What Admiral Ugaki Wrote After Watching The Musashi Go Down

[00:00:00]On October 24, 1944, a 23-year-old American pilot from the carrier Intrepid banked his Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber through a curtain of anti-aircraft fire over the Sibuyan Sea and saw something below him that he could not reconcile with anything had been taught about warships. The ship was enormous. It was longer than three football fields. It sat in the water like a steel island trailing a white wake that stretched to the horizon and it was on fire. Smoke poured from craters in its superstructure. Its bow was noticeably lower than its stern, which meant flooding, which meant torpedoes had already struck below the waterline. Geysers of water erupted around it where bombs had missed and on its deck the pilot could see tiny figures running between gun positions, some of them dragging the bodies of other men. And then the ship fired its main guns into the water ahead of his approach and the ocean itself seemed to explode. Columns of seawater 300 ft tall erupted in his flight path and the pilot understood with sudden clarity that this ship was trying to swat him out of the sky with its battleship guns. With shells designed to destroy other battleships, the blast wave nearly flipped his aircraft. He had been briefed 90 minutes earlier standing in a ready room aboard the Intrepid that his target was a Japanese battleship of unknown class. The intelligence officer had pointed to a chart of the Sibuyan Sea and drawn a line showing the expected course of the enemy formation.

[00:01:28]He had said there would be heavy anti-aircraft fire.

[00:01:31]That was an understatement of a kind that only a man who had never flown into a wall of flak could have made.

[00:01:37]The pilot had not been told the ship's name.

[00:01:40]He had not been told that it carried the largest naval guns ever mounted on any warship in the history of the world. He had not been told that the steel plates along its waterline were thicker than the length of his forearm. All he knew was what he could see.

[00:01:53]And what he could see was a ship that had already been hit by multiple torpedoes and multiple bombs and was still sailing, still shooting, still fighting as though the damage meant nothing. An American rear gunner from the carrier Franklin named Russ Duston, who flew over the same ship that day, later recalled that the Musashi was huge, that he had never seen anything as big in his entire life. He called it a magnificent sight. The pilot dropped his torpedo and pulled away through a sky so full of tracer fire that he later said the air itself seemed to glow. He did not see whether his torpedo hit. He did not need to. Other pilots would tell him later that the ship absorbed hit after hit after hit for another 3 hours after his run, soaking up punishment that would have sunk any other vessel afloat.

[00:02:38]When it finally rolled over and slipped beneath the surface at approximately 7:35 that evening, it had taken an estimated 19 torpedoes and 17 bombs.

[00:02:48]Those numbers vary depending on the source.

[00:02:51]Japanese records initially reported about 11 torpedo hits and 10 bomb hits.

[00:02:56]American assessments concluded the number was significantly higher. What is not disputed is that no warship in history had ever absorbed that much damage before sinking and no warship ever would again. The pilot did not know the name of the ship he had attacked. It was called Musashi. And its death that afternoon was the single most important event in modern naval history that almost no one talks about.

[00:03:19]Not because of how it sank, but because of what it proved and because of the man who watched it die from the bridge of its sister ship several miles away. And because of what that man wrote in his diary that night.

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[00:03:38]The man on the bridge was Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki. He was 54 years old. He was born on February 15, 1890 to a farming family in Okayama Prefecture on the island of Honshu. He had graduated ninth in his class from the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy in 1912, had trained as a gunnery specialist, had served an attachment in Germany in the late 1920s, and had risen through the ranks with a reputation for meticulous planning and relentless pessimism. Colleagues described him as brooding, dutiful, and inflexible. His wife had died in 1940, and the loss had hollowed something out of him that never filled back in.

[00:04:16]He commanded Battleship Division 1 of the Imperial Japanese Navy, which consisted of the three most powerful surface warships on Earth, the Nagato, the Yamato, and until 7:35 that evening, the Musashi. He stood on the bridge of the Yamato, the Musashi's sister, and watched as American aircraft tore his ship apart over the course of 5 hours.

[00:04:39]Through binoculars, he could see the bomb strikes sending debris skyward. He could see the torpedoes running in the water. He could see the Musashi's bow settling lower with each successive wave of attackers. Her massive pagoda mast listing slowly to port as the flooding shifted her center of gravity.

[00:04:56]He watched his ship die the way a surgeon watches a patient bleed out on an operating table, seeing every wound, understanding every consequence, and unable to stop any of it.

[00:05:07]That night, Ugaki opened his diary. He had kept this diary faithfully since October of 1941, recording the war with a candor and detail that no other senior Japanese commander matched.

[00:05:19]He called it Senshiroku, which translates roughly as Seaweeds of War.

[00:05:25]After the war, it would be published in English under the title Fading Victory by the University of Pittsburgh Press, translated by Masataka Chihaya.

[00:05:34]In that diary, Ugaki had written about Pearl Harbor, about Midway, about the slow grinding attrition of the Solomons.

[00:05:42]He had recorded with painful honesty the deterioration of Japanese naval strength, the loss of irreplaceable pilots, and the steady erosion of the empire's defensive perimeter. He had buried his wife in 1940 and never recovered from the loss.

[00:05:57]His diary returns again and again to the search for a worthy time and place for his own death, as though the war was not merely a duty, but a personal appointment with an end he was trying to locate.

[00:06:08]He had survived the aerial ambush that killed Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto on April 18, 1943.

[00:06:15]American P-38 Lightning fighters, acting on intercepted and decoded Japanese radio communications, ambushed two Japanese Betty bomber aircraft over the jungles of Bougainville.

[00:06:27]Yamamoto was in the lead bomber. Ugaki was in the second. Both aircraft were shot down. Yamamoto was killed. Ugaki's bomber crashed into the sea near the shoreline, and he was dragged from the wreckage with a broken arm. He was one of only three survivors from his aircraft.

[00:06:43]He had crawled from the wreck, still clutching the short sword Yamamoto had given him. He carried that sword for the rest of his life. He was a man who wrote about pain. He understood catastrophe.

[00:06:54]And on the night his most powerful warship was destroyed, the night the physical embodiment of everything his navy had been built to do was sent to the bottom of the Sibuyan Sea, he wrote a sentence that captured not grief, not strategic reassessment, not the recognition that an era had ended, but something far more revealing.

[00:07:13]He noted that the small number of enemy planes shot down was regrettable. That was his reaction.

[00:07:18]The Musashi was gone. Over a thousand of her crew were dead. The Americans had lost only 18 aircraft, and the admiral who had watched it happen through binoculars sat down and complained about the anti-aircraft gunnery.

[00:07:31]That sentence is the key to everything that follows, because it is not the response of a man who has witnessed a disaster. It is the response of a man who has witnessed the death of his faith and cannot bring himself to say so.

[00:07:43]The faith was called Kantai Kessen, in English, the decisive battle, and it was not merely a strategy, it was the organizing principle of the entire Imperial Japanese Navy for four decades.

[00:07:55]It was the reason the Musashi existed.

[00:07:57]It was the reason Ugaki held his command. It was the reason Japan had spent a significant portion of its national treasury building the two largest warships the world had ever seen.

[00:08:08]And on October 24, 1944, that faith died in the Sibuyan Sea, and the man who watched it die could not write its obituary. But before we can understand what Ugaki could not bring himself to say, we need to understand what the Musashi was, why it was built, and what idea it was designed to prove. And that story begins not in the Sibuyan Sea, but 40 years earlier on a strait between Korea and Japan on an afternoon in May of 1905 that shaped the thinking of every Japanese admiral who came after it.

[00:08:40]On May 27th, 1905, the Imperial Japanese Navy met the Russian Baltic Fleet in the Tsushima Strait and destroyed it. The battle was not close.

[00:08:50]The Japanese battle line, under Admiral Togo Heihachiro, crossed the Russian formation's path in a maneuver called crossing the T and poured concentrated gunfire into ship after ship. The Russian fleet, which had sailed 18,000 mi from the Baltic Sea around the Cape of Good Hope to reach the Pacific, ceased to exist as a fighting force in a single afternoon. 21 Russian ships were sunk, seven were captured, over 4,000 Russian sailors died. The Japanese lost three torpedo boats. Tsushima did not merely win a war, it created a religion.

[00:09:24]It was, at the time, the most decisive naval victory since Trafalgar a century earlier, and its psychological impact on the Japanese military establishment was immeasurable. The The Japanese Navy had defeated a European great power at sea.

[00:09:39]It had done so with big guns and superior seamanship and bold tactical maneuvering.

[00:09:44]Every lesson the battle seemed to teach pointed in the same direction. Bigger ships, heavier guns, better trained crews. Seek the one great battle and win it and the war is decided.

[00:09:55]For the next four decades, the Imperial Japanese Navy built its entire strategic identity around this belief.

[00:10:02]Naval Academy cadets studied Tsushima the way seminary students study scripture. War games at the Naval Staff College replayed the battle in endless variations, always arriving at the same conclusion. The doctrine they built from this battle was called Kantai Kessen and by the 1930s it had hardened from a strategy into an ideology that could not be questioned without risking one's career.

[00:10:25]The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 and the London Naval Treaty of 1930 had limited the size of the Japanese fleet to a ratio of three capital ships for every five built by the United States and Britain.

[00:10:39]Japanese naval planners accepted this limitation publicly. Privately, they decided that if they could not match American quantity, they would exceed American quality.

[00:10:49]They would build individual ships so powerful, so heavily armed and armored that each one was worth two or three of anything the Americans could put to sea.

[00:10:58]If the ratio was three to five, then each Japanese three would have to hit harder than any two of the American five. The result was the Yamato class, two battleships, Yamato and Musashi, that were unlike anything the world had ever seen or would ever see again.

[00:11:14]A third ship of the class, Shinano, was laid down at Yokosuka but was converted to an aircraft carrier during construction after the carrier losses at Midway.

[00:11:23]Shinano was commissioned on November 19, 1944 and sunk by the American submarine Archerfish just 10 days later on her maiden voyage, making her the largest warship ever sunk by a submarine. Even the ships that were modified to acknowledge the carrier age could not survive in it.

[00:11:41]Musashi was laid down on March 29th, 1938 at the Mitsubishi shipyard in Nagasaki.

[00:11:48]The secrecy around her construction was extraordinary and almost paranoid. A massive curtain of woven hemp and palm fiber, weighing roughly 400 tons, was strung around the slipway to block the view from the harbor. Workers at the yard were subjected to background investigations. Residents near the shipyard were ordered to stay indoors on the day of her launch, November 1, 1940.

[00:12:10]Windows overlooking the harbor were boarded shut.

[00:12:13]The American consulate sat directly across Nagasaki harbor from the Mitsubishi yard, and its staff never grasped what was being built.

[00:12:21]Official Japanese publications listed the class at 45,000 tons with 40-cm guns, a deliberate and massive understatement.

[00:12:30]American naval intelligence had almost no accurate data on the ships throughout the war and still listed their main guns as 16 in as late as July of 1945.

[00:12:40]When Japan surrendered, the Navy attempted to destroy all technical data and photographs of both ships, leaving Western analysts guessing at their exact specifications well into the Cold War.

[00:12:52]What was being built was a warship of almost incomprehensible power, a floating fortress that made every other warship on the planet look like a toy.

[00:13:00]Musashi displaced roughly 72,800 tons fully loaded.

[00:13:05]To put that in perspective, that is heavier than a modern American aircraft carrier of the era, heavier than anything that had ever floated. She was 862 ft long. Her beam was nearly 128 ft.

[00:13:17]Her main armor belt was over 16 in thick, a wall of hardened steel running the length of the citadel that was designed to stop anything the American Navy could throw at it. Below the waterline, a system of torpedo blisters and void spaces were supposed to absorb the blast of any torpedo ever manufactured. And her primary armament was unlike anything the world had ever seen. Nine guns in three triple turrets, each gun measuring 18.1 inches in bore diameter, designated the type 94.

[00:13:48]They were the largest naval rifles ever mounted on any ship. No other navy had guns this large. No other navy had attempted guns this large.

[00:13:57]Each turret weighed approximately 2,774 tons, which meant that a single turret weighed more than many destroyers displaced in total. The shells they fired weighed approximately 1 and 1/2 tons each and could reach targets over 26 miles away, far beyond the range of anything in the American fleet. When all nine guns fired a broadside together, the blast was so violent that crewmen anywhere on the weather decks could be knocked unconscious or killed by the concussion alone. Crew members were warned to take shelter inside the superstructure before the main battery fired.

[00:14:30]The man who would captain Musashi in her final battle was Rear Admiral Toshihira Inoguchi. He assumed command on August 12, 1944 and was promoted to Rear Admiral on October 15, just 9 days before the battle that would kill him.

[00:14:46]Inoguchi was the Imperial Japanese Navy's foremost gunnery theorist, a man who had spent his career refining the mathematics of long-range naval gunfire.

[00:14:55]He had written technical papers on shell trajectories and armor penetration.

[00:14:59]He had trained gun crews to hit targets at distances that other navies considered impossible. Musashi herself had served as the Combined Fleet Flagship from February of 1943, replacing Yamato.

[00:15:11]She had carried the ashes of Admiral Yamamoto home after his death. In March of 1944, she was torpedoed by the American submarine Tunny, which put a single torpedo into her bow that blew a hole nearly 19 ft wide and flooded her with over 2,600 tons of seawater.

[00:15:29]Seven men died.

[00:15:30]The ship was repaired and her anti-aircraft armament was heavily reinforced.

[00:15:35]But the Tan I's torpedo had proven something that the architects of the Yamato class did not want to hear.

[00:15:41]The underwater protection system, the carefully designed torpedo blisters and void compartments that were supposed to make the ship unsinkable, had a weakness near the bow. The armor that was supposed to stop everything had a gap.

[00:15:53]If any single officer embodied the Kantai Kessen doctrine in human form, it was Inoguchi. The man who believed most deeply in the power of the big gun was given command of the biggest guns ever built. Remember his name and remember what he believed because what happened to Inoguchi and to the Musashi on October 24, 1944 was not merely a military defeat. It was the violent falsification of an idea that an entire navy had staked its existence on. But here is the detail that transforms this story from a tragedy into something far darker.

[00:16:27]An irony so complete that it is almost unbearable.

[00:16:30]Because the Japanese navy did not need to wait until 1944 to learn that battleships could be destroyed by aircraft. They had proven it themselves.

[00:16:39]They had proven it first. They had proven it 3 years earlier on December 10th, 1941, 3 days after Pearl Harbor.

[00:16:47]Japanese land-based torpedo bombers and high-level bombers operating from airfields in Indochina attacked a British naval force called Force Z off the east coast of Malaya.

[00:16:58]Force Z consisted of the modern battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse, two of the most powerful warships in the Royal Navy.

[00:17:09]They were underway at sea.

[00:17:10]They were defending themselves with anti-aircraft fire. They had experienced crews and competent commanders and Japanese aircraft sank both of them in under 2 hours.

[00:17:21]It was the first time in history that capital ships had been sunk by air power alone, while steaming under their own power and actively resisting attack.

[00:17:30]Admiral Tom Phillips, commanding Force Z, went down with the Prince of Wales.

[00:17:35]When the news reached London, Winston Churchill later wrote that in all the war he never received a more direct shock. He said he turned over and twisted in bed as the full horror sank in.

[00:17:46]Two of Britain's newest warships gone, sunk by airplanes launched from land bases hundreds of miles away. The lesson was unambiguous.

[00:17:54]A capital ship operating without air cover was vulnerable to destruction from the sky, no matter how thick its armor, no matter how powerful its guns, no matter how well trained its crew.

[00:18:05]The planned aircraft carrier HMS Indomitable, which was supposed to have provided air cover for Force Z, had run aground during workups near Jamaica and was under repair. Her absence had been fatal.

[00:18:17]The conclusion was inescapable.

[00:18:20]Battleships without air cover were targets, not weapons. Japan had written that lesson. Japan had taught it to the world. Japan's own pilots had proven it in the waters off Malaya.

[00:18:31]And then Japan spent the next 3 years building, deploying, and betting its national survival on the largest battleships in history, as though the lesson did not apply to them.

[00:18:40]As though the rules their own aviators had proven against British ships would somehow not apply to Japanese ships, as though Japanese steel was different from British steel, as though the armor on the Musashi could stop what the armor on the Prince of Wales could not.

[00:18:55]The man who understood this contradiction better than anyone was the man Ugaki had served under for 2 years as chief of staff.

[00:19:02]Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Combined Fleet, the architect of the Pearl Harbor carrier strike, had opposed the construction of Yamato and Musashi from the beginning.

[00:19:13]He called battleships elaborate religious scrolls that old people hang in their homes as a matter of faith, not reality.

[00:19:20]He said that in modern warfare, battleships would be as useful to Japan as a samurai sword. And when fellow admirals argued that only a battleship could sink a battleship, Yamamoto answered with an old proverb. He said that the fiercest serpent may be overcome by a swarm of ants. The serpent was the super battleship. The ants were carrier aircraft, and Yamamoto was right. Ugaki, who had stood beside Yamamoto on the bridge of the Yamato when she served as the combined fleet flagship, who had helped plan the carrier strike on Pearl Harbor that proved air power could a battle fleet in a single morning, knew he was right. The evidence was everywhere.

[00:20:00]Midway in June of 1942 had destroyed four Japanese fleet carriers in a single day and proved beyond argument that carriers, not battleships, decided naval battles in the Pacific. The Yamato had been present at Midway, sailing with the main body of the fleet hundreds of miles behind the carrier striking force. Her 18-in guns loaded and her crew at battle stations, waiting for the decisive surface engagement that was supposed to follow the carrier duel. Musashi had not yet been commissioned. She would not enter service until August of that year.

[00:20:33]But neither ship would have mattered.

[00:20:35]The engagement never came. The carriers were destroyed. The Yamato turned around and sailed home without firing a shot.

[00:20:43]The most powerful warship on Earth had been a spectator at the battle that destroyed the reason for her existence.

[00:20:49]The grinding attrition of the Solomons campaign through 1942 and 43 consumed Japanese naval air strength at a rate that could not be replaced. Experienced carrier pilots, the men who had struck Pearl Harbor and ravaged the Indian Ocean, were killed faster than new ones could be trained. The Battle of the Philippine Sea in June of 1944, which American pilots called the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, obliterated what remained of Japan's carrier-trained pilots, with American fighters shooting down over 300 Japanese aircraft in a single day.

[00:21:23]By October of 1944, the Imperial Japanese Navy had carriers with almost no trained pilots to fly from them. The carriers had become what the battleships had always been, symbols of a capability that no longer existed. And yet the battleships remained. Yamato and Musashi remained. The doctrine remained.

[00:21:43]Because Kantai Kessen was not a plan that could be revised when the evidence turned against it. It was the identity of the institution. Tsushima had created the modern Japanese Navy.

[00:21:53]The decisive battle was its founding story, its reason for existing, its justification for every yen spent and every life consumed. To abandon the battleship was to abandon the idea that had organized the Navy's existence for 40 years, and no institution abandons its founding story willingly.

[00:22:12]Not when the alternative is to admit that everything it has built, everything it has believed, everything it has spent its national treasure on, was wrong from the moment the first rivet was driven into the keel.

[00:22:23]This is why Ugaki could not write what he saw. The Musashi's sinking was not a military setback. It was an existential verdict. And the man who watched it could not accept the verdict because accepting it would have required him to dismantle the faith that had organized his entire professional life.

[00:22:40]Now, let us go to the Sibuyan Sea and watch the faith die. In October of 1944, the American invasion of the Philippines forced the Japanese Navy into the engagement it had been preparing for and dreading since Midway.

[00:22:54]The Philippines were the strategic hinge of Japan's remaining empire. They sat astride the sea lanes connecting Japan to the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies, the oil that powered the fleet, the oil without which the Yamato and Musashi were nothing but steel monuments anchored in harbors.

[00:23:11]If the Americans took the Philippines, the oil would stop flowing. The fleet would be immobilized. The war would be over. The plan Japan devised to prevent this was called Sho-Go 1, meaning victory operation 1. It was the most complex naval operation Japan ever attempted, and it was born of desperation so total that the planners knew most of the ships they committed would never come home. The plan divided the remaining Japanese fleet into separate forces, each with a specific role, and required timing and coordination that the battered Japanese communications network could barely support.

[00:23:47]Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita's Center Force, the most powerful element, would transit the Sibuyan Sea, pass through San Bernardino Strait at night, and fall on the American transport fleet in Leyte Gulf at dawn on October 25. To draw the American fast carrier groups away from Leyte and leave the transports unprotected, Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa's Northern Force, built around Japan's remaining fleet carriers, now stripped of almost all their aircraft and trained pilots, would offer itself as bait off Cape Engano to lure Admiral William Halsey's Third Fleet north.

[00:24:23]The carriers were the sacrifice. They were being sent to die in order to draw American eyes away from the real blow.

[00:24:29]Two smaller forces under Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimura and Vice Admiral Kiyohide Shima would approach Leyte Gulf from the south through Surigao Strait, adding pressure from a second direction.

[00:24:40]The battleships were the weapon. It was Kantai Kessen one last time, not as doctrine but as desperation wearing doctrine's uniform. Kurita's Center Force was the hammer. It included the Yamato, the Musashi, the Nagato, and a powerful screen of heavy cruisers and destroyers.

[00:24:57]Ugaki rode aboard Yamato as commander of Battleship Division 1. Inoguchi commanded Musashi. The force sailed from Brunei Bay on October 22, 1944.

[00:25:08]Things went wrong immediately. On October 23, the American submarines Darter and Dace intercepted the force in the Palawan Passage.

[00:25:17]Darter torpedoed Kurita's flagship, the heavy cruiser Atago, which sank in minutes.

[00:25:22]Kurita had to swim for his life in an oil-slick sea before being fished from the water by a destroyer.

[00:25:28]Dace sank the heavy cruiser Maya outright.

[00:25:31]Darter also damaged the heavy cruiser Takao so badly she had to withdraw.

[00:25:35]Kurita, shaken and exhausted and still drying out from his swim, transferred his flag to the Yamato.

[00:25:42]He had not slept. He would not sleep for 3 days. Ugaki's diary entry for October 23 was blunt. A bad day is a bad day to the end.

[00:25:52]The next morning, October 24, was worse.

[00:25:56]At approximately 0810, a reconnaissance aircraft from the carrier Intrepid spotted Kurita's force transiting the Sibuyan Sea. Within 2 hours, the first strike package was airborne. Six American carriers from Task Force 38, Intrepid, Cabot, Essex, Lexington, Enterprise, and Franklin.

[00:26:16]They would ultimately launch approximately 259 sorties against the force over roughly 5 hours. Nearly all of them concentrated on a single target, the Musashi.

[00:26:28]The attacks began at approximately 10:25.

[00:26:31]Eight Curtiss Helldiver dive bombers from Intrepid rolled into their dives over the Musashi. The first bomb struck the roof of the number one main gun turret and bounced off the hardened steel without penetrating.

[00:26:44]But it proved something. The Americans could reach the ship. More bombers followed, then Grumman Avenger torpedo bombers at wave height, boring in through a blizzard of anti-aircraft fire to drop their fish into the water at close range.

[00:26:57]A torpedo struck the Musashi amidships on the port side. Another hit jammed the primary main battery fire director on its ball race. The Musashi's 46-cm main guns had been fitted to fire a special anti-aircraft shell called the type 3.

[00:27:12]A massive round designed to burst in the air and scatter thousands of incendiary fragments across a wide area.

[00:27:19]The crew switched to a backup director, but the damage degraded the accuracy of those enormous guns at the worst possible moment. The largest weapons ever put to sea were struggling to defend the ship they were mounted on.

[00:27:30]Inaguchi ordered counter-flooding to correct the developing list. Musashi slowed. The formation moved ahead. The second wave struck, then a third, from Essex and Lexington in the early afternoon.

[00:27:44]Each wave added more bomb and torpedo hits.

[00:27:47]The bow settled lower.

[00:27:49]The ship's speed dropped. Damage control parties worked in flooded compartments below the waterline in darkness lit only by emergency lanterns, shoring up bulkheads and pumping seawater out of spaces that filled as fast as they could be emptied. The fourth wave was devastating. Aircraft from the carrier Enterprise scored multiple 1,000-lb armor-piercing bomb hits that penetrated the upper decks and detonated inside the ship, wiping out the forward damage control team.

[00:28:18]Torpedoes opened the starboard bow and flooded additional compartments. Speed dropped to approximately 13 knots.

[00:28:24]Musashi was falling behind the formation. The other ships pulled ahead.

[00:28:29]She was alone. The final wave arrived at approximately 15:25.

[00:28:34]37 aircraft from Intrepid, Franklin, and the light carrier Cabot attacked simultaneously from multiple angles, boxing the ship so that no evasive turn could avoid every torpedo. Torpedoes slammed into both sides of the hull.

[00:28:47]Bombs cratered the superstructure.

[00:28:50]By the time the last aircraft pulled away, the Musashi was listing heavily to port, her bow nearly awash, her speed barely enough to maintain steerage.

[00:28:59]Inside the ship, Inoguchi did everything his training had prepared him to do and more. He shifted ballast. He counter-flooded.

[00:29:07]He ordered compartments sealed with men still inside them, because the alternative was losing the ship faster.

[00:29:13]The men in those compartments knew what the order meant. They knew the hatches were being dogged shut above them. Some of them pounded on the steel. Some of them did not. The sound of water rushing into sealed spaces, the screaming of steel under stress, the percussion of bombs detonating on the upper decks transmitted through the hull like the beating of a monstrous drum, these were the sounds of the Musashi's death, heard from the inside by men who could not escape. Inoguchi tried to steer for the nearest coastline, hoping to beach the Musashi on one of the Sibuyan Sea's islands, and save what remained of his crew. The ship would not answer the helm. The rudder was damaged.

[00:29:51]The flooding had shifted her balance so far forward that the screws were partially out of the water, reducing thrust. The damage was beyond anything the ship's designers at Mitsubishi had imagined, because the designers had imagined a gun duel with another battle line, a concentrated exchange of heavy shells lasting perhaps an hour.

[00:30:10]They had not imagined 5 hours of relentless air attack by over 200 carrier aircraft approaching from every direction simultaneously.

[00:30:18]By approximately 1915, the list had reached roughly 12°, and was increasing.

[00:30:24]Inoguchi ordered the crew to stand by to abandon ship. He called his executive officer, Captain Kenkichi Kato, to the bridge. He handed Kato his personal notebook. He told Kato to survive. Then Inoguchi retired to his cabin to go down with his ship. The gunnery theorist, the man who had spent his entire career perfecting the weapon that had proven irrelevant against the weapon that was killing him, chose to die inside the steel monument to the doctrine he had served. He was never seen again. At approximately 1930, the list reached 30°. Kaito gave the order to abandon ship. Men slid and tumbled across decks that had become steep inclines, grabbing at anything bolted down, some of them falling into the water as the hull rolled beneath them. At approximately 1935, the Musashi rolled to port, her massive hull capsizing slowly, almost gently, and then plunged bow first beneath the surface of the Sibuyan Sea.

[00:31:21]Of her crew of approximately 2,399 men, roughly 1,023 died. The destroyers Kiyoshimo and Hamakaze pulled more than 1,300 survivors from the water. Those survivors were later relocated and kept from public contact to maintain secrecy about the loss. The Imperial Japanese Navy did not want its own people to know that the unsinkable had sunk. From the bridge of the Yamato, Ugaki had watched the entire thing. Five hours of watching. Five hours of seeing the bombs fall and the torpedoes strike and the bow settle lower and the list increase and the speed drop and the formation leave the Musashi behind. And that night he sat down and wrote that the anti-aircraft gunnery had been inadequate. Consider what that sentence reveals. It is not denial in the ordinary sense. Ugaki was too intelligent for simple denial. His diary elsewhere shows that he harbored genuine doubts about the decisive battle strategy. He questioned the Combined Fleet's planning. He criticized the wasteful deployment of surface forces in battles they could not win. He had served the man who called these ships serpents waiting for ants. He had survived the ambush that killed that man. He had helped plan Pearl Harbor, the greatest carrier air strike in history.

[00:32:36]An operation that proved beyond any doubt that a handful of aircraft carriers could project more destructive power in a single morning than every battleship gun in the Pacific combined.

[00:32:46]He understood, at some level that he could not quite reach with words, that the world had changed. His diary contains the evidence of that understanding, scattered like fragments of a mirror he had broken and could not reassemble. He knew, and yet he could not say it. There is a word for that condition.

[00:33:04]It is not stupidity, and it is not cowardice. It is the paralysis that strikes when the truth is incompatible with the structure of your life.

[00:33:12]But understanding and accepting are not the same thing. What Ugaki could not do, what the entire Japanese naval establishment could not do, was follow the evidence to its conclusion.

[00:33:24]Because the conclusion was annihilating.

[00:33:26]If battleships were obsolete, then the Yamato was obsolete. If the Yamato was obsolete, then Ugaki's command was obsolete. If the decisive battle doctrine was dead, then the purpose that had organized the lives and deaths of tens of thousands of Japanese sailors for 40 years had been a mistake.

[00:33:44]And the ships they had built, and the men they had lost, and the resources they had consumed, had been wasted on a faith that their own aviators had disproven 3 years earlier over the coast of Malaya.

[00:33:55]No single man can carry that conclusion.

[00:33:57]No diary entry can hold it. So, Ugaki wrote about anti-aircraft gunnery and turned the page.

[00:34:03]The morning after the Musashi sank, Kurita's Center Force, minus its most powerful ship, transited San Bernardino Strait in darkness and emerged into the Philippine Sea off the island of Samar.

[00:34:15]At approximately 06:45 on the morning of October 25, lookouts aboard the Yamato spotted masts on the horizon. Kurita believed he had found the American fast carrier fleet. He had not.

[00:34:28]He had stumbled into a formation of American escort carriers, small and slow, screened by a handful of destroyers and destroyer escorts. This was Taffy 3, the northernmost of three escort carrier groups supporting the Leyte landings.

[00:34:42]What followed was one of the most extraordinary naval engagements in history, and it illustrated everything the Musashi's death should have taught the men who survived her. The American destroyers and destroyer escorts, hopelessly outgunned, facing battleships and heavy cruisers with ships that displaced a fraction of their tonnage and carried guns that could not penetrate their enemies armor at any range, charged directly at the Japanese fleet to buy time for the escort carriers to escape. Commander Ernest Evans of the destroyer Johnston attacked without waiting for orders, driving his ship at flank speed straight at the heavy cruiser Kumano and launching a spread of 10 torpedoes that blew off Kumano's bow and knocked her out of the battle.

[00:35:23]Johnston was hit by three 14-in shells and three 6-in shells from battleship and cruiser fire that knocked out half her engineering plant, killed many of her crew, and blew the fingers off Evans's left hand.

[00:35:36]He wrapped the hand in a rag and kept fighting.

[00:35:39]For the next 2 and 1/2 hours, Johnston wove through the Japanese formation, firing at anything in range, laying smoke to cover the fleeing carriers, and drawing fire onto herself that would otherwise have hit the defenseless flattops.

[00:35:53]She was eventually surrounded by Japanese destroyers and heavy cruisers and pounded into a sinking wreck.

[00:35:59]Evans was last seen on the fantail, wounded in multiple places, still giving orders. His body was never recovered. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. He was of Cherokee and Creek ancestry from Pawnee, Oklahoma, a man who had wanted to be a sailor since he was a boy.

[00:36:16]Then, with Leyte Gulf seemingly open before him and the American transports apparently undefended, Kurita made the decision that historians have debated ever since.

[00:36:26]He turned his fleet around and withdrew.

[00:36:29]The reasons remain disputed. He had not slept in 3 days. He misidentified the escort carriers as fleet carriers. He received a false report of a powerful American carrier force approaching from the north.

[00:36:41]He feared being trapped inside the gulf with no air cover. His chief of staff, Rear Admiral Tomiji Koyanagi, later described the original order to attack Leyte as effectively a suicide order for the fleet.

[00:36:54]Whatever the cause, the result was that the most powerful surface force Japan had ever assembled sailed to within striking distance of its objective and turned back.

[00:37:03]The decisive battle had come at last and it had been decided not by great guns in a climactic duel between battle lines, but by submarine torpedoes, carrier aircraft, an exhausted admiral, and a handful of American destroyer captains who threw their ships at a battleship fleet and refused to stop.

[00:37:22]Everything Kantai Kessen had promised, everything the Musashi had been built to deliver, had been proven wrong in the space of 48 hours.

[00:37:31]The broader Battle of Leyte Gulf, fought across four separate engagements from October 23 through 26, destroyed the Imperial Japanese Navy as an effective fighting force. And the cruelest irony of all was reserved for Surigao Strait.

[00:37:45]On the night of October 24 to 25, Vice Admiral Nishimura's Southern Force, built around the old battleships Fuso and Yamashiro, sailed into Surigao Strait and directly into an ambush arranged by Rear Admiral Jesse Oldendorf.

[00:38:00]American battleships, five of the six raised from the mud of Pearl Harbor where Japanese aircraft had sunk them 3 years earlier, crossed the T on Nishimura's column and destroyed it.

[00:38:10]Fuso broke in half and sank. Yamashiro was battered into a burning wreck and went down with Nishimura aboard. It was the last time in the history of warfare that battleships fired on other battleships in a fleet engagement. The decisive gun battle that Kantai Kessen had promised for 40 years finally happened, and it happened as a sideshow, a minor action fought with obsolete ships that had no bearing on the outcome of the larger battle. The gun duel the Japanese navy had spent four decades preparing for arrived at last, and it was irrelevant. Off Cape Engano, Ozawa's decoy carriers succeeded in luring Halsey north, the one part of the Japanese plan that worked perfectly, but the carriers and their skeleton air groups were destroyed in the process.

[00:38:54]By the time the four engagements were over, the Japanese navy had lost 26 warships and more than 10,000 men.

[00:39:02]The Imperial Japanese navy would never fight as a coherent fleet again, but the doctrine still was not dead, not in the minds of the men who had built their lives around it, and its final act would come 6 months later in an operation so futile that even the officers ordered to carry it out recognized it for what it was.

[00:39:20]On April 7th, 1945, the Yamato sailed from Japan on a one-way mission to Okinawa.

[00:39:27]The operation was called Ten-Go, meaning Operation Heaven.

[00:39:31]The name was not chosen carelessly.

[00:39:34]The plan was to fight through the American fleet, beach the Yamato on the shore of Okinawa, and use her 18-in guns as fixed artillery, firing until her ammunition was exhausted and her hull was destroyed.

[00:39:46]The crew was ordered fueled for a single passage. Whether the fuel depots actually loaded more than that has been debated by historians, but the intent was clear. There would be no return voyage. The surviving crewmen were expected to go ashore and fight as infantry until they were killed. Vice Admiral Seiichi Ito, commanding the force, initially refused to order the mission, calling it futile and a waste of lives.

[00:40:10]His captains unanimously rejected it when it was briefed to them on April 5th. They argued that sending the last major warship in the fleet on a suicide run against overwhelming American air superiority was not strategy but ritual sacrifice.

[00:40:24]They changed their minds only when Vice Admiral Kusaka flew to the naval base at Tokuyama and told them that the emperor himself expected the navy to make its best effort. The invocation of the emperor settled the argument. Crews were told the nature of the mission and given the chance to stay behind. Almost none did.

[00:40:43]The Yamato sailed with the light cruiser Yahagi and eight destroyers. She was spotted almost immediately by the American submarines Threadfin and Hackleback as she transited the Bungo Strait between Kyushu and Shikoku.

[00:40:55]The submarines reported her position, course, and speed. There would be no surprise.

[00:41:01]On the afternoon of April 7th, approximately 280 aircraft from Task Force 58 descended on the Yamato. The American pilots had learned from the Musashi's sinking 6 months earlier.

[00:41:13]The Musashi had survived as long as she did partly because torpedo hits were distributed across both sides of the hull, allowing counter flooding to correct the list. This time, the torpedo bombers were briefed to concentrate almost exclusively on the port side, stacking the hits to accelerate the list beyond what counter flooding could correct. Dive bombers coordinated with strafing fighters that suppressed the anti-aircraft batteries, killing and wounding gun crews on the exposed weather decks, while torpedo planes used the distraction to make their runs at low altitude.

[00:41:45]The Yamato fought back with everything she had. Her anti-aircraft batteries threw up a wall of fire. Her main guns fired Type 3 anti-aircraft rounds into the approaching formations, but there were too many attackers coming too fast from too many directions.

[00:42:00]The Yamato absorbed approximately 11 torpedo hits, at least eight of them on the port side, and at least six bomb hits in roughly 2 hours. Her rudder jammed, locking her into a slow turn.

[00:42:12]Her speed dropped to eight knots, the list reached 20°. Then continued to grow as flooded compartments connected and the sea found new paths into the hull.

[00:42:22]At approximately 14:02, the order to abandon ship was given.

[00:42:27]Men scrambled across listing decks toward the high side, some jumping into the water, some sliding down the hull as it rolled.

[00:42:34]Captain Kosaku Ariga, the Yamato's last commanding officer, lashed himself to the binnacle on the bridge with a length of rope, ensuring he would go down with his ship. Vice Admiral Ito locked himself in his cabin and was never seen again. Minutes later, the Yamato capsized to port. As she rolled, her forward magazines, containing hundreds of 18-in shells, each weighing 1 and 1/2 tons, detonated in a cataclysmic explosion.

[00:43:00]A column of fire and smoke rose 6 mi into the sky, visible from the coast of Kyushu over 100 mi away.

[00:43:08]American pilots circling overhead said the mushroom cloud resembled a small atomic blast.

[00:43:14]The shock wave knocked down aircraft observing the sinking. Of her crew of approximately 3,332 men, only 269 survived. The Yahagi and four destroyers also went down. The Americans lost 10 aircraft and 12 men.

[00:43:31]The two largest and most powerful battleships ever built had both been destroyed by carrier aircraft without ever firing their main guns at an enemy surface warship in a decisive engagement. The fiercest serpent had been overcome by a swarm of ants, exactly as Yamamoto had predicted. And the ants had not even needed to swarm in overwhelming force.

[00:43:51]They had simply shown up with the right weapons, in sufficient numbers, and killed the serpent from above while it thrashed helplessly in the water below.

[00:43:59]Now, there is one more chapter to this story, and it does not take place at sea.

[00:44:04]It takes place on an airfield on Kyushu on the last day of the war, and it involves the man who started this story, the man who watched the Musashi die and could not write what he saw. After Leyte Gulf, Ugaki was recalled to Japan. In February of 1945, he took command of the Fifth Air Fleet based on Kyushu. His new assignment was not battleships, it was Kamikaze operations.

[00:44:28]The man who had commanded the largest naval guns in history was now sending young men in single-engine dive bombers on one-way missions to crash into American ships off Okinawa.

[00:44:39]The irony of his position was total.

[00:44:41]The weapon he now commanded, the airplane, was the same weapon that had killed the Musashi.

[00:44:47]The tactic he now employed, the suicide dive, was an admission that conventional naval warfare had failed. And the ships he was sending his pilots to destroy were the same ships, aircraft carriers and their escorts, that had rendered his beloved battleships irrelevant. He directed the mass Kikusui attacks, named for the chrysanthemum crest of a legendary medieval warrior, against the Okinawa invasion fleet through the spring and summer of 1945.

[00:45:14]10 major waves of Kamikaze aircraft, nearly 1,500 planes in total, were hurled at the American fleet between April and June.

[00:45:23]They caused terrible casualties. Dozens of American ships were damaged. Several were sunk, but they did not stop the invasion. They did not turn the tide.

[00:45:32]They proved only that bravery without strategic purpose is self-destruction dressed in honor. In his diary, Ugaki wrote that he was glad to see that this kind of attack method had come to the fore without compulsion, displaying what he called the glorious way of warriors.

[00:45:48]The battleship admiral had transferred his faith from steel and gunpowder to flesh and aviation fuel, and he did not appear to notice the contradiction. He had spent his career believing that the big gun would decide the war.

[00:46:00]Now he believed that the willing death of young men would decide it instead.

[00:46:04]Both faiths were wrong, but faith does not require evidence. It requires only the inability to live without it. On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito broadcast his recorded message announcing Japan's surrender.

[00:46:19]Ugaki was at an airfield on Kyushu.

[00:46:22]The broadcast was garbled by static, and Ugaki later wrote that he could guess at most of what the emperor said. It did not matter. He had already decided what he would do.

[00:46:32]He opened his diary for the last time.

[00:46:34]He wrote that he had never been so ashamed of himself. He wrote that as an officer entrusted by the throne, he had met this sad day.

[00:46:42]He noted that no formal ceasefire order had yet reached his command, and he reasoned that he alone bore the blame for failing to destroy the enemy.

[00:46:51]He would make one final attack.

[00:46:53]At 4:00 in the afternoon, he drank a last toast with his staff officers. He stripped the rank insignia from his dark green uniform. He picked up the short samurai sword that Admiral Yamamoto had given him years before, the sword he had carried since the day Yamamoto was killed. The sword of the man who had warned him that the serpent could not survive the ants. He walked to the flight line. 11 Yokosuka D4Y Suisei dive bombers waited on the tarmac. Ugaki had requested five aircraft. The unit commander insisted on launching at full strength. 22 young airmen stood beside their aircraft wearing headbands with the rising sun emblem.

[00:47:31]A young airman named Akio Shiendo, whose place on the mission Ugaki had taken, refused to be left behind and forced his way into the rear seat of the admiral's aircraft. The plane that was meant to carry two men took off carrying three.

[00:47:44]Ugaki's final radio transmission came at approximately 19:24 that evening. He reported that he was diving on an enemy vessel off Okinawa.

[00:47:53]American Navy records show no successful kamikaze strike on any vessel that day.

[00:47:59]His aircraft almost certainly crashed into the sea off the Ryukyu Islands near the island of Iheya Jima. Wreckage containing three bodies was recovered the following morning.

[00:48:08]His diary, which he had instructed must never fall into enemy hands, ends on August 15, 1945.

[00:48:16]His final written words express his intention to die, displaying what he called the real spirit of a Japanese warrior. Consider the arc of this man's war.

[00:48:24]In December of 1941, the Japanese Navy proved that air power could destroy capital ships at sea.

[00:48:31]In October of 1944, Ugaki watched American air power destroy the Musashi, the most powerful capital ship his navy had ever built. In April of 1945, the same fate took the Yamato, the Musashi's sister, in an even more lopsided engagement. And on August 15, 1945, the admiral who had watched the Musashi die from the bridge of her sister ship, climbed into a single-engine aircraft and flew himself into the ocean, dying in the spirit of the doctrine that was already dead before his ship went under.

[00:49:04]Ugaki did not strike an American warship. He struck the water. The last act of the battleship admiral was to become a kamikaze who missed his target on a day the war was already over.

[00:49:15]There is a specific kind of tragedy in that. Not the tragedy of a brave man dying for a lost cause. The tragedy is deeper.

[00:49:22]Ugaki died for a principle that he himself had watched disproven.

[00:49:27]He had stood on the bridge of the Yamato and seen what carrier aircraft could do to the most heavily armored warship on the planet.

[00:49:33]He had survived the death of the man who told him the battleship was obsolete.

[00:49:38]He had spent his final months commanding the very weapon, the airplane, that had killed the thing he loved. And he still could not release his grip on the faith that the evidence had buried.

[00:49:48]The Musashi's wreck was found in March of 2015 by a research team funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

[00:49:55]It lies in pieces on the floor of the Sibuyan Sea at a depth of approximately 1,000 m.

[00:50:01]The hull is broken, confirmation that the ship suffered a catastrophic internal explosion as she sank. Her 46-cm gun turrets, each weighing more than a destroyer, were found scattered across the seabed, separated from the hull by the force of the detonation.

[00:50:17]The largest weapons ever mounted on a warship rest in the dark at the bottom of the Philippine Sea, aimed at nothing, defending nothing, proving nothing except that the size of a weapon is not the same as its relevance.

[00:50:29]In Iguchi lies with his ship. The gunnery theorist died inside the instrument of his theory. Yamamoto lies in a grave in Tokyo, the man who warned them all, killed by the kind of air attack he had spent his career telling the Navy to prepare for.

[00:50:44]Ugaki lies somewhere in the waters off the Ryukyu Islands in an airplane with a sword at the bottom of the ocean he spent his life trying to rule with guns that could not save him. And the lesson that none of them could fully accept, the lesson that Japan itself had taught the world over the coast of Malaya on December 10th, 1941, is the lesson that every institution built around a single idea must eventually confront.

[00:51:08]The weapons you built your identity around will be made obsolete.

[00:51:12]The doctrine you staked everything on will be overtaken by a technology you did not take seriously.

[00:51:18]And the proof will not come from some distant, abstract source.

[00:51:22]It will come from the same innovation you pioneered and then failed to follow to its conclusion. Japan proved that air power could kill a battleship. And then, Japan lost its greatest battleships to air power. And the admiral who watched the first one die could not bring himself to write what it meant. That silence in Ugaki's diary on the night of October 24, 1944, is the sound of a man watching his faith sink beneath the waves and choosing to write about anti-aircraft gunnery instead.

[00:51:51]Now you know what Admiral Ugaki wrote after watching the Musashi go down.

[00:51:56]And now you know why what he did not write matters more.

[00:51:59]Thank you for spending these minutes with this history. If this story reached you, a like is the single best way to help it find others who care about these events. If you are not subscribed, now is a good time. And the bell ensures you do not miss one of these. I would love to hear where you are watching from today. And if you have a connection to naval history, a grandfather who served in the Pacific, a family story about a ship or a sailor or a battle, tell me about it in the comments.

[00:52:26]Every one of those men carried a story like the ones you just heard. Most of them never told it. This is how we make sure they are not forgotten.