I agree, they are beautiful ships.
I always wondered what the Yamato could have done if it had been brought to Guadalcanal early in that conflict.
It would have fought alone. It would have eaten up the fuel for the rest of the fleet.
But...Yamato versus South Dakota and North Carolina in a slugfest? Might be pretty interesting.
Very poorly. Yamato initially had only 24 antiaircraft guns, 25mm and mounted mostly amidships. She would have been easy meat for Marine and Army Air Force aviation, let alone the Navy’s bombers. Lacking serious air defense, she would have been sent to the bottom in short order by whoever’s air power found her first. Especially after American air power expressed their extreme displeasure with the IJN and sank 4 carriers plus destroyed 332 of their aircraft at Midway.
The Japanese eventually figured out this was a problem and updated the AA armaments to a total of 162 25mm guns, but that wasn’t done until the big overhaul of 44-45. She also didn’t get aircraft search radar or gunnery control radar until this overhaul - without which, again, she would have been easy prey for aircraft and could not engage beyond visual range or at night without extreme difficulty, something American battleships like the South Dakotas could do from day one of the war.
The only way that Yamato would have had a decisive advantage is in a pure daylight, visual range gunfight with low cloud cover preventing air power from coming by to say hello. She wouldn’t have been good at shore bombardment either because someone forgot to make sufficient quantities of rounds suitable for shore bombardment, which is why she spent most of the war at Truk. Well, that and the fact that she drank more fuel than all her escorts combined plus a nice margin over that and the Japanese weren’t flush with fuel even before Pearl Harbor.