Posted on 03/04/2015 6:14:40 AM PST by C19fan
Microsoft's co-founder has used his own submarine to find the wreck of the Japanese Navy's biggest warship - which has lain undiscovered at the bottom of the ocean for the past 70 years. Paul Allen revealed his amazing discovery to the world on Tuesday, by posting a photo to Twitter of the World War II battleship Musashi's rusty bow, which bore the Japanese empire's Chrysanthemum seal. The Musashi - which, along with its sister ship Yamato, was the heaviest and most powerfully armed battleship ever constructed - was sunk by the U.S. Navy in 1944, taking with it more than 1,000 crew members. But despite numerous eyewitness accounts, its exact location had remained a mystery - until now.
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How would it hold up against a modernized flying submarine-battleship ATRAGON?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atragon
Musashi was hit by at least 17 bombs and 19 torpedos.
Its not my opinion. I’ve forgotten now the source, perhaps it was Garzke and Dulin’s definitive work, but the writer posited (with a detailed explanation) that the Mitsubishi yard was superior to the Kure naval yard, in the skill of its workforce and construction techniques.
There’s a very good book on the battle that finally turned back the Japanese Center Force, “The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors”. A tiny force of jeep carriers and destroyers beat back Kurita’s fleet. Well worth reading.
MUSASHI might have survived the aerial onslaught if she had put up a screen of grape. They had grape rounds for her 18” guns, but her Commander refused to fire them as he was afraid the rifling in the bores would be damaged.
Very interesting.
Thanks for posting.
Hence my tagline...
Kure still turns out the gunboats and lesser naval craft; Nagasaki the more high tech stuff. So I stand corrected.
However, I still think the nature of the missions, their fuel and their crew size also played a large role.
Thanks for posting this.
I agree. It also may be that the Musashi had the better trained crew, as they were some. She certainly had a great damage control team by IJN standards.
meant to say... as they were somewhat self conscious about their inferior status in the fleet to that of the Yamato. Probably worked harder to compensate.
FMCDH(BITS)
Yes, I’m sure quality of crew was as much a factor as quantity of the crew. By the time the Battle of Okinawa rolled around, the survival rate for Japanese naval crews in combat was only slightly better than that of kamikaze pilots.
Those were the so-called “beehive” rounds?
It occurred to me that the pictures coming from this discovery are going to be really interesting - an upright, intact japanese battleship wreck has never been found before. Battleships tend to upend to to topside armor.
I thought 1.6 miles was a little deep that close to land.
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