page_title: List of battleships of Japan
section_title: Nagato class
hierarchical_section_title: List of battleships of Japan / Dreadnought battleships / Nagato class
caption_attribution_description: English: Nagato at anchor, around September 1924
context_page_description: Between the 1890s and 1940s, the Imperial Japanese Navy built a series of battleships as it expanded its fleet. Previously, the Empire of Japan had acquired a few ironclad warships from foreign builders, although it had adopted the Jeune Ecole naval doctrine which emphasized cheap torpedo boats and commerce raiding to offset expensive, heavily armored ships. To counter the Imperial Chinese Beiyang Fleet in the early 1890s, however, Japan ordered two Fuji-class battleships from Great Britain as Japan lacked the technology and capability to construct its own vessels. Combat experience in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 convinced the IJN that its doctrine was untenable, leading to a ten-year naval construction program that called for a total of six battleships and six armored cruisers. The two ships of the Shikishima class and the battleships Asahi and Mikasa were also purchased from Great Britain. Aware that they could not outbuild the Americans or British, the IJN decided that their ships would always be qualitatively superior to offset their quantitative inferiority.
context_section_description: The Nagato-class battleships (長門型戦艦, Nagato-gata senkan) were the third pair of dreadnoughts built during World War I, although they were not completed until after the end of the war. Both ships carried supplies for the survivors of the Great Kantō earthquake in 1923. Modernized during the 1930s, Nagato and her sister ship Mutsu briefly participated in the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and Nagato was the flagship of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto during the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 that began the Pacific War.
  The sisters participated in the Battle of Midway in June 1942, although they did not see any combat. Mutsu participated in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons in August before returning to Japan in early 1943. One of her magazines exploded in June, destroying the ship. Nagato spent most of the first two years of the war training in home waters. She was transferred to Truk in mid-1943, but did not see any combat until the Battle of the Philippine Sea in mid-1944 when she was attacked by American aircraft. Nagato did not fire her main armament against enemy vessels until the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. She was lightly damaged during the battle and returned to Japan the following month for repairs. The IJN was running out of fuel by this time and decided not to fully repair her. Nagato was converted into a floating anti-aircraft platform and assigned to coastal defense duties. After the war, the ship was a target for US nuclear weapon tests during Operation Crossroads in mid-1946. She survived the first test with little damage, but was sunk by the second test.
caption: Nagato at anchor, c. 1924
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