page_title: Yamato-class battleship
section_title: Yamato
hierarchical_section_title: Yamato-class battleship / Ships / Yamato
caption_attribution_description: Imperial Japanese Navy's battle ship, Yamato running full-power trials in Sukumo Bay, 1941
context_page_description: The Yamato-class battleships were two battleships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Yamato and Musashi, laid down leading up to World War II and completed as designed. A third hull laid down in 1940 was converted to an aircraft carrier, Shinano, during construction.
  Displacing 72,000 long tons at full load, the completed battleships were the heaviest ever constructed. The class carried the largest naval artillery ever fitted to a warship, nine 460-millimetre naval guns, each capable of firing 1,460 kg shells over 42 km.
  Due to the threat of American submarines and aircraft carriers, both Yamato and Musashi spent the majority of their careers in naval bases at Brunei, Truk, and Kure—deploying on several occasions in response to American raids on Japanese bases.
  All three ships were sunk by the U.S. Navy; Musashi while participating in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, as part of Admiral Takeo Kurita's Center Force, lost to American carrier aircraft; the still incomplete Shinano was torpedoed ten days after her commissioning in November 1944 by the submarine USS Archerfish; and Yamato, also ravaged by carrier planes, in April 1945 during Operation Ten-Go.
context_section_description: Yamato was ordered in March 1937, laid down 4 November 1937, launched 8 August 1940, and commissioned 16 December 1941. She underwent training exercises until 27 May 1942, when the vessel was deemed "operable" by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Joining the 1st Battleship Division, Yamato served as the flagship of the Japanese Combined Fleet during the Battle of Midway in June 1942, yet did not engage enemy forces during the battle.  The next two years were spent intermittently between Truk and Kure naval bases, with her sister ship Musashi replacing Yamato as flagship of the Combined Fleet.  During this time period, Yamato, as part of the 1st Battleship Division, deployed on multiple occasions to counteract American carrier-raids on Japanese island bases. On 25 December 1943, she suffered major torpedo damage at the hands of USS Skate, and was forced to return to Kure for repairs and structural upgrades.
  In 1944—following extensive antiaircraft and secondary battery upgrades—Yamato joined the Second Fleet in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, serving as an escort to a Japanese Carrier Division.  In October 1944, as part of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita's Center Force for the Battle of Leyte Gulf, she used her naval artillery against an enemy vessel for the only time, helping sink the American escort carrier Gambier Bay and the destroyer Johnston before she was forced away by torpedoes from Heermann, which put her out of combat.  Lightly damaged at Kure in March 1945, the ship was then rearmed in preparation for operations. Yamato was deliberately expended in a suicide mission as part of Operation Ten-Go, 
  sent to use her big guns to provide relief to Japanese forces engaged in the Battle of Okinawa. She never came close, sunk en route on  7 April 1945 by 386 American carrier aircraft .  After receiving 10 torpedo and 7 bomb hits she capsized, taking 2,498 of the 2,700 crew-members with her, including Vice-Admiral Seiichi Itō. The sinking of Yamato was seen as a major American victory, and Hanson W. Baldwin, the military editor of The New York Times, wrote that "the sinking of the new Japanese battleship Yamato ... is striking proof—if any were needed—of the fatal weakness of Japan in the air and at sea".
caption: Yamato on trials in 1941
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