Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

The Musashi’s fate was an ill omen for the Yamato. The two behemoths were twin sisters, built on identical lines. Both had been advertised as unsinkable. Japan had poured immense reserves of money, manpower, raw materials, and engineering expertise into their design and construction. An officer in the naval ministry had estimated that for the cost of both superbattleships, the Japanese navy could have built 2,000 state-of-the-art fighter planes and trained top-flight pilots to fly them.57 The program had required major expansions of the two shipyards where they were born, at Nagasaki (Musashi) and Kure (Yamato). Their 2,700-man crews were elite, handpicked from among the navy’s top performers at every level of the chain of command, from skippers to the humblest ordinary seamen. They were the sister-queens of the fleet, whose symbolic importance far surpassed their actual value as weapons. Both had served as flagships to commanders in chief of the Combined Fleet; Ugaki had previously been billeted in both ships as chief of staff to the late Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. With his expert eye, Ugaki did not need a full report to know that nearly all of the Musashi’s available starboard “pumping in” compartments had already been flooded, so there was little more that could be done to correct the list.