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By Root 1082 0

’s, launched against American ships in the anchorage. A handful inflicted damage, pinpricks by comparison with the aerial onslaught. Just once, in the first week of the campaign, did the Imperial Navy’s surface forces attempt to join the battle. On the evening of 6 April off Kyushu, the U.S. submarine Threadfin reported a sighting of two large warships and eight destroyers, beyond torpedo range and heading south. By this stage of the war, Magic intercepts were diminishing. Close to home, whenever possible the Japanese communicated by landline rather than radio. Yet it was not hard to guess where this force was probably heading. At 0815 on 7 April, a reconnaissance aircraft from Essex spotted the Japanese squadron again, this time heading west across the East China Sea. It was composed of the great battleship Yamato, undistinguished veteran of Leyte Gulf, with an accompanying cruiser. It seemed overwhelmingly likely that the enemy intended to turn south in time to approach Okinawa at first light next day.

Through the next four hours, the force was tracked. At 1017, as expected, it turned south. At first, Spruance proposed to hold back his carrier aircraft to maintain their kamikaze watch, and dispatch American battleships to deal with Yamato—a strange, possibly romantic notion, never explained. Carrier commander Marc Mitscher successfully argued, however, that the Japanese squadron should be targeted by his strike aircraft, even at the cost of weakening the CAP over the fleet. Soon after 1000, the first of 280 planes took off from the flight decks of Mitscher’s Task Force 58: San Jacinto, Bennington, Hornet, Belleau Wood, Essex, Bataan, Bunker Hill, Cabot and Hancock. There were 132 fighters, 50 bombers, 98 torpedo-carriers, launched in successive waves. Fifty-three planes from Hancock lost their way, and did not attack. Nonetheless, the Americans were able to send more planes to address the Yamato group than the Japanese had deployed against Pearl Harbor. “We looked like a giant crop of blackbirds hunting for Farmer Ito’s granary,” said Lt. Thaddeus Coleman of Essex. The sky was murky—flying conditions were so poor that on Kyushu, kamikaze operations had been cancelled for the day. At 1220, after a difficult flight through rain squalls, the American air fleet found the Yamato group. “Sugar Baker Two Charlies,” the air group commander called to Bennington’s Helldivers as he surveyed the pattern of fast-moving ships below, “you take the big boy.”

Below them lay the largest fighting vessel in the Japanese navy and the world, sister ship of Musashi, sunk at Leyte Gulf. “We took a chance and launched766 where we would be if we were the Yamato,” wrote Mitscher’s chief of staff, Commodore Arleigh Burke. “The Yamato thought the same thing—she was there.” The battleship displaced 72,000 tons and was protected by armour up to two feet thick. She was served by a crew of more than 3,000 men, boasted a main armament of nine 18.1-inch guns, and possessed as much relevance to the last year of the Second World War as Nelson’s Victory. Now flying the flag of Vice-Admiral Seiichi Ito, fifty-four-year-old commander of 2nd Fleet, and accompanied by the cruiser Yahagi, the huge ship had been dispatched to Okinawa on the most ambitious kamikaze mission of all. The ship was not intended to return, even in the implausible event that it survived the attentions of the enemy. Her orders demanded that she should beach herself after doing her worst to the American fleet, landing surviving crew to join the defenders ashore. Her sailors had been instructed to sharpen bayonets, in anticipation of an infantry role. The squadron was denied air cover, on the grounds that every plane was needed to support kamikaze operations.

The men aboard Yamato shared none of their commanders’ fantasies. Though Ito and his senior officers accepted their fate in the spirit of samurai, they were privately disdainful of the waste of ships and lives. In an unusual moment of mercy before the ship sailed, fifty newly embarked cadets, fresh from the naval academy, were sent