THE YAMATO DISASTER 1945: 3.055 Japanese Dead in 2 Hours

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[00:00:03]On the afternoon of April 6th, 1945, the battleship Yamato departed the Tokuyama oil depot with enough fuel to reach Okinawa and a plan that did not include the return journey.

[00:00:15]The force she sailed with was designated a surface special attack unit.

[00:00:21]In the Imperial Japanese Navy of April 1945, the term special attack had one meaning. It was the same term applied to the pilots who flew their aircraft into American warships. The largest battleship in the world was being sent to Okinawa by the same logic that had been sending 18-year-old pilots to their deaths since October of 1944.

[00:00:42]She was on the bottom of the East China Sea the following afternoon.

[00:00:46]2,498 of her crew of 3,332 did not come back. 386 American aircraft in two waves, 11 torpedoes, six bombs, 2 hours between the first torpedo and the moment the magazines detonated.

[00:01:04]The Musashi, the Yamato's identical sister ship, had lasted 9 hours under the same kind of attack 6 months earlier.

[00:01:11]The vice admiral who commanded this mission had called it futile before agreeing to lead it.

[00:01:17]The Americans had decrypted the operational orders 11 days before the Yamato left port. The Americans who knew about the mission before it began lost 10 aircraft.

[00:01:27]The Yamato's crew had loaded 1,170 shells for nine 18-in guns, 13,500 anti-aircraft rounds, and 11 and 1/2 million rounds of machine gun ammunition.

[00:01:40]It was not enough. The Yamato and the Musashi were the same ship built twice.

[00:01:44]Same hull, same guns, same armor.

[00:01:47]The Musashi was destroyed in October of 1944 without having fired her main guns at an enemy surface vessel in combat.

[00:01:55]The Yamato fired her main guns at enemy ships exactly once at escort carriers so outmatched that the battle should not have been in doubt and was ordered to withdraw before it concluded. Both were sunk from the air. Between them, the two largest warships in the history of naval warfare were built at enormous cost and died without ever doing what they were designed to do.

[00:02:16]I spent 8 hours writing, editing, and researching this story to verify every number and every name exactly right because the 2,498 men who died on the Yamato on April 7th deserve an accounting of the mission they were told they were not coming back from.

[00:02:33]And because the story of how the largest battleship ever built was sent to die as a kamikaze is the story of what the Pacific War had become by the spring of 1945.

[00:02:43]If this story matters to you, subscribe to the channel. Just subscribe. That is all. Thank you. To understand what the Yamato was doing at the Tokuyama oil depot on April 6th, 1945, you need to understand what happened to her sister ship 6 months earlier, what the months between October of 1944 and April of 1945 had cost the Japanese Navy, and why the institution that had built the two most powerful warships in history was left with no alternative that made more sense than what it chose.

[00:03:15]The Yamato was present in the Sibuyan Sea on October 24th, 1944 when the Musashi was destroyed.

[00:03:23]Both ships were part of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita's Center Force, the most powerful Japanese surface fleet still operational, sailing south toward Leyte Gulf as part of Operation Sho-Go. The Musashi was the ship the American aviators chose to concentrate on. She was hit by 19 torpedoes and 17 bombs over 9 hours. She sank at 19:36.

[00:03:46]The Yamato, sailing in the same formation, received a fraction of that attention.

[00:03:51]One torpedo struck her during the engagement, two bombs. She continued south while her sister ship was dying behind her. That night, Kurita brought what remained of the center force through the San Bernardino Strait and into the Philippine Sea.

[00:04:06]In the early morning of October 25th, the Yamato's 18-in guns fired at the escort carriers of Taffy 3 in the only surface engagement of her career.

[00:04:16]The Yamato had been built for exactly this kind of action. She was facing ships so outclassed that the outcome should not have been in doubt.

[00:04:25]Then Kurita ordered a withdrawal before the battle resolved. The Yamato returned to Japan with her main guns having fired at enemy ships for the first and last time in her career.

[00:04:35]She had not sunk anything.

[00:04:37]The Taffy 3 engagement was significant not only for what the Yamato failed to accomplish, but for what it revealed about the condition of the Japanese Navy by October of 1944. A force that included the Yamato, three other battleships, and six heavy cruisers had engaged a group of escort carriers that were designed for anti-submarine patrol and support operations, not for fleet combat.

[00:05:02]The escort carriers had no armor to speak of.

[00:05:05]Their aircraft were not equipped for ship-to-ship attacks. They were, by any standard of fleet combat, overwhelmed.

[00:05:12]They were not overwhelmed.

[00:05:13]Their escorting destroyers and destroyer escorts, some of them small ships with crews of a few hundred men, charged the Japanese formation in attacks that should have resulted in their destruction and that instead disrupted the Japanese fire control long enough for the escort carriers to disperse.

[00:05:30]When Kurita ordered the withdrawal, the Yamato's guns went quiet. She had been engaged for approximately 2 hours with forces that should not have been capable of defending themselves, and she was sailing away from them.

[00:05:42]The Yamato reached Japan after Leyte Gulf with the knowledge of what she had not done at Samar encoded in her history, she was the most powerful surface combatant in the world and she had been given the opportunity to use that power and she was at anchor in Kure. The months that followed kept her at anchor in Kure.

[00:06:00]A port on the Inland Sea that was within range of American bombers but that still provided the illusion of security that open ocean no longer offered.

[00:06:10]Fuel was the central problem.

[00:06:12]Japan's access to the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies had been effectively severed by American submarine operations and air attacks on the supply routes.

[00:06:21]The Navy had enough fuel to conduct operations but not enough to conduct them wastefully. A fleet of destroyers could be fueled from what was available.

[00:06:30]A battleship the size of the Yamato consumed fuel at a rate that required specific strategic justification for every movement. She sat at Kure through November and December of 1944 and through January and February of 1945. The most powerful warship in the world sitting idle while the war moved past her. While American forces took Iwo Jima and began preparing the invasion of Okinawa.

[00:06:55]The Japanese High Command was planning what they called Ketsu Go, the decisive battle for the home islands.

[00:07:02]The Yamato's role in that plan was never fully defined.

[00:07:06]She was an asset without a viable mission. The American invasion of Okinawa began on April 1st, 1945.

[00:07:14]The first day of fighting established that this would be a different kind of campaign than any that had come before it.

[00:07:21]Okinawa was Japanese home territory in a way the Pacific Islands had not been.

[00:07:26]The civilian population was substantial.

[00:07:28]The defenders were numerous, well supplied by Japanese standards and fighting with the understanding that what happened on Okinawa would determine the conditions under which the home islands themselves were defended.

[00:07:41]The Japanese High Command understood Okinawa's significance in the same terms.

[00:07:46]If Okinawa fell, American air bases on the island would bring every part of the Japanese home islands within range of bombers.

[00:07:54]The B-29s already reaching Japan from the Mariana Islands would be supplemented by tactical aircraft operating from Okinawa, 40 miles from Kyushu.

[00:08:04]The difference in what that meant for the home island population was measurable in casualties. Defense of Okinawa was not simply a military operation.

[00:08:13]It was the last geographic barrier before the home islands themselves.

[00:08:17]The options available to the Japanese Navy in response to the Okinawa invasion were limited by what the Navy had left.

[00:08:25]The carrier aviation that had been the decisive arm of Japanese naval power had been destroyed at the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June of 1944 and at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October. The surface fleet that remained was substantial in individual ship quality but crippled by the fuel shortage and the absence of air cover.

[00:08:46]The submarine force was operational but had not reversed the American tide.

[00:08:51]The primary offensive capability the Japanese possessed was the Kamikaze program which had demonstrated at Leyte Gulf and in subsequent operations that it could impose serious costs on the American fleet. The planners who designed Operation Ten-Go looked at what they had and produced a plan that reflected the logic of the moment.

[00:09:11]The Yamato, the cruiser Yahagi, and eight destroyers would sortie from Japan. They would transit south through the East China Sea.

[00:09:19]They would arrive at Okinawa, engage the American amphibious fleet, and beach themselves on the Okinawan shore if necessary to continue fighting as stationary gun platforms.

[00:09:30]Simultaneously more than 350 Kamikaze aircraft would attack the American carrier task forces in what was designated Kikusui number one. The designation of the Yamato's force as a surface special attack unit was not incidental language.

[00:09:46]The planners who wrote the operation plan chose the same words used for Kamikaze units because they understood the mission in the same terms.

[00:09:55]The Yamato was being asked to do for the Navy surface forces what the Kamikaze pilots were doing for the Navy's air power.

[00:10:02]Die usefully imposing cost on the enemy in the process. The man given command of the operation was Vice Admiral Seiichi Ito, commander of the second fleet.

[00:10:13]When Ito was briefed on the plan in late March, he called it futile and wasteful.

[00:10:18]He sat in the briefing and told the officers presenting it that he believed the mission would accomplish nothing that justified the cost, that the Yamato and her escorts would be destroyed by American air attack before reaching Okinawa, and that the men who sailed on them would die without having materially affected the outcome of the battle for the island.

[00:10:38]His superiors listened to his assessment.

[00:10:41]They kept the mission.

[00:10:43]The decision to proceed despite Ito's objections was not made out of ignorance of the situation.

[00:10:49]The officers who overruled Ito understood, as he did, that the Yamato would almost certainly be sunk before reaching Okinawa.

[00:10:58]The calculation they made was that the Yamato's sortie, combined with the mass Kamikaze attack of Kikusui number one, might draw sufficient American attention away from the Okinawa landing area to create tactical opportunities. They also understood something that was rarely stated explicitly, but was widely understood. Allowing the Yamato to remain at anchor while the war ended was not a viable option.

[00:11:23]The largest warship Japan had ever built dying at anchor would mean something different than the largest warship Japan had ever built dying in battle.

[00:11:32]The distinction mattered to the men who made the decision.

[00:11:35]His superiors listened to his assessment. They kept the mission.

[00:11:40]Ito accepted command. Ito accepted command.

[00:11:44]He had made his professional judgment in the appropriate forum through the appropriate channels. The judgment had been overruled. What came after was his duty, and he carried it in the same way he had carried every previous assignment. Thoroughly, professionally, without visible reservation about a decision he had stated his opposition to through the correct channels. On March 29th, the Yamato took on her ammunition load.

[00:12:08]1,170 shells for the 9 18-in guns, 1,629 shells for the secondary battery, 13,500 anti-aircraft shells, 11 and 1/2 million rounds for the machine guns.

[00:12:23]The loading was thorough and careful.

[00:12:25]The men who loaded the ammunition knew what the ammunition was for. The crew who loaded those shells were doing what sailors do before any operation.

[00:12:34]Their jobs, systematically and without comment on what the operation was intended to accomplish.

[00:12:40]The loading of 1,170 shells for 9 18-in guns is not a quick process.

[00:12:46]It takes time and careful handling and the coordination of dozens of men working in confined spaces with weapons that weigh over a ton each. The men who spent the days before April 6th loading the Yamato's magazines were not thinking about the mathematics of fuel and distance.

[00:13:02]They were thinking about the shell they were handling and the shell after that.

[00:13:06]The fuel loading was more complicated.

[00:13:09]The standard account holds that the Yamato received only enough fuel for the outward journey, that the mission was explicitly one-way from the fuel perspective.

[00:13:17]Later analysis of the Japanese records suggests that she received as much fuel as was available to give her, which happened to be insufficient for a return trip.

[00:13:27]The practical result was the same.

[00:13:29]If the Yamato survived long enough to want to return, she would not have the fuel to do so. The mission was designed without a return phase because the planners did not expect one to be necessary. The Americans did not learn about the operation from Japanese communications alone.

[00:13:46]They had been developing intelligence from multiple sources throughout the Okinawa campaign.

[00:13:51]On March 26th, 11 days before the Yamato's departure, American signals intelligence units intercepted and deciphered the execute order for Ten Ichi Go. The intercept was forwarded to Admiral Spruance, the commander of the American 5th Fleet, and to the carrier and battleship commanders who would need to respond.

[00:14:11]Spruance sent a brief message to his forces, "You take them on."

[00:14:16]In the days that followed, additional intercepts refined the intelligence picture.

[00:14:21]The Americans knew the approximate timing of the sortie.

[00:14:24]They knew the composition of the force.

[00:14:27]They knew the route south through the Bungo Strait and across the East China Sea.

[00:14:32]When the Yamato departed on April 6th, an American submarine spotted her passing through the Bungo Strait. There were no surprises on the American side.

[00:14:40]The submarine USS Threadfin sent a contact report in the clear, and the American carrier task forces began positioning for the intercept.

[00:14:49]Inside the Yamato, the situation was more opaque.

[00:14:53]Ensign Mitsuru Yoshida was the ship's junior radar officer, 22 years old, part of a generation of Japanese naval officers who had spent their entire service careers in a war that was going badly.

[00:15:05]He was assigned to the Yamato in the final weeks before the operation and found himself aboard a ship preparing for a mission that was described in terms no one on board could fully interpret.

[00:15:17]The official briefing said the mission was to support the defense of Okinawa.

[00:15:21]The unofficial conversations ran through the ship's compartments in the days before departure carried a different assessment. On April 5th, the day before departure, the orders came to put certain members of the crew ashore.

[00:15:34]Cadets who were aboard for training were told to disembark. Sailors who were ill were told to disembark. The crew who would remain were not told in explicit terms what this meant, but the arithmetic was clear to anyone who worked through it. The ship was being cleared of men whose deaths would be considered more wasteful than necessary given the nature of the mission. The evening of April 5th, the ship at anchor, the coast of Japan visible from the deck, officers moved through the compartments.

[00:16:02]Sake was distributed in the traditional gesture that marked significant operations.

[00:16:07]Some men who had served on the Yamato through Leyte Gulf and the months of waiting afterward noted that this felt different from previous departures.

[00:16:16]Previous departures had a return built into them. The composition of the force being put ashore, the explicit acknowledgement by officers who had stopped pretending that the mission was routine, the presence of letters being written in every space large enough for a man to sit with paper, all of it communicated what the official briefings had left unstated.

[00:16:36]The morale aboard the Yamato in the hours before departure was described by survivors as poor.

[00:16:42]Not defeated, not broken, but not the morale of men who believed they were sailing into a battle they could win.

[00:16:48]They were sailors of the Imperial Japanese Navy trained to serve and to die in service if necessary, and the necessity of dying in service had become the dominant fact of their professional existence over the preceding year. What most of them felt in those final hours was something that took different forms in different men.

[00:17:07]Some wrote letters. Some drank sake that was distributed by officers. Some stood at the rails watching the Japanese coast recede as the formation cleared the harbor, Yoshida overheard a conversation between senior officers that gave him information he had not been officially provided.

[00:17:24]The Second Fleet's mission, as he understood it from what he heard, was not only to attack the American amphibious fleet at Okinawa. It was also to serve as a lure, drawing the American carrier aircraft away from the Okinawa landing area and creating a window during which the Kamikaze aircraft of Kikusui number one could strike the American carrier task forces.

[00:17:45]The Yamato was being sent to die as a distraction as much as a weapon.

[00:17:49]He wrote about what he heard. He wrote about what he saw in the days that followed. His account includes details about the days before departure that no official record captured.

[00:18:00]The quality of the food the officers shared in the wardroom the night before sailing, the conversations between men who understood what the operation required, and were trying to talk about other things, the sounds of the ship at night when most of her crew were in their bunks, and the ones who could not sleep were thinking about what the morning would bring. He noted that some men wrote letters to their families. Some of those letters were mailed from Kure before departure. Some were not mailed, kept in pockets against the chance that there would be a later opportunity that everyone understood was unlikely.

[00:18:33]He survived the sinking and published his account after the war.

[00:18:36]It is the primary source for what the final hours of the world's most powerful battleship looked like from inside.

[00:18:43]His account, published in Japan in 1952 as Requiem for Battleship Yamato, was translated into English and remains the closest thing to a first-hand record of what it felt like to sail on a ship that everyone on board understood was not coming back.

[00:19:00]He survived because he was pulled from the water. Most of his shipmates were not.

[00:19:05]Of the 3,332 men who sailed, 2,498 did not return.

[00:19:12]Subscribe to this channel right now because what you are about to hear is what happened when the American aircraft arrived over the Yamato's position on the morning of April 7th.

[00:19:22]Why the world's most heavily armored battleship sank in 2 hours when her sister ship had lasted nine.

[00:19:29]What the explosion when her magazines detonated looked like from 200 miles away.

[00:19:34]What Yoshida saw as the ship went under.

[00:19:36]And what the loss of the Yamato meant for the naval war that had closed. Do not miss it.

[00:19:42]The morning of April 7th, 1945 found the Yamato and her escort still moving south through the East China Sea.

[00:19:50]American scout planes had been tracking the force since before dawn.

[00:19:54]The position reports were flowing back to the carrier task forces that had been positioned for the intercept since Spruance issued his order 2 days earlier.

[00:20:03]Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher, commanding the carrier task forces, had his aircraft loaded and ready. He had more aircraft than the Yamato had anti-aircraft guns.

[00:20:14]He knew where she was, where she was going, and how fast she was moving.

[00:20:18]The first wave of American aircraft arrived over the Yamato's position at approximately 12:30 in the afternoon.

[00:20:25]The force that came was large enough to address every asset in the Japanese formation simultaneously.

[00:20:31]The Yamato was the primary target. Her escorts drew their own attacks. The destroyer Hamakaze was sunk in the opening minutes. The cruiser Yahagi, the Yamato's escort, was struck by torpedoes and bombs early in the first wave and ceased to be an effective anti-aircraft platform within the first hour.

[00:20:51]The forces that were supposed to defend the Yamato were being eliminated. And the Yamato's own anti-aircraft guns were fighting against odds that grew worse with each aircraft that came in. The torpedoes came from the port side. This was a deliberate tactical choice learned from the destruction of the Musashi 6-months earlier. In October of 1944, the American pilots attacking the Musashi had distributed their torpedoes more or less equally between the two sides of the ship, which forced the other ships damage control crews to counter flooding on both sides and produced a slower accumulation of list.

[00:21:25]The Yamato was attacked differently. The torpedo planes concentrated on the port side. Each torpedo hit added to the port list without the corresponding pressure from the starboard that had been present in the earlier engagement. The list grew steadily and without the possibility of being counteracted by symmetric flooding.

[00:21:45]The Yamato's crew fought the list with the same methods that had been used 6-months earlier.

[00:21:50]Counter flooding on the starboard side, moving every available weight to the high side, pumping water from the port compartments at maximum capacity.

[00:21:59]None of it was sufficient. The pumps could not outpace the flooding because the flooding was coming faster than the pumps had been designed for and more torpedoes were still arriving.

[00:22:09]Inside the ship, Ensign Yoshida was at his radar station when the first torpedoes hit. He recorded what the interior of the ship felt and sounded like during the attack.

[00:22:20]The concussions from the torpedo hits transmitted through the hull as physical sensations, pressure changes that could be felt in the chest and the ears before they could be consciously identified as explosions.

[00:22:32]The lights flickered. Compartments that had been accessible minutes before became inaccessible as flooding spread and damage control parties sealed or attempted to seal the breaches.

[00:22:43]The men at their stations were doing their jobs, continuing to operate the equipment they were responsible for, reporting to the positions they had been assigned because that was what training produced when nothing else was left. The anti-aircraft crews on the upper decks were fighting differently. The sky above the Yamato was filled with American aircraft and the men at the gun mounts were firing at targets that were coming from multiple directions simultaneously.

[00:23:09]The Yamato carried a massive anti-aircraft battery, substantially upgraded since her early service, and the volume of fire she could produce was considerable.

[00:23:18]It was not sufficient for 386 aircraft.

[00:23:22]The American pilots who made their attack runs later described the anti-aircraft fire as heavy and as less accurate than they had expected.

[00:23:31]The ship's increasing list was affecting the gunners' ability to track targets effectively.

[00:23:36]A gun mount designed to operate on a level deck performs differently on a deck that is tilting toward the water.

[00:23:42]The second wave of aircraft arrived at approximately 1:00 in the afternoon while the Yamato was still fighting the fires and flooding from the first wave.

[00:23:51]The second wave concentrated on the torpedo hits that had been started by the first, deepening the list further.

[00:23:57]By this point, the Yamato's speed had decreased significantly. Her maneuvering was compromised by the flooding and the list. The anti-aircraft crews who had survived the first wave were fighting through smoke and damage and the accumulating physical effects of sustained combat.

[00:24:13]The second wave found a ship that was already dying and made certain of the outcome.

[00:24:18]Between the two attack waves, the Yamato's damage control teams made their last efforts.

[00:24:23]The counter-flooding on the starboard side had been consuming water storage capacity that was now needed for other purposes.

[00:24:31]The pumps were running at maximum capacity and not keeping pace with the incoming water.

[00:24:36]Officers were directing men to physically move equipment and ammunition from port to starboard, the same desperate measure her sister ship's crew had used with rice and timber 6 months earlier.

[00:24:47]By the time the second wave arrived, the Yamato was past the point where such measures could be effective.

[00:24:53]The crew knew.

[00:24:54]The men moving ammunition from one side to the other knew that the amount of ammunition they could move was not going to correct a list produced by flooding on a ship of this size.

[00:25:04]They moved it anyway, because that was what the order said, and because the alternative to following an order was standing still. At 14:23 in the afternoon, approximately 1 hour and 50 minutes after the first attack wave arrived, the list of the Yamato reached a point from which recovery was impossible.

[00:25:22]The ship was going to capsize.

[00:25:25]The order to abandon ship was given.

[00:25:28]The chaos that followed was the chaos of a 70,000 ton ship rolling over in water while thousands of men tried to get clear of it.

[00:25:36]The anti-aircraft guns that had been firing minutes before were now above the men in the water, and then they were gone.

[00:25:43]The superstructure that had risen above the waterline since the Yamato was commissioned at Kure in December of 1941 went under.

[00:25:51]The hull rolled past vertical, and then the magazines detonated. The explosion when the Yamato's ammunition magazines ignited was visible from approximately 200 miles away.

[00:26:03]It was the largest single explosion in the history of naval warfare to that point, produced by 1,170 shells for 9 18-in guns, plus 13,500 anti-aircraft rounds, plus 11 and a half million rounds of machine gun ammunition igniting together in a space that had been rated to contain them under normal conditions, but that was no longer under normal conditions.

[00:26:28]The ships that were still afloat in the formation attempted to recover survivors from the water after the Yamato went under.

[00:26:35]The destroyers for Yutsuki and Yukikaze, two of the eight that had departed with the Yamato, were still operational. They moved through the debris field recovering men from the water. The water was covered with oil from the Yamato's ruptured fuel tanks, and with the wreckage that the explosion and the sinking had produced.

[00:26:52]Men who had been in the water for any length of time were fighting hypothermia from the sea temperature and exhaustion from the effort of staying afloat. Some of them were injured. Some were too far from the rescue ships to be reached in time. The destroyers could not remain stationary. American submarines were in the area and a stationary destroyer was a stationary target.

[00:27:13]The rescue operations were conducted while moving and the time available to conduct them was limited. Yoshida was in the water when the magazines went.

[00:27:22]He described being pushed under the surface by the force of the explosion, fighting to the surface again, looking around at an ocean that had been full of men seconds before and that was now emptied of many of them by the blast.

[00:27:34]He was pulled from the water by a rescue ship. 269 men from the Yamato were rescued. 3,063 were dead or missing.

[00:27:43]Vice Admiral Seiichi Ito had refused to be evacuated. He went to his quarters before the end and was still there when the ship went under.

[00:27:51]Captain Kosaku Ariga, the Yamato's last captain, had been seen on the bridge as the ship was capsizing.

[00:27:59]Accounts from survivors describe him as having lashed himself to the binnacle, the compass mounting, so that he would not be separated from the ship in the final moments.

[00:28:08]He was not seen after the capsizing.

[00:28:11]He was 50 years old at his death. The American aircraft returned to their carriers.

[00:28:16]American losses in the engagement were 10 aircraft and 12 aviators, 10 planes and 12 men in exchange for the largest warship in history, her cruiser escort, four destroyers, and 3,465 sailors.

[00:28:31]The exchange was 10 American aircraft and 12 men for the Yamato, the cruiser Yahagi, four destroyers, and 3,465 Japanese sailors. It was the last major surface action of the Pacific War.

[00:28:45]December 16th, 1941. Yamato commissioned at Kure Naval Base 9 days after Pearl Harbor. June 1942. Present at Midway as Yamamoto's flagship. Does not engage.

[00:29:00]October 24th, 1944.

[00:29:03]Battle of the Sibuyan Sea.

[00:29:05]Yamato receives one torpedo and two bomb hits. The Musashi, her sister ship, is sunk by 19 torpedoes and 17 bombs.

[00:29:14]October 25th, 1944.

[00:29:17]Battle of Samar. Yamato fires her main guns at enemy ships for the first and only time. Kurita orders withdrawal.

[00:29:25]Yamato returns to Japan. October to March. Yamato sits idle at Kure, fuel shortage preventing operations. March 26th, 1945.

[00:29:35]Americans intercept and decrypt the execute order for Operation Ten-Go.

[00:29:41]April 1st, 1945.

[00:29:43]American forces land on Okinawa.

[00:29:46]April 5th.

[00:29:47]Cadets and sick crew put ashore. Crew informed of one-way mission.

[00:29:52]April 6th. Yamato departs Tokuyama. USS Threadfin issues contact report. April 7th, 12:30. First wave of American aircraft arrives. 386 aircraft total in two waves.

[00:30:07]April 7th, 14:23.

[00:30:09]Yamato capsizes.

[00:30:11]Magazines detonate. Explosion visible from 200 miles. April 7th, 14:57.

[00:30:19]Yamato's position recorded as the ship's final location.

[00:30:23]Total dead.

[00:30:24]2,498 of 3,332.

[00:30:29]The four factors that determined what happened to the Yamato on April 7th require examining both the tactical conditions of the engagement and the strategic context that produced the operation itself. The first was the loss of surprise.

[00:30:42]The Americans had known the Yamato was coming before she left port. By the time she cleared the Bungo Strait, Spruance had already positioned his carrier task forces for the intercept and issued the instruction to his commanders.

[00:30:55]The Yamato was sailing into a trap whose dimensions had been established before she departed.

[00:31:01]Whatever tactical advantage her armor and guns might have provided in a different situation was negated before the engagement began.

[00:31:10]The second was the torpedo concentration tactic. The lessons drawn from the destruction of the Musashi in October of 1944 had been incorporated into American attack doctrine by April of 1945.

[00:31:24]The decision to concentrate torpedoes on the port side produced a rate of list accumulation that the Yamato's damage control systems could not address through counter flooding and pumping.

[00:31:35]The identical sister ship had lasted 9 hours under more distributed attack. The Yamato lasted 2 hours under concentrated attack. The difference was not in the ships. It was in what the American pilots had learned from the first engagement.

[00:31:49]The third was the absence of air cover.

[00:31:52]The Yamato had sailed with the understanding that she would have minimal air cover between 6:00 in the morning and 10:00 in the morning on April 7th, after which she would be on her own.

[00:32:02]The cover that was provided was insufficient. The American carrier task forces operated more than 350 aircraft in total across the two attack waves.

[00:32:12]The Japanese aircraft assigned to cover the Yamato could not prevent the attacks from developing. The ship that had been designed to fight in an era when carrier aviation was theoretically manageable was fighting in an era when it was not.

[00:32:26]The fourth was what the mission itself represented.

[00:32:29]A force sent without a viable plan for return whose commander had described it as futile before for to lead it was not a force operating at full effectiveness. The morale aboard the Yamato in the final hours before and during the attack was the morale of men who knew what the outcome was likely to be.

[00:32:47]This did not mean they did not fight.

[00:32:50]They did fight.

[00:32:51]The anti-aircraft crews fired until they could no longer fire. The damage control parties worked until they could no longer work.

[00:32:59]But there is a difference between a force fighting to win and a force fighting to die well. And by April of 1945, the Yamato was the latter.

[00:33:09]The paradox at the center of the Yamato's existence is what she was built for and what she was used for.

[00:33:15]She was the most powerful surface warship ever constructed.

[00:33:19]Her nine 18-in guns could hurl shells that weighed over a ton to distances of over 40 km.

[00:33:26]Her belt armor was 410 mm of steel designed to defeat any shell any enemy ship could fire. Her designers had created a ship that could defeat any surface opponent in a conventional naval engagement. And they had succeeded.

[00:33:40]No surface force the allies possessed could have sunk the Yamato in a gun duel.

[00:33:46]The Yamato was never in a gun duel with an opponent capable of defeating her.

[00:33:50]She fired her main guns at enemy ships exactly once at the escort carriers of Taffy 3 on October 25th, 1944.

[00:33:59]And she was ordered to withdraw before the engagement concluded.

[00:34:02]She was then sent to die as the naval equivalent of a kamikaze without enough fuel to return, designated a surface special attack unit. The most powerful battleship in history was treated as an expendable asset.

[00:34:16]Her sister ship, the Musashi, had been destroyed 6 months earlier in similar circumstances.

[00:34:22]Overwhelming air power, no air cover, a mission that required her to cross open water in daylight.

[00:34:29]Both ships had been the same. Both died the same way.

[00:34:33]Together they represented the largest naval construction project in Japanese history, costing resources that Japan could not afford to commit, and produced capabilities that Japan was never able to use as intended. The loss of the Yamato removed from the Japanese Navy its last operational capital ship of significance.

[00:34:52]The second fleet that had sorted with her was effectively destroyed in the engagement.

[00:34:57]What remained of Japanese naval power after April 7th, 1945 was submarines, smaller surface craft, and the Kamikaze program. The surface fleet that had been constructed at enormous cost over the preceding two decades that had struck Pearl Harbor, fought at Midway, engaged at Guadalcanal and in the Philippine Sea, and at Leyte Gulf was effectively gone.

[00:35:21]The significance of the Yamato's loss was understood in Tokyo almost immediately.

[00:35:25]The Naval General Staff had expected her to be sunk. They had sent her knowing the probable outcome.

[00:35:32]What they had not fully anticipated was how quickly it happened, or how completely the operation failed to accomplish its stated objectives. The Kamikaze attacks of Kikusui number one that were supposed to coordinate with the Yamato sortie were conducted, and they inflicted damage on the American fleet.

[00:35:49]They did not drive the American fleet away from Okinawa. The invasion continued.

[00:35:54]The battle for the island lasted until late June, producing casualty figures on all sides that made it the bloodiest engagement of the entire Pacific campaign.

[00:36:04]The Yamato had been sent to prevent this. She had been destroyed before reaching Okinawa. The battle happened without her.

[00:36:12]The Yamato was discovered in 1985 by a Japanese expedition. She lies at approximately 340 m in the East China Sea, northwest of Okinawa in deep water.

[00:36:23]Her hull containing the remains of many of the 2,498 men who went down with her.

[00:36:30]The wreck is in two main sections separated by the force of the magazine explosion.

[00:36:35]The bow section is relatively intact.

[00:36:37]The stern section, where the explosions originated, is scattered across a wide debris field.

[00:36:44]Yoshida lived until 2006.

[00:36:47]He was the last surviving officer from the Yamato.

[00:36:50]His book, published in Japanese in 1952 and translated into English as Requiem for Battleship Yamato, is the definitive account of the ship's final mission.

[00:37:01]He spent the decades after the war as a banker. He never stopped being, among other things, the junior radar officer who watched the world's most powerful battleship go under from the water beside it.

[00:37:13]The Yamato's wreck lies in two main sections separated by the magazine explosion.

[00:37:19]The bow section, which contains the forward turrets and the anchor chain, is relatively intact at approximately 340 m depth.

[00:37:28]The stern section, closer to where the magazines detonated, is scattered across a wider debris field. Surveys of the wreck conducted in subsequent years documented the physical record of what the aircraft and the explosion had done to a ship that had been designed to be unsinkable by surface fire.

[00:37:46]Japan commissioned a replica of the Yamato at a museum in Kure, the city where she was built.

[00:37:52]The replica is full-scale, built to the exact dimensions of the original. It sits in a museum dedicated to the history of the Japanese Navy in the Second World War. The city that built the most powerful battleship in history and watched it sail away and not return has been living with that fact for 80 years.

[00:38:11]The museum receives hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

[00:38:15]Many of them are the descendants of men who were aboard the Yamato or who built her or who watched her leave the harbor for the last time, subscribe to this channel right now and turn on notifications because every week we bring you the stories that the histories reduced to a casualty figure and a tactical summary without telling you that the vice admiral who commanded the Yamato's final mission told his superiors the mission was futile before he agreed to lead it.

[00:38:41]That the Americans knew the Yamato was coming 11 days before she left port.

[00:38:45]That the torpedo concentration tactic that sank her in two hours was learned from the destruction of her identical sister ship six months earlier. That the largest naval explosion in the history of warfare was visible from 200 miles away. Or that the man who published the most detailed account of the Yamato's final hours spent the rest of his life as a banker and died in 2006 as the last surviving officer of the most powerful battleship Japan ever built. Hit subscribe now then like so this reaches more people who should understand that the world's most powerful warship was sent to die as a kamikaze and that the man who commanded the mission said it was futile before he agreed to do it. Drop a comment below telling us where you are watching from.

[00:39:30]We will see you in the next one.