The last battleship confrontation in history was the Battle of Surigao Strait, on October 25, 1944, in which a numerically and technically superior American battleship group destroyed a lesser Japanese battleship group by gunfire after it had already been devastated by destroyer torpedo attacks. All but one of the American battleships in this confrontation had previously been sunk during the attack on Pearl Harbor and subsequently raised and repaired. When fired the last salvo of this battle, the last salvo fired by a battleship against another heavy ship, she was "firing a funeral salute to a finished era of naval warfare". In April 1945, during the battle for Okinawa, the world's most powerful battleship, the "Yamato", was sent out on a suicide mission against a massive U.S. force and sunk by overwhelming pressure from carrier aircraft with nearly all hands lost.