Good thread...keeps getting better. I should have known: spaceship freaks also love navy ships!
Yep, for sure my ship's the Musashi. Not as famous as Yamato, which, for some reason that's always bugged me, is usually mistaken for an imaginary ship called "Yamamoto." (Makes me feel like that guy in the movie version of Hunt for Red October, exasperatedly explaining for the 100th time, "Pavarotti is a tenor, Paganini was a composer...")
I should check a chart...it's close enough to "Bondoc point" (original Boondocks, anyone?) so that maybe it could be visited by Dr. Ballard...but then, to the east of the Philippines is some of the deepest waters on the earth.
When I was living in Japan as a teenager, I ordered a huge stack of back issues of Maru Special, and 20 years later, still have a shelf full of them. TONS of black and white photos. And indeed Japanese ships in WWII looked...weird. But as usual, that's why I liked them so. And their stories were so interesting and tragic!
- Fuso...blew up spectacularly in what was possibly the last major surface action of the war, at Surigao strait (if you don't count Leyte Gulf which happened, like, the next day). Her sister ship, Yamashiro, continued on toward a long line of old US battlewagons--many refloated after being sunk at Pearl Harbor in 1941--who "crossed her T" and reduced her to scrap in no time.
- US Submarine commander Sam Dealey would signal the other sailors that he'd spotted a warship through the 'scope by saying "I see a Pagoda!"
- Hood vs. Bismarck... Well, of course HMS Hood was designed to be big and fast, but not to slug it out with an equal-length battleship. A real pity she blew up. And Bismarck's fate was especially terrible, in that the British didn't stick around to pick up many survivors, partially because of U-Boat fears, and perhaps also out of a sense of justice for the loss of the Hood. The book by Ludovic Kennedy, is one of the best books out there.
- Shinano (sister to Yamato and Musashi, although converted to a carrier) wasn't quite finished when it got hit by that submarine torpedo. I recall that damage control efforts didn't suffice, when, for instance, the packing that usually seals the gaps between conduits and bulkheads had not yet been installed. So water, once introduced by the hole in the hull, couldn't be sealed off. But by then the IJN air arm had been reduced to a ghost of its former self, and what good is a supercarrier if you've not got the trained pilots needed to fight effectively? Maybe it was best sunk quickly.
Enuf blather. Ciao-
