The HIJMS Yamato and Musashi were the largest battleships ever built, displacing almost 70,000 tons at full load. They carried the heaviest guns ever to put to see, nine rifles of 18.11 inch bore (460mm) and were capable of throwing a 3,219lb shell just over 45,000 yards.
They were also white elephants, obsolete almost as soon as they were built. Both ships fell prey to the new decisive weapon of the sea, airpower.
Only once was on these "superbattleships" in a position to face American battleships in a slug-fest, this would have been on October 25, 1944 at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. A Japanese task force consisting of Yamato, three older battleships, as well as a cruiser/destroyer escort slipped through San Bernardino Strait and attacked a CVE task group off Samar Island. The running fight that ensued turned into an American victory as the Japanese broke off their pursuit after sinking 2 CVEs and 3 DDs.
The US planning for the invasion of the Philippines had envisioned the possibility that the IJN might threaten the invasion forces with surface ships. Accordingly Admiral Halsey was to detach seven fast battleships and form Task Force 34 under the command of Admiral Willis Lee, the Navy's best battleship commander. However, when Halsey took Third Fleet north to attack the Japanese carriers, he took the battleships with him (later citing their massive antiaircraft batteries were needed to protect the carriers). Had he not done so or if he had heeded the initial warnings to dispatch them southwards then the largest battleship fight of the war could have taken place with the HIJMS Yamato, Nagato, Haruna and Kongo and the USS Iowa, New Jersey, Massachusetts, South Dakota, Washington and Alabama...and as Samuel Eliot Morison would later write, "What a brawl that would have been!"
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The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
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