She engaged the American forces invading the Philippines during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.Īs the war continued, and Japan started losing naval power in the Pacific, they sent Yamato in one last mission. While it was armed with the largest guns on a warship, the only time Yamato fired her main guns at enemy surface targets was in October 1944.

Laid down in 1937 and formally commissioned a week after the Pearl harbor attack in 1941, Yamato served as the flagship of the Combined Fleet. The Japanese constructed the ship to act as a counter to the numerically superior battleship fleet of the US. They were the largest guns ever mounted on a warship. Yamato and her sister ship, Musashi were the heaviest and most powerfully armed battleships ever constructed.įor info, Yamato weighed 72,800 tons at full load and armed with nine 46cm (18.1inches) type 94 main guns.

Yamato was the lead ship of the battleships class built for the Imperial Japanese Navy before World War II. Japan had the idea of sacrificing The Yamato by placing it to act as an unsinkable gun emplacement.

Japanese naval ship armada