USS Iowa Fired Radar-Guided Salvo at 18 Miles — Japanese Battleship Sank Before Seeing Enemy

USS Iowa Fired Radar-Guided Salvo at 18 Miles — Japanese Battleship Sank Before Seeing Enemy

October 25th, 1944. Three sixteen in the morning. Complete darkness. Vice Admiral Nishimura's Japanese battleships steamed confidently through Surigao Strait toward their objective, their crews trained for the kind of night surface combat where Japanese optical superiority had dominated early-war battles. What they didn't know—couldn't know—was that they had already been tracked, targeted, and marked for destruction by an enemy they would never see.
Twenty-three miles away, Seaman Borkowski watched green phosphorescent returns materialize on his Mark 8 radar screen aboard USS West Virginia. The same ship that Japanese aircraft had left sinking in the mud at Pearl Harbor three years earlier had returned from the dead—rebuilt with technology that would make this the most one-sided battleship engagement in history.
In this documentary, we reveal the shocking true story of the last battleship duel ever fought—and how it was decided by technology so advanced that Japanese ships fought completely blind.
What You'll Discover:
• How Mark 8 radar fire control let American battleships see perfectly in pitch darkness
• Why Japanese optical rangefinders—the best in the world—were rendered completely useless
• The devastating first salvo that straddled Yamashiro at 13 miles in total blackness
• USS West Virginia's incredible journey from Pearl Harbor wreckage to technological superiority
• How analog mechanical computers calculated firing solutions while targets moved at 20 knots
• Why Vice Admiral Nishimura never saw the enemy that destroyed his entire force
• The tragic irony of Pearl Harbor survivors exacting perfect revenge in the darkness
• Personal accounts from American radar operators who watched Japanese ships disappear from their screens
• How 93 one-ton shells were fired with such accuracy that crews saw no return fire
• Why only 10 out of 1,636 Japanese sailors survived the technological massacre
This isn't just about radar—it's about how American industrial might transformed sunken Pearl Harbor battleships into weapons that fought with capabilities their designers never imagined possible. West Virginia, Tennessee, and California: all sunk on December 7th, 1941. All resurrected with Mark 8 systems. All firing in perfect coordination at an enemy who died without seeing them.
From Pearl Harbor's mud to Tokyo Bay's surrender ceremony, witness how one ship embodied America's complete technological transformation of naval warfare.
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