beehive shells with her main guns, caught fire in several locations, and intentionally flooded her starboard engineering compartments to counter hits to the port side, even though it caused hundreds of unprepared sailors to drown.
Slowed by repeated hits and uncontrolled flooding, Yamato was an easy target; almost ten torpedoes and fifteen bombs did her in, and the order to abandon ship was given at 2:02 PM. During the evacuation, a fire probably spread to her magazine which caused an explosion so enormous that it was noticed over 100 miles away in Kagoshima on the southern coast of Kyushu.
Over 4,000 Japanese sailors were dead. The mission had failed, and Okinawa would fall on June 22nd after the deaths of nearly 100,000 civilians, 100,000 Japanese troops, and 20,000 Americans. Japan herself would surrender in August after back-to-back atomic bombings annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the threat of imminent invasion and escalated bombing proved too great to bear. Even after such brutal damage, direct orders from the Emperor to surrender the fight were very nearly circumvented in the Kyujo Incident when hardline Imperial Japanese Army officers attempted to seize control of the government and continue the war to the end, a sentiment which a shocking number of Japanese military staff were sympathetic to.
Japan would exit the war a shadow of its pre-war self with hundreds of lost ships, over three million military dead out of roughly nine million personnel, a million civilian deaths, the memory of brutal fighting and colonization in China and Korea that left tens of millions dead, and a shameful heritage of brutality and human experimentation.
In spite of it all, in the face of insurmountable odds, Yamato's crew sailed to their deaths and faced the end with grim determination for naught but the fact that as Japanese sailors, their country and Emperor expected them to. In tragic conflicts such as WWII which irrevocably scarred our collective psyche, there are these instances we can look to where men looked fate in the eye even as those around them took sullenly to being buried in the bloody mausoleum of human history.
Welcome to Real Cool History.
