Battleships - Japan: Books - Yamato and Musashi

The Japanese Battleship Musashi (Super Drawings in 3D)

The "Musashi" was built by the Mitsubishi shipyard in Nagasaki and entered service with the Japanese Navy in 1942. This book in the "Super Drawings in 3D" series describes the design, armament and career of this very heavily armed Japanese battleship, sister ship to the "Yamato".

A volume in the Super Drawings in 3D Series. With ground-breaking 3D imagery, each corner, angle, and dimension of the ship is viewable.
With various close-up views, and each 3D image based on actual technical scale drawings and photographs, this is an exceptional reference tool.
Information on the design, development and combat history of the vessel is also included, as well as numerous photographs and scale drawings.

The Battleships Yamato & Musashi : Selected Photos from the Archives of the Kure Maritime Museum

Selected photos from the archives of the Kure Maritime Museum showing the battleships Yamato and Musashi used by the Japanese Navy.

Originally published in Japan in 2005, each album in The Japanese Naval Warship photo album series contains official photographs taken by the Kure Maritime Museum, as well as those taken by private individuals. These pictorial records document the main types of Japanese vessels, from battleships to submarines, based on the best images from Shizuo Fukui, a former Imperial Japanese Navy commander and technician.

These photos include the ones Fukui began collecting as a young boy and continued after he worked as a naval shipbuilder, and those that he was given in order to complete a photographic history of the Imperial Japanese Navy's ships, which include those gathered by Nagamura Kiyoshi, a shipbuilder who proactively collected photos, and the collection of machinist Amari Yoshiyuki. These images are especially valuable because of the massive destruction of official documents at the end of the war.

Yamato - Flagship of the Japanese Imperial Navy

The Yamato and her sistership Musashi represented the ultimate development in the battleship during the Second World War and were the heaviest and most powerfully armed battleships ever constructed.
Named after the Yamato Province, Yamato was designed to counter the numerically superior fleet of the US Navy.
Built amongst a shroud of secrecy and deception - and commissioned shortly after the outbreak of the war in the Pacific - she was present at a number of engagements, including the Battle of Midway and the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

Despite having been designed to engage and sink enemy surface vessels, the Yamato would only fire her unrivalled 18.1-inch guns at an enemy surface target on one occasion in October 1944 during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
In the final months of the war, as kamikaze aircraft targeted American landing fleets off Okinawa, the Yamato embarked on a one-way mission of ultimate sacrifice. In a last desperate roll of the dice in an attempt to wreak havoc on the landing forces around Okinawa, the last stepping stone prior to an invasion of the Japanese home islands, the Yamato finally succumbed to a mass aerial attack by carrier-based bombers and torpedo bombers.

Despite being antiquated products of war from the moment of their construction, the Yamato and Musashi enjoy an iconic figure of Japanese might in mainstream consciousness such as films and anime.

Battleship Yamato : Of War, Beauty and Irony

The battleship Yamato, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, was the most powerful warship of World War II and represented the climax, as it were, of the Japanese warrior traditions of the samurai - the ideals of honour, discipline, and self-sacrificethat had immemorially ennobled the Japanese national consciousness.
Stoically poised for battle in the spring of 1945 - when even Japan's last desperate technique of arms, the kamikaze, was running short - Yamato arose as the last magnificent arrow in the imperial quiver of Emperor Hirohito.

Here, Jan Morris not only tells the dramatic story of the magnificent ship itself - from secret wartime launch to futile sacrifice at Okinawa - but, more fundamentally, interprets the ship as an allegorical figure of war itself, in its splendour and its squalor, its heroism and its waste.
Drawing on rich naval history and rhapsodic metaphors from international music and art, "Battleship Yamato" is a work of grand ironic elegy.

Battleships Yamato and Musashi

Equipped with the largest guns and heaviest armour and with the greatest displacement of any ship ever built, the Yamato proved to be a formidable opponent to the US Pacific Fleet in the Second World War.
The wreck of Musashi has been recently discovered to great excitement in Japan, renewing interest in these iconic warships.

The book contains a full description of the design and construction of the battleship including wartime modifications, and a career history followed by a substantial pictorial section with rare onboard views of Yamato and her sister ship Musashi, a comprehensive portfolio of more than 1,020 perspective line artworks, 350 colour 3D views, and 30 photographs.

Janusz Skulski's anatomies of three renowned ships of the 20th century Japanese navy are among the most comprehensive of the Anatomy series with hundreds of meticulously researched drawings of the ships.
Since their first publication he has continued to research the ships and has now produced a more definitive anatomy than was possible then. He has teamed up with 3D artist Stefan Draminksi who produces superb realistic renditions of the ships that bring a whole new level of detail to the portraits of the ships.

This new editions is a genuine `Super Anatomy' containing the most detailed renditions of these ships ever seen.

Yamato Class Battleships (Ship Craft)

The Yamato class battleships of the Imperial Japanese Navy were the largest warships of the Second World War and the largest battleships ever constructed, displacing 78,800 tonnes. They also carried the largest naval artillery ever fitted to a warship - 18in guns.
Neither Yamato nor her sistership Musashi made much impact on the War. Musashi was sunk during the battle of Leyte Gulf while Yamato, deployed in a deliberate suicide attack on Allied forces at the battle of Okinawa, was finally sunk by US carrier-based aircraft; Not 300 of her 3,330 crew survived.

The 'ShipCraft' series provides in-depth information about building and modifying model kits of famous warship types. Lavishly illustrated, each book takes the modeller through a brief history of the subject class, then moves to an extensive photographic survey of either a high-quality model or a surviving example of the ship.

Hints on building the model, and on modifying and improving the basic kit, are followed by a section on paint schemes and camouflage, featuring numerous colour profiles and highly-detailed line drawings. The strengths and weaknesses of available kits of the ships are reviewed, and the book concludes with a section on research references - books, monographs, large-scale plans and relevant websites.

US Navy Carrier Aircraft vs IJN Yamato Class Battleships - Pacific Theatre 1944-45 (Osprey)

As the Pacific War approached a crescendo, the clashes between swarming US Navy carrier aircraft, and the gigantic Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) Yamato-class battleships became symbolic of the fortunes of the two nations. They also served as a metaphor for the profound changes in naval technology and doctrine that the war had brought about.

The two opposing forces were the most powerful of their kind - the Japanese Yamato and Musashi were the biggest most heavily armored and armed battleships ever built, while US carrier aviation had evolved into a well-oiled, war-winning machine.

With detailed analysis of the technical features of the opposing war machines and a gripping account of the fighting itself, this vividly illustrated work presents views from the cockpits of US Navy Divebombers, and down the sights of IJN anti-aircraft guns, during two of the most dramatic naval engagements ever fought.

Contents: Introduction - Chronology - Design and Development - Technical Specifications - The Strategic Situation - The Combatants - Combat - Statistics and Analysis - Aftermath - Further Reading.