Thursday, October 12, 2006

Battleship Yamato


Are you a fan of the War World II battleship Yamato? I sure am, but as to why am I can't say exactly. Maybe it was how cool it looked illustrated on the box top of the Revell plastic model, which was my first knowledge of it back in the 1950s when I was still a wee tyke.

Or, it could be that the Yamato was the apogee of Japanese battleship design. The Yamato just looks sleek and deadly. It should have been a major player in the war for the Pacific, but it spent most of the war sitting behind torpedo nets a victim of what I like to call the Japanese Navy's Godzilla strategy.

The Godzilla strategy was that, just like in a movie, one day the Yamato would sail out and wade through the American fleet like a giant radioactive lizard stomping through downtown Tokyo and send the americans reeling in defeat back to California. The trouble was the Japanese Navy could never decide when that decisive moment had arrived.

So, instead of taking the Yamato out when it could have been of use in battles early in the war (Guadalcanal, the invasion of the Philippines, etc), it was always held in reserve until it was too late. The Yamato met its end at the hands of torpedo bombers while trying to reach Okinawa.

The Japanese have a Battleship Yamato museum, which I wish I could visit. The museum has just about all the information you could want regarding the Yamato even to include the Star Blazers TV show.

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