Yamato Class Battleship |
| Ship/ Class | Length | Beam | Disp. | Main Arm. | Speed | # | Date |
| Yamato Class | 839’ | 127’ | 69,998 t | 18†(3x3) | 27 | 2 | 1941 |
Yamato Class Battleship
ID: Plastic battleship gaming piece: the Yamato class battleship from the game Axis & Allies Pacific 40-2nd Ed.
The Story of the Yamato class: The Japanese, limited at first by treaty restrictions and then by their own industrial capacity, knew they had little chance of catching up with the United States in numbers of ships. Thus, they adopted the strategy of trying to design individually more powerful ships in every category, with the hope of catching US ships off-guard before they could be assembled in numbers. The Yamato class was thus designed to be big, very big; in fact they would in fact be the largest battleships ever built! Since the width of the Panama Canal had traditionally been the limit for the width of US battleships, the Yamato was thus deliberately designed to be too wide to fit. With an unheard-of amount of armor and the largest guns ever mounted on a battleship, the Yamato class was designed to be an invincible, world-beating battleship, and yet they were also relatively fast, at 27 knots. Originally, Japan had planned to build 5 of them, but in the end, only the Yamato and her sister-ship Musashi were finished as battleships. A third, the Shinano was converted into an aircraft carrier as part of a program to recover from the carrier losses of Midway. With such a heavy-hitting weapon at their side, however, the Japanese found it difficult to risk such valuable ships in combat until things grew truly desparate. When they finally were sent into the fray, the Musashi was sunk, though only after absorbing the overwhelming majority of the hits that Halsey’s carrier planes threw at Kurita’s Center Force in the Sibuyan Sea. The Yamato survived the battle, only to be sacrificed in a suicidal attempt to single-handedly disrupt the US landings at Okinawa. Spotted by US aircraft well before it was able to close within range of any US flotillas, the result was predictable: US carrier planes pounded her from the air until she finally succumbed. Even then, the US pilots marveled at how much punishment it took to sink her!
Usage Notes: Use this piece for “Global 1939†and “Invasion of Italy†Variants as a battleship unit. Other Japanese warships of interest may be: the Takao class cruiser, & the Shinano class aircraft carrier.
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