The sinking of the Yamato

In the early afternoon of 7 April 1945, in the East China Sea south-west of Kyushu, the first waves of American carrier aircraft appeared over the largest battleship ever built. In less than two hours the Yamato – a ship of more than 70,000 tons’ displacement, armed with nine 460 mm guns – took a dozen or more torpedo and bomb hits, rolled over to port and exploded. With her went down the light cruiser Yahagi and four of the eight destroyers escorting them. It was the last major offensive operation by the Japanese surface fleet in the Second World War – a sortie planned from the outset as a one-way voyage.

War chronologies record under this date that the Yamato was sunk in waters north of Okinawa during the last great Japanese naval operation. The assessment of the operation is accurate, but the location needs to be made more precise: the battleship sank far from Okinawa – according to most accounts some 200 kilometres south-west of the tip of Kyushu (the wreck, found in 1985, lies according to some sources as much as 290 kilometres from the island), that is, roughly a third of the way, nearly 400 kilometres north of the sortie’s objective. The force never even got close to Okinawa.

The last ships of the Combined Fleet

By the spring of 1945 the Imperial Japanese Navy was a shadow of the fleet that in December 1941 had struck Pearl Harbor. Its carriers had been sunk at Midway, in the Philippine Sea and in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, where in October 1944 American aircraft in the Sibuyan Sea had sunk the Yamato’s sister ship, the Musashi. The Yamato, in 1942–1943 the flagship of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, came out of Leyte damaged; her main guns had fired at surface ships for the first and last time in the clash with American escort carriers off Samar. Since then she had lain in the bases of the Inland Sea. There was a shortage of fuel, aircraft and trained pilots, and a fleet that could not put to sea was defenceless even in harbour – on 19 March 1945 the battleship was lightly damaged by a bomb during the Task Force 58 carrier strike on Kure.

On 1 April 1945 the Americans landed on Okinawa. The Japanese command intended to respond above all from the air: with massed attacks by suicide aircraft from the airfields on Kyushu and Formosa, known as the Kikusui operations (“floating chrysanthemum”). According to post-war accounts, when the plan for the island’s defence was presented to Emperor Hirohito in March, he asked what the navy would do and whether it no longer had any ships. Whatever weight the question carried, the naval command took it as an obligation.

The Ten-ichi-gō plan

The plan for Operation Ten-ichi-gō (often called simply Ten-Go) was drawn up by the staff of the Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Soemu Toyoda. The Yamato, the Yahagi and eight destroyers were to fight their way through to Okinawa, attack the fleet supporting the landing off the island’s west coast, and then beach themselves and fight as immobile batteries until they were destroyed. Surviving sailors were to go ashore and fight on as infantry. Air cover was practically out of the question. Along the way the sortie was to draw American aircraft onto itself just as hundreds of kamikazes appeared over the fleet off Okinawa.

The commander of the Second Fleet, Vice Admiral Seiichi Itō, regarded the plan as a senseless waste of men and fuel and for several days refused to issue the order. On 5 April the Combined Fleet’s chief of staff, Vice Admiral Ryūnosuke Kusaka, flew to the base at Tokuyama. The ships’ captains unanimously backed Itō. According to participants’ accounts, the turning point came when Kusaka declared that the fleet was to become the vanguard of the suicidal attack of the “hundred million” – the whole nation, which was expected to fight to the end. Itō gave way. The sick, newly arrived sailors and several dozen cadets from the naval academy at Etajima were put ashore; according to post-war accounts, none of the rest took the opportunity to stay on land.

The order provided for issuing fuel for a one-way trip only. According to some sources, the staff of the Tokuyama base quietly filled the ships with almost everything left in the tanks, although even that would probably not have been enough for a return from Okinawa to Japan. The story of “fuel for one way” therefore belongs only half to the legend of the sortie – its suicidal character came from the plan, not from the measure of fuel.

Putting to sea

The force sailed from Tokuyama on the afternoon of 6 April 1945. Besides the Yamato (commanded by Captain Kōsaku Aruga), on which Itō hoisted his flag, and the Yahagi under Captain Tameichi Hara, it comprised the destroyers Asashimo, Hamakaze, Isokaze, Kasumi, Yukikaze, Hatsushimo, Fuyutsuki and Suzutsuki. That same day the Japanese launched the first Kikusui operation – hundreds of aircraft, several hundred of them suicide planes, attacked the American fleet off Okinawa.

As early as the evening of 6 April, as the ships passed through the Bungo Channel between Kyushu and Shikoku, they were detected by two American submarines, the Threadfin and the Hackleback. Their reports reached the commander of the Fifth Fleet, Admiral Raymond Spruance. At dawn on 7 April the force passed the Ōsumi Peninsula and headed first west, to throw off pursuit, and then towards Okinawa. In the morning it was spotted by carrier reconnaissance aircraft and flying boats, which from then on never lost sight of it.

Spruance initially intended to deal with the Yamato in the classic way: he ordered Rear Admiral Morton Deyo, commanding the older battleships bombarding Okinawa, to prepare for a gunnery action. Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher, commander of the fast carriers of Task Force 58, did not wait for a decision, however, and at around 10 a.m. began launching aircraft, informing his superior only after they had taken off. Spruance accepted the fait accompli. Task Groups 58.1 and 58.3 sent some 280 aircraft, Task Group 58.4 another 106; in all, some 386 aircraft from a dozen or more carriers took part in the attack: Hellcat and Corsair fighters, Helldiver dive-bombers and Avenger torpedo bombers.

Two hours

The Japanese force had no fighter cover at all. The first wave arrived at around 12.30 p.m.; the Yamato opened fire with her main guns, the ships increased speed and began evasive manoeuvres, and the sky filled with anti-aircraft fire. Fighters strafed the decks and used rockets to suppress the gun positions, dive-bombers attacked the superstructures, and torpedo bombers came in low over the water. In the first wave, according to American and Japanese accounts, the Yamato took two bombs and one torpedo; a fire broke out aft of the superstructure that could never be put out.

The Yahagi was disabled almost at once, hit by a torpedo in the engine room. In subsequent waves the cruiser took, according to accounts, at least six more torpedoes and a dozen or more bombs, and she sank at around 2.05 p.m.; Hara survived and later described the sortie in his memoirs. The Hamakaze sank quickly, the Isokaze and Kasumi were badly damaged, and the Asashimo went down with all hands.

Between 1.20 and 2.15 p.m. successive waves concentrated on the Yamato. The torpedoes struck mainly on the port side – according to American accounts, some squadrons deliberately aimed them at one side so that the list would grow faster than the crew could correct it. Bombs destroyed much of the anti-aircraft armament and fire-control positions. At around 1.33 p.m., to save the ship from capsizing, the starboard engine and boiler rooms were flooded; according to survivors’ accounts, the hundreds of men working there drowned without warning. The list eased only briefly. Torpedo bombers hit the stern, jamming the rudder. The total number of hits is uncertain – according to various sources, the Yamato took between nine and a dozen or more torpedoes and anywhere from a few to more than a dozen bombs.

At around 2.02 p.m. Itō, told that the ship could not be steered and was sinking, called off the operation and ordered the crews to be saved. He himself stayed on the battleship, as did Captain Aruga. The order to abandon ship came too late: the Yamato was already rolling over to port, and many sailors were trapped below decks. At around 2.20 p.m. the battleship capsized and began to sink, and at 2.23 p.m. her magazines exploded – probably as a result of the fires. According to accounts, a mushroom-shaped column of smoke rose several kilometres and was visible more than a hundred nautical miles away, even from Kagoshima on Kyushu.

Losses

The surviving destroyers – Fuyutsuki, Yukikaze and Hatsushimo – picked survivors out of the water. From the Yamato, according to various sources, between 269 and about 280 men were rescued; the crew is given as between 2,750 and more than 3,300, and the most frequently cited estimate speaks of 3,055 killed out of 3,332. Itō and Aruga were among the dead. On the Yahagi 446 men were killed, and several hundred more on the destroyers. The Isokaze and Kasumi were finished off by their own ships. The Suzutsuki, with her bow blown off, made it to Sasebo, steaming stern-first the whole way. Total Japanese losses are estimated at between about 3,700 and 4,250 killed.

According to accounts, the Americans lost ten aircraft shot down by anti-aircraft fire and twelve airmen; some of the crews of downed aircraft were picked up by seaplanes and submarines. Japanese survivors reported after the war that American fighters strafed men in the water; others recalled that the aircraft broke off their attacks when the destroyers began rescue operations. That same day kamikazes struck American ships off Okinawa – the carrier Hancock was among those hit – but the aircraft could not protect the Yamato, and the sortie did not draw any significant part of the American air power away from them.

The memory of the sortie

One of the survivors, a young officer named Mitsuru Yoshida, described the voyage and the death of the ship in his book Senkan Yamato no saigo (“The End of the Battleship Yamato”), published after the war and regarded in Japan as a classic of war literature. Its conversation among young officers, who wondered whether their deaths had any meaning and concluded that Japan had to lose in order to be reborn, became one of the most frequently cited testimonies of the last months of the war. The wreck of the Yamato was found in 1985 at a depth of some 340 metres; it lies in two main sections.

In post-war Japan the Yamato became a symbol – both of former technical might and of the futility of a sacrifice imposed by a command that knew the sortie had no chance. The plan itself was criticised as early as 1945 by some naval officers, who called it a waste of men and fuel in the name of the “honour of the fleet”.

Significance

The sinking of the Yamato ended the existence of the Imperial Japanese Navy as a force capable of operating at sea. What remained – a few damaged battleships and carriers without aircraft at Kure and other ports – lay immobilised for lack of fuel and was destroyed or badly damaged by American carrier raids in July 1945. From then on the only weapons Japan could throw against the fleet off Okinawa were kamikaze aircraft, motor boats packed with explosives and midget suicide craft.

The battle also settled a dispute that had divided the world’s navies throughout the war: whether a battleship could survive at sea without air cover. The answer had already been given by the sinking of the British Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya in December 1941 and by the fate of the Musashi in October 1944; on 7 April 1945 the world’s largest capital ship, ready for battle and aware of the threat, was sunk by carrier aircraft in less than two hours, at the cost of twelve American airmen. The era of the battleship as the main force of the fleet was definitively over.

Finally, the sortie showed what the Japanese command was prepared to do in the face of the coming invasion of the Home Islands. The logic of the “suicidal attack of the hundred million”, in whose name the Yamato had been sent out, was to apply in the plans for the defence of Kyushu and Honshu as well. American planners, counting the losses suffered at Okinawa, took it into account when in the summer of 1945 they weighed the cost of invading Japan.