The country had become an industrial power almost overnight, had beaten Russia in a war at a time when no one thought an Asian nation could compete with a European country. To understand what these ships represented, you have to appreciate the fantastic tension surrounding Japan during the buildup to WWII. The Musashi was the second, and wound up being the last, of the Yamato class of battleships, oceanic fortresses dreamed up in the 1930s to give Japan ascendancy at sea. The guns and their huge turrets were constructed in the arsenal at Kure, near Hiroshima before they could be installed on the Musashi, the Japanese Navy had to build a second ship just to transport them to Nagasaki, where the behemoth was being built. Its nine 18.1-inch guns, the largest caliber ever mounted on a ship, were designed to fire 3,000-pound shells at a range of more than 26 miles. It was, and remains, one of the largest battleships ever launched - 70,000 tons of water displaced, with a crew of more than two thousand. To call Musashi massive, actually, doesn’t begin to do it justice. Until last week, when the billionaire Paul Allen began tweeting images of deep-sea wreckage - a coral-encrusted anchor, a green valve hairy with algae - the annals of vanished ships contained no entry more mysterious than that of the Musashi, a massive Japanese battleship sunk off the Philippines toward the end of World War II. A Brief History of the Super Battleship Musashi or, the Best-Laid 70,000-Ton Warships Often Go Awry
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