Battleship Musashi: The Making and Sinking of the Worlds Biggest Battleship

by Akira Yoshimura

Book Overview

Admiral lsoroku Yamamoto, the man who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, said that the three great follies of the world were the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids, and the battleship Musashi. Yamamoto understood that sheer size and firepower would not be decisive factors in the battle for naval supremacy in the Pacific.

The Musashi was massive-upright it would have approached the size of the Chrysler Building. Outfitted with eighteen-inch...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 4770024002
• ISBN13: 9784770024008
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: Kodansha
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 8.2" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Musashi - The forgotten Sister

An easy read. Each chapter is short and to the point. From its birth to its death the reader is taken on a journey. An interesting insight into the lives of those that had a part in building and crewing this massive battleship. Overshadowed by the life of the Yamato, this ship took massive punishment and 4 hours to sink which allowed the US to change tactics for the Yamato. Highly recommended.Battleship Musashi: The Making and Sinking of the Worlds Biggest Battleship

Excellent read

I really enjoyed reading about the technical details involved in building this ship. It was all quite fascinating and I consumed this book over three jet-lagged nights. The Yamato class battleships were obsolete the moment they were laid down. The amount of materials and energy devoted to building these vessels would have been far better spent on 4-6 Soryu-type air craft carriers and their airwings. Fortunately for the U.S. Japan squandered a great deal of her precious resources on these dreadnoughts, even while the Japanese navy (unlike our own) was convinced that air craft carriers would be the key ships in Naval warfare. Moreover, the sinking of the HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse by land based bombers shortly after Pearl Harbor should have sent shivers down the spine of any Admiral envisioning battleships as stand alone fighting ships. The idea behind these battleships was to use their longer range fire power to fight Amerian battlehips before our ships could get in range, but this was a highy suspect strategy. 1)It's very hard to get accurate targeting of ballistic projectiles at extreme ranges even if targeting is provided by airplane (Yamato and Musashi carried 9 each for this purpose) 2)Though heavily armored- more so than our Iowa class and South dakota and Washington-classes- the guns were 50 caliber whereas the smaller bore (40cm versus Yamato and Musashi's 46 cm guns) were 70 caliber and the penetrating power of the guns on US battleships would have been about the same as the larger bore lower caliber Japanese guns. 3)Guns on our ships were radar directed and more accurate. We could have "picked up" the Yamato's long before their aircraft spotted our ships. The "tragic" aspect for me is that her final and really only battle was futile. There was zero chance of accomplishing her mission in the face of overwhelming US Naval aviation. The ship was lost for no reason whatsoever. I have to wonder what would have happened in the Pacific if Japan had built more aircraft carriers instead of these obsolete thugs. I am glad that a good book on the Musashi has been wtitten. In Japan, the Yamato is still famous, but almost no one has ever heard of the Musashi. The writing itself is very engaging but there are som typos and mistranslations. For example the commanding officers of the Musashi are designated Lieutenant Commanders but this is highly unlikely. Destroyers would have been commanded by officers of this rank but even Light Cruisers would have been commanded by a Commander and a capital ship- battlehips and air craft carriers- were surely all commanded by Captains. In one of the final chapters of the book the Cruiser Maya is misclassed as a destroyer (even though she was properly classed as a cruiser pages earlier). Destroyers generally had names ending in... "Kaze" (wind)- as in Hayakaze (Fast Wind or Early Wind, depending on the character for "hayai") or ... "Shio" (current)- as in Tsuyoshio (Strong Current). These error or ty

NOT WHAT I EXPECTED -- BUT A PLEASANT SURPRISE NEVERTHELESS

IN A NUTSHELL: A TRUE STORY ABOUT THE MIND SET OF A DESPERATE JAPAN The book is a short, easy, and an interesting read for most people acquainted with naval construction and operations. It is broken into two distinct parts; the construction of the ship [under a cloak of extreme secrecy], and its short life as one of a class of two, of the most extreme battleship designs ever constructed. Both the designs of the ships and the mindset of the navy that ordered them are interwoven and born of a need to somehow prevail over a greatly superior adversary. In that light, this book is fascinating as it reveals this rather empirically. In reading "Battleship Musashi", I felt and empathized with the Japanese of the era by witnessing [through the written accounts] some of the motivations and experiences of the Japanese people during the period. Many of the goals that were to be achieved with this new class of vessel embodied the rather unique hopes and ideas that the Japanese people had at the time, compared to westerners. This book stresses these cultural themes in the context of the construction and destruction of an incredible symbol of Japanese Imperial power. Though I would have preferred reading more detailed accounts of the design criteria and ship operations, it was a fast and worthwhile read. In the end, the invincible Battleship Musashi shared the same fate as the rest of the Imperial Japanese Empire, and this book is a requiem to both.

An Interesting, if Nearly Irrelevant, Chapter of WWII in the Pacific

This is a short book that chronicles the amazing construction and the practically useless battle experience of the 2nd Yamato class battleship, the HIJMS Musashi. It is basically split up into two quite distinct sections. The first two thirds or so of the book is concerned with the construction of the Musashi in the Nagasaki shipyards and is told from the point of view of the senior engineers and shipyard leadership, and their Navy overseers. The story of the Musashi's construction and launch is rather amazing, especially because of the security paranoia of the Japanese during the late '30's. What struck me as an engineer in industry was just how familiar the organization and methods of the Nagasaki shipyard design offices were back then, with the notable exception that workers who made mistakes or gossiped about their job simply "disappeared" of course. How the engineers and the Japanese Navy managed to upgrade the Nagasaki facilities to build and launch the Musashi, to prevent it from careening across Nagasaki bay and beaching itself on the nearby opposite shore, and keep the construction and launching a complete secret even though it took place in the heart of major city made for some pretty absorbing reading at times. It's also filled with interesting little facts, such as the explanation of how the caliber of a battleship's main gun determines its necessary width. Based on this the Japanese planned to beat American battleships by mounting 9 x 18.1 inch guns on the Musashi and Yamato, while the need to traverse the Panama Canal limited their American counterparts to 9 x 16 inch guns. The last third of the book was a little less strong, following the Musashi along its completely undistinguished operational career and told from the viewpoint of no one in particular. Nonetheless you get a clear picture of the highly paradoxical and at times anachronistic thinking of the Imperial Japanese Navy during WWII, a fighting force that is normally cited for being extremely efficient, effective, and innovative. Yet the nation that showed the world how to fight with aircraft carriers in the first part of the war showed none of these qualities when it came to using their giant super-battleships, ships made useless by their own early operational innovations. For the majority of the war the Yamato and Musashi sat in Truk Lagoon and then Palau doing not much of anything. Officially they were waiting for a giant decisive gun battle with the U.S. Navy, but other than occasionally running away from air raids or briefly chasing false leads about the location of the U.S. Fleet they pretty much sat around, trying not to waste fuel. At one point the Musashi was even used as a freighter with bombs, fuel and equipment lashed to the deck, making it surely their worst designed freighter in history. This unsurprisingly came to nothing however as heavy seas started moving the cargo and it had to be thrown overboard. Nearing a couple years of service in the midst of th

Battleship Musashi, a book with the spirit of Musashi

History is presented in many forms. I still remember my 6th grade history class test, with a list of dates on the right, and historical events on the left. My task was to draw lines between the two. I succeeded in drawing the lines, but I didn't make the connection. Battleship Musashi transends a "list of dates"; launch, displacement, number of guns (it's all there too). I am presented with the flesh and blood of the ship and it's crew, in a way that I have not experienced before from historical essays. The writer shows me the minds of the people and government involved with the ship, and though I know the final outcome for Musashi, I was rivited to the account.In my opinion, this is a must-read book for those interested in history, Japan, political science, or simply want a good spy story to curl up with!