Yamato
JAPAN’S DOOMED FLAGSHIP
Why Japan’s iconic flagship set sail on a fateful suicide mission
In 1945 this super battleship embarked on a desperate mission to halt the American landings on Okinawa
7 April 1945
Agrey leviathan looms in the midday light. The battleship’s great guns are silent but exude a palpable aura of menace. It drives southwards over the waves of the East China Sea at 20 knots towards its final destination, Okinawa, where an armada of American ships lies offshore overseeing the invasion of the island. Yamato, the pride of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN), is a 70,000ton super battleship, the first of her class and flagship of the Combined Fleet. It is far superior to any other warship afloat.
Yamato is under orders to ravage the American ships off Okinawa with her gigantic 47-centimetre (18.1-inch) guns, beach herself and fight to the death in the same spirit as the kamikaze pilots who at that moment exact a frightful toll on the US Navy’s warships. Okinawa is an island in the Ryukyu chain, and the last stepping stone for the US forces before the Japanese Archipelago lying 560 kilometres (350 miles) away. It is here that the battleship is expected to live up to her name, Yamato – a word that embodies the essence of the Japanese nation and people.
However, the flagship will never reach its destination. It is just past noon, 7 April 1945, and Yamato is still 400 kilometres (250 miles) to the north west of Okinawa. US Navy warplanes have found her. They are circling, visible through gaps in the clouds – midnightblue angels of death casting judgement over the battleship and her nine escorts. On Yamato’s bridge stands a young assistant radar officer, Ensign Mitsuru Yoshida. He is 22 years old and had been a law student at Tokyo Imperial University just two years before, when he was called to serve his emperor. Unlike almost all of his fellows aboard Yamato, he will survive the calamity that is about to befall the vessel. After the war, he will write a eulogy for the doomed ship and her crew.
Operation Heaven Number One, or Ten-ichigo in Japanese, has little chance of success. The mission has been conceived as a means of restoring a measure of honour to the Combined Fleet, which has been shamed by its inaction around Okinawa compared to the kamikaze attacks of Japan’s death-seeking pilots. “But where is the navy?” Emperor Hirohito asked Admiral Koshiro Oikawa, his most senior naval adviser, at a 29 March meeting concerning the fighting. “Are there no more ships? No surface forces?” Oikawa was mortified by the implication that the navy, most of whose ships now lie at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, was not doing enough. So on 6 April Yamato sailed from Kure Harbour to die at Okinawa, covered in glory for the good of the navy. “The fate of
the navy rests on this one action,” her crewmen were portentously told as they departed.
Despite her awesome power, Yamato has seen little combat, having engaged the Americans briefly during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. The ship has been outmoded since the start of the Pacific War. The strike on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 proved that aircraft carriers, not battleships, were now the arbiters of war at sea. A mere two days later, the Japanese confirmed the vulnerability of surface warships to aircraft when their planes struck and sank the Royal Navy’s HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse. Surface ships, however powerful, were extremely vulnerable to air attack unless themselves protected by fighters, and so for much of the war Yamato has been kept sheltered in home waters, awaiting a decisive battle with American battleships that will never come.
The Surface Special Attack Force is under the overall command of Vice Admiral Seiichi Ito, who uses Yamato as his flagship, while the ship herself is under the direction of Captain Kosaku Ariga. Ito is aghast at what he considers the purposeless waste of his ships and the lives of his men, but he keeps such thoughts from them. Yet the crewmen of Yamato are under no illusion that Ten-ichigo can end in anything besides her destruction. It is a suicide mission. They have been ordered, preposterously, that if they manage to survive long enough to reach the island, they are to arm themselves and go ashore to continue the fight. Many sailors, aware of what is to come, have written their last letters home to their loved ones.
Awaiting Yamato and the ships of the Second Destroyer Squadron that accompanies it on this death ride is the US Fifth Fleet, riding high at the peak of its wartime might. The Yamato crewmen know they have been spotted by an American submarine, but they are deeply upset that the Americans have radioed their position to the rest of the fleet without even encoding the message, as if they are not taking the great battleship seriously enough.
On Yamato, rice balls and black tea are served to the crew, who sing patriotic songs and shout “Banzai!”, the traditional Japanese battle cry. Ariga, a popular captain, allows some of his younger officers to affectionately pat his bald pate. There is a limit to the levity, however. In contemplation of the swarm of American aircraft that is sure to assail them, one sailor asks morbidly but with true prescience, “Which country showed the world what airplanes could do by sinking Prince of Wales?”
Ensign Yoshida finds that one of his fellows, Ensign Sakei Katono, is reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, while Yoshida buries himself in a biography of Baruch Spinoza. He also sees that another ensign, Kunio Nakatani, is weeping into his pillow. The assistant communications officer aboard Yamato is a Japanese-american from California who was studying in Japan and had the misfortune to find himself stranded there when the war began. He has received, at long last – just before Yamato sailed on her final voyage – a letter from his mother in America, that reaches him via neutral Switzerland. He will never see her again.
A reconnaissance plane operating off the aircraft carrier USS Essex spies the flotilla at 8.15am on 7 April. Over the following four hours, the Americans doggedly track Yamato and the other ships of the flotilla. Admiral Raymond Spruance, commanding officer of the Fifth Fleet at Okinawa, at first decides to keep his carrier fighters close by to provide cover against the swarming kamikazes and instead sends a powerful squadron of battleships to confront the onrushing Japanese ships. Yamato, it seems, will finally get to fulfill her purpose and duel valiantly with her American peers.
Then Spruance cancels his order. Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher, the commander of the carrier aircraft of Task Force 58, convinces him that his planes will be better dealing with the immense Japanese warship. At 10.00am 280 planes from no fewer than ten aircraft carriers launch themselves into the leaden Pacific sky,
“ITO IS AGHAST AT WHAT HE CONSIDERS THE PURPOSELESS WASTE OF HIS SHIPS AND THE LIVES OF HIS MEN, BUT HE KEEPS SUCH THOUGHTS FROM THEM”
“AT 10.00AM 280 PLANES FROM NO FEWER THAN TEN AIRCRAFT CARRIERS LAUNCH THEMSELVES INTO THE LEADEN PACIFIC SKY, DESTINED FOR A BLOODY RENDEZVOUS WITH YAMATO”
“YAMATO’S EXECUTIVE OFFICER, REAR ADMIRAL NOBII MORISHITA, CAN’T HELP BUT ADMIRE THE PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE OF THE ATTACKERS. ‘BEAUTIFULLY DONE, ISN’T IT?’ HE SAYS”
destined for a fateful rendezvous with the approaching Yamato.
At 12.00pm Admiral Ito sits on the bridge of Yamato and smiles. He says cheerfully, “We got through the morning all right, didn’t we?” The battleship’s good fortune will not last long. Just 20 minutes later Yamato’s air search radar detects the approaching American aircraft. The Japanese ships are bereft of fighter cover. Their only defences will be the anti-aircraft guns aboard. Then the attacks begin – the first wave of many in a sea of fire and smoke.
Yamato’s anti-aircraft batteries and those of her escorts open up in defence. The ferocious fire sent skyward – a prismatic, tracer-lit torrent of searing metal – does the Japanese ships little good. The Americans manoeuvre their machines with great skill. Yoshida grimly observes that their highly trained pilots fly in a straight course only long enough to drop their bombs or torpedoes, then hurriedly zigzag away. The sheer number of aircraft also works in the Americans’ favour, as the Japanese gun crews find themselves overwhelmed with a multiplicity of fast-moving targets.
In all, 364 American carrier aircraft pounce on Yamato and the ships in her escort. The light cruiser Yahagi, the lead ship of the Second Destroyer Squadron, goes down after being struck by seven torpedoes and 12 bombs, while US aircraft also hammer the destroyers. It is Yamato, however, that receives the greatest attention from the American fliers. They concentrate their torpedo strikes on the port side of the ship to cause her to list quickly.
Wave after wave of Avenger torpedo bombers and Helldiver dive bombers, protected by Corsair and Hellcat fighters, surge over Yamato. Yamato’s executive officer, Rear Admiral Nobii Morishita, can’t help but admire the professional competence of the attackers. ‘Beautifully done, isn’t it?’ he says. She is hit by one torpedo after another. Between 11 and 13 strike her, together with no fewer than eight bombs. There are many more near-misses, and she lists worryingly to port. She takes on thousands of gallons of seawater to counter the listing, but to little avail. The waves crash over her port side. At 2.10pm a bomb strikes her rudder, damaging it and knocking out all power in the ship. She can no longer manoeuvre. Yoshida spies a thin, human-sized length of flesh dangling from a rangefinder. Her crew has been equally savaged.
Another wave of enemy planes bears down on Yamato. “Don’t lose heart,” Captain Ariga keeps urging the surviving men on the bridge. But there is no hope for Ten-ichigo. Admiral Ito’s flotilla has been shredded by American airpower to no purpose, just as he had expected. Like Yahagi, most of the destroyers have been smashed. He calls off the operation and commands his remaining ships to return home after picking up survivors of disabled ships. After giving this order, he goes to his cabin and closes the door behind him. He will never emerge. Captain Ariga calls his crew to Yamato’s deck as water floods the stricken vessel and orders them to abandon ship.
“THE FEROCIOUS FIRE SENT SKYWARD – A PRISMATIC, TRACER-LIT TORRENT OF SEARING METAL – DOES THE JAPANESE SHIPS LITTLE GOOD”
He will not be leaving with them. Ariga binds himself to a binnacle so that he will go down with his ship. “Long live the emperor!” he cries.
Yamato’s severe list is now reaching an astonishing 90 degrees to port. As she continues to roll, the giant shells she stows for her main guns slip and slide in their magazines, their fuses striking bulkheads and overheads. They begin to detonate. By 2.23pm Yamato is completely upside down and begins to sink. The greatest of these blasts consumes her, sending up a mushroom cloud of fiery smoke that can be seen all the way back in Japan.
Ensign Yoshida is indescribably lucky. The plunging Yamato was about to pull him under in its whirlpool when this final explosion propels him back to the surface. He will live. The remains of the battered Yamato finally sink in 883 metres (2,700 feet) of water. Yoshida, who will become a bank executive after the war, is plucked from the oil-choked water by the destroyer Fuyutsuki. He writes his Requiem for Battleship Yamato years later, calling Ten-ichigo “An operation that will live in naval annals for its recklessness and stupidity.”
The Japanese navy loses seven ships in Ten-ichigo, including Yamato, along with 4,250 sailors. Only three destroyers escape the carnage. The US Navy’s losses are much lighter – a mere ten warplanes and 12 airmen. When Emperor Hirohito learns of the failure of the operation and the loss of Yamato, he raises his hand to his head and sways. “Gone?” he says in shocked disbelief. “She’s gone?”
The Okinawa invasion will not be stopped. It continues until late June, when the last Japanese resistance is crushed. Of the 3,300 crewmen of Yamato, just 269 survive. Her dead are the among the first casualties in the Okinawa campaign. They are not the last.