Japanese Couldn't Believe Torpedoes Sank Yamato in 2 Hours... Until 380 Aircraft Proved It

Japanese Couldn't Believe Torpedoes Sank Yamato in 2 Hours... Until 380 Aircraft Proved It

April seventh, nineteen forty-five. Four hundred twenty miles southwest of Kyushu. The battleship Yamato rolled heavily to port as her captain ordered maximum speed. Vice Admiral Seiichi Ito stood on the bridge watching American aircraft swarm overhead like insects against the morning sky. The largest battleship ever constructed was three hours into what would be her final voyage, and the men aboard her were beginning to understand that everything they had believed about their ship was wrong.
The Yamato displaced seventy-two thousand eight hundred tons fully loaded. Her main battery consisted of nine eighteen-point-one-inch guns, the largest naval rifles ever mounted on a warship. Each shell weighed three thousand two hundred pounds. Her armor belt measured sixteen inches thick at its maximum. Her deck armor reached nine inches in critical areas. Japanese naval architects had designed her to be unsinkable, and for years, the Imperial Japanese Navy believed that assessment was accurate.
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But on that April morning, with American torpedo bombers circling for attack runs, the Yamato's crew was discovering that invulnerability was not a function of armor thickness or displacement tonnage. It was a function of air superiority, and Japan no longer possessed air superiority anywhere in the Pacific. The question was not whether the Yamato would sink. The question was how long she could survive without air cover against an enemy that controlled the skies absolutely.