I’d hate to be in A turret when B turret fired forward.
I suppose that was the same in most battleships, but you’d think A turret crew would be bleeding from the ears if B fired over them.
Not only battleships. A former teacher was ex Royal Navy. Though nominally a Navigation Officer He was once in the A turret of either Hood or Barham when B turret let loose overtop… according to this man it was a couple days before ears regained some sense of what hearing was supposed to be, despite ear protectors and heavy flash-over gear.
Going by his report, I’d nae wish to be in a turret when the thing let loose, let alone when the next turret fired it’s weapons.
Seeing that magnificent scale model, I can only think that that ship was truly the last of it’s Kind. Yes, others went on and exist today, though they barely match the Yamato, despite their awesome magnificence. Those remaining Battleships are surely the last such ships to exist. I have to say I’m impressed.
Regards, Uyraell.
Off topic, but that’s the joy of this forum.
First time I realised the difference between being at the butt and somewhere forward of the breech was sitting in a car as a kid when someone fired a .243 or .270 over the roof. Gave me a whole new appreciation of acoustics, and there was a car roof between me and the muzzle, even if the car windows were open.
I’ve often wondered what it was like for the hearing of troops in battle when, for example, riflemen’s weapon pits are forward of machine guns, or in contacts and ambushes where you’re a few feet forward of the muzzle of the bloke beside you. It must destroy hearing for a while afterwards, which in some circumstances must leave you prey to approaching enemy you can’t hear.
http://ww2incolor.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7077&highlight=Yamato+kure
I already have a thread for Kure 
Domo Arigato, Schmidt 
Most enjoyable.
Regards, Uyraell.
Welcome!
Gunfire overhead isn’t actually that loud - you get the whole crack-bang thing, but it isn’t too bad. Lots of guys together firing live when you have no ear defence on, however, is LOUD. I’ve done that on a Section in Defence range at night, where half the section lost their ear defence on the way in. One guy had a slight ringing in his ears for a few days, and we were all a bit fuzzy for a few hours. That was about it - after firing off as much 7.62 and 5.56 as we could physically carry in.
Ear defence? What’s that? Ear muffs or something? In my day, in a cruel and brutal era before occupational health and safety had been invented, we were lucky to be issued with ears.
My recollection is that being forward of fire from 7.62 muzzles, not to mention .50 cal, was not an aid to hearing when the noise stopped, and that the longer and closer the exposure to fire the longer the time for recovery.
However, the speculation in my earlier post was based on the reality of combat rather than the much more regulated and carefully arranged positions in exercises. For example, in a contact or ambush you might find yourself with someone else’s muzzle a couple of feet behind and beside your head and firing furiously.
It seems that hearing damage is a serious problem in modern warfare, and that hearing protection doesn’t help too much in the field. As a tinnitus sufferer myself, I wouldn’t wish it on others.
Protect Your Ears, Not Just Mom AdviceStars and Stripes | March 11, 2008
Roadside bomb blasts seen as chief culprit in audio disabilities
SAN DIEGO – Many soldiers and Marines caught in roadside bombings and firefights in Iraq and Afghanistan are coming home with permanent hearing loss and ringing in their ears, prompting the military to redouble its efforts to protect the troops from noise.
Hearing damage is the No. 1 disability in the war on terror, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, and some experts say the true toll could take decades to become clear. Nearly 70,000 of the more than 1.3 million troops who have served in the two war zones are collecting disability for tinnitus, a potentially debilitating ringing in the ears, and more than 58,000 are on disability for hearing loss, the VA said.
“The numbers are staggering,” said Theresa Schulz, a former audiologist with the Air Force, past president of the National Hearing Conservation Association and author of a 2004 report titled “Troops Return With Alarming Rates of Hearing Loss.”
One major explanation given is the insurgency’s use of a fearsome weapon the Pentagon did not fully anticipate: powerful roadside bombs. Their blasts cause violent changes in air pressure that can rupture the eardrum and break bones inside the ear.
Also, much of the fighting consists of ambushes, bombings and firefights, which come suddenly and unexpectedly, giving soldiers no time to use their military-issued hearing protection.
“They can’t say, ‘Wait a minute, let me put my earplugs in,’” said Dr. Michael E. Hoffer, a Navy captain and one of the country’s leading inner-ear specialists. “They are in the fight of their lives.”
In addition, some servicemen on patrol refuse to wear earplugs for fear of dulling their senses and missing sounds that can make the difference between life and death, Hoffer and others said.
Others were not given earplugs or did not take them along when they were sent into the war zone. And some Marines weren’t told how to use their specialized earplugs and inserted them incorrectly.
Hearing damage has been a battlefield risk ever since the introduction of explosives and artillery, and the U.S. military recognized it in Iraq and Afghanistan and issued earplugs early on.
But the sheer number of injuries and their nature – particularly the high incidence of tinnitus – came as a surprise to military medical specialists and outside experts.
The military has responded over the past three years with better and easier-to-use earplugs, greater efforts to educate troops about protecting their hearing, and more testing in the war zone to detect ear injuries.
I once heard a WWII Australian artilleryman, who served 25 pdrs in New Guinea, say that everyone he served with had tinnitus or other hearing problems, and they were all well behind the muzzle.
First, as some Japanese military said before the war, the Yamato was a waste of resources.
Instead they could have built a few more carriers before the war.
Now about noise. in 'Pacific War Diary" Fahey, a seaman on the U.S.S. Montpelier, a light Cleveland class cruiser, talked about the quad 40s above the 5 inch DP turrets. I bet most of the lost alot of their hearing.
Deaf
Yamato was an amazing enough machine of war for me to paint. Stunning lines - not even Darth Vader possessed a more sinister, yet beautiful, flagship.
- Ron Cole
In real the Japanese plain is to engage US fleets with light forces (torpedo boat, submarine and airplane from aircraft carrier) and then, when light forces decimate US fleet resolve the war with a decisive battle with surface fleets. They know that US can put in war a greater number of ships than Japan and a direct battle is a suicide so they put a lot of efforts in creation of technologic superior light forces (for example Type 93 torpedo, the most avdanced torpedo of world) to use against only military ships. The US Navy Orange War Plan also at the start thinks only about a series of battle in main islands and then a major battle with giant battleships, like Yamato class, and aircraft carriers. After Pearl Harbor, where Japanese demonstrate that battleships are useless against airplanes, the Orange Plan was changed, focusing on using submarine, airplane and torpedo boat for hunting down commercial transport and with aircraft as main ships in surface battle and battleship mainly used as mobile battery against coastal defense. Japanese fail to understand that commercial routes are vital for war economy and don’t create a defence net of their transport because they are still focused on the “great battle” that never happened. The effect on Japanese industry of this choice is well-know, for example battleships from Yamato class don’t have the gas to fight. Battleship born already outclassed by aircraft carrier in WWII, they are neeeded only as mobile battery against coastal defense in amphibious assault.
Yamato anyway is not soo good: his giant guns at the end has the same range of smaller guns of Iowa battleship, but Iowa guns were more accurate.
In any case, before start of WWII some theorist already said that the era of gun-fighting between battleship is ceased. The first ship sunked by air torpedo is a Turkish ship in 1915. Dive-bomber and torpedo bomber can easily sink a ship without cover from airplanes, and it was demonstrate for example by Billy Mitchell in 1921 with Project-B.
I’ve seldom seen so much misinformation in a single thread.
The Yamato’s main battery was 18.1 inch rifles, not 19 inch. Unlike most battleship guns of the day, it was not practical to reline the Yamato’s guns, and after firing the equivalent of about 150 full power rounds, new barrels had to be installed. Unfortunately for the Japanese, they never manufactured any spare 18.1 inch barrels. The Yamato had nine barrels, the Musashi had nine, and the Shinano was supposed to get nine barrels, but was converted to a aircraft depot ship instead. So there were only the nine barrels that belonged to the Shinano for spares, and two of these were used in ballistics experiments by the Japanese. The seven remaining 18.1 inch barrels were destroyed or captured at the end of the war, neither the Yamato or Musashi ever had any replacement barrels.
Yamato’s guns still out ranged the 16 inch guns of the Iowa class battleships, but the super heavy 16 inch shell fired by the Iowa class had nearly the same penetration performance of the larger 18.1 inch guns. And the Iowa class had far better fire control systems than the Yamato. Tests showed that the Iowa class could maneuver radically while still retaining a valid firing solution for her own guns; in any contest between an Iowa class ship and Yamato, this alone would have doomed the Yamato. At Samar, the Yamato demonstrated a rather mediocre performance and proved her fire control arrangement to be deficient.
The issue of Yamato’s fuel state on her last mission is in doubt. Many sources claim she had only enough fuel to reach Okinawa, but Russell Spurr, a British historian who knew several of the Japanese involved, said in his book, “A Glorious Way to Die”, that the officers commanding the fuel depot where Yamato fueled before her last mission, decided to give her substantially more fuel than their orders authorized. They did this by tapping the fuel in the bottom of empty storage fuel storage tanks that was (technically) not on their books. It was necessary to have men climb down into the tanks with portable pumps to reach the fuel which was a very dangerous exercise, but that’s what they did.
As for the proportion the world’s oil produced by the NEI in 1940, as I’ve posted in another thread, it was roughly 2.8 %. Mexico produced significantly more oil in 1940 than the NEI.
War Plan Orange was not changed, it was abandoned in 1939, and replaced by the Rainbow One through Five series of war plans. Rainbow Five, the war plan ultimately adopted called for the USN to stand on the defensive in the Pacific until the threat of Germany was decisively defeated. As pointed out by Edward S. Miller in his book, “War Plan Orange”, many of the provisions which had appeared in the old War Plan Orange series over the years, were eventually resurrected in the US Navy’s Pacific War strategy. But the “Decisive Battle” doctrine that was, oddly enough, a feature of both the IJN’s and USN’s early war plans was, at least for the USN , transmuted into a series of attritional battles that progressively bled the Japanese Navy to the point that it was so anemic that when the decisive battle did occur in the Philippine Sea in 1944, the IJN had no chance of prevailing.
Yamato is also synonomous with ‘Japan’ or ‘Japanese’, being derived from the the Yamato people who became the dominant ethnic group in ancient Japan.
The battleship, however, appears to have been named after (ancient) Yamato Province in Japan to celebrate the emergence of the Yamato people and the Yamato Court as the ‘true’ essence of Japan.
I don’t think so.
The Yamato was engaged in training during the Philippines campaign, which ended with surrender on 8 May 1942.
The Yamato didn’t go anywhere near the Philippines during that campaign. It wasn’t declared operational until 27 May 1942. http://www.combinedfleet.com/yamato.htm
Then maybe the Musashi was in the Philippines? But responsible for conquering? I don’t think any one ship could say that.
Deaf
The Musashi did not become fully operational until December, 1942. Until that time she was engaged in trials, training, and final fitting out in Japan’s Inland Sea. Musashi’s first operational assignment was in February, 1943, when she relieved the Yamato as Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet flagship at Truk. Neither Yamato nor Musashi had anything to do with the conquest of the Philippines.
Although both, primarily Musashi, had something to do with Japan’s loss of the Philippines.
It was sunk there in October 1944, by American carrier planes.
Well, yes, in a rather round about way.
The inability of either ship to effectively counter the American offensive at Leyte Gulf, especially given the effort, resources, and hope the Japanese had invested in the class, could be considered a factor in the loss of the Philippines. But in reality, it’s difficult to see how any force available to the Japanese in late 1944, could have stemmed the wave of destruction that was beginning to fall on the pathetic remnants of the Japanese Empire.
I’d define it as a ship designed for combat against other naval vessels, as distinct from armed merchantmen etc with modest armament for (usually futile) self-defence purposes.
I’d class them as ships lost in war.
In many respects, the latter class is more tragic as the crew and passengers were completely, or if armed with a modest gun or two, effectively defenceless against a warship.
The most tragic were the POWs inadvertently killed when US subs sank unmarked Japanese transports taking survivors of the Burma Railway to Japan to work them to death in the coalmines and other war industries.
As with most data concerning the Yamato, these numbers are disputed. I have seen sources listing the death toll among Yamato’s crew as being from 2,032 to 3,063. The total of 3,665 is almost certainly too high. The Yamato’s crew, as of April 6, 1945, was cited as exactly 3,332 in Russell Spurr’s book, “A Glorious Way to Die” (page 80), according to Japanese pay records. Two hundred seventy-nine crewmen from Yamato were rescued by her escorts. Before her final mission, numbers of men were sent ashore; her aircraft pilots and aircraft maintenance crews, for example, and about 50 officer cadets assigned to the ship, but the numbers in these records are imprecise at best.
Most informed estimates put Yamato’s death toll somewhere between 2,800 and 3,000, Almost 1,200 additional Japanese crewmen and officers died aboard Yamato’s escorts; the light cruiser Yahagi and four destroyers that were sunk, as well as casualties aboard four other destroyers that were damaged but survived to return to Japan.