Japanese battleship Yamato
Marker: recorded wreck position (Date not recorded).
Key facts
| Name | Japanese battleship Yamato | Wikidata label |
|---|---|---|
| Ship type | battleship, super battleship | Wikidata P31 instance of |
| Cause of loss | War action | Keyword match in English Wikipedia lead sentence |
| Nationality / flag | Empire of Japan | Wikidata P8047 country of registry |
| Operator | Imperial Japanese Navy | Wikidata P137 operator |
| Conflict | World War II | Wikidata P607 conflict |
| Sea / ocean | East China Sea | Natural Earth marine areas (public domain), point-in-polygon |
| Position | 30.3667, 128.0667 | Wikidata P625 coordinate location (CC0) |
About the wreck
Yamato (Japanese: 大和; named after the ancient Yamato Province) was the lead ship of her class of battleships built for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) shortly before World War II. She and her sister ship, Musashi, were the heaviest and most powerfully armed battleships ever constructed, displacing nearly 72,000 tonnes (71,000 long tons) at full load and armed with nine 46 cm (18.1 in) Type 94 main guns, which were the largest guns ever mounted on a warship.
Yamato was designed to counter the numerically superior battleship fleet of the United States, Japan's main rival in the Pacific. She was laid down in 1937 and formally commissioned a week after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Throughout 1942, she served as the flagship of the Combined Fleet, and in June 1942 Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto directed the fleet from her bridge during the Battle of Midway, a disastrous defeat for Japan. Musashi took over as the Combined Fleet flagship in early 1943, and Yamato spent the rest of the year moving between the major Japanese naval bases of Truk and Kure in response to American threats.
Diving & visiting
Because of often confused circumstances and incomplete information regarding their sinkings, it took until 2019 to discover and identify most wrecks of Japanese capital ships lost in World War II. Drawing on US wartime records, an expedition to the East China Sea in 1982 produced some results, but the wreckage discovered could not be clearly identified. A second expedition returned to the site two years later, and the team's photographic and video records were later confirmed by one of the battleship's designers, Shigeru Makino, to show the Yamato's last resting place.
Location
- Recorded position: 30.3667, 128.0667 (Wikidata P625 coordinate location (CC0); may be approximate)
- Sea / ocean: East China Sea
Wreck positions on this site are for interest only and are not for navigation. Many wrecks are war graves or legally protected: never disturb human remains or remove artefacts, and check local law before diving.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Japanese battleship Yamato (revision 1380750022), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: excerpted from the article lead section and section(s) “Wreck discovery”; condensed by selecting paragraphs and trimming at sentence boundaries; citations and formatting removed. No text added. This excerpt is available under the same licence.
Wreck facts from Wikidata (CC0).
Nearby wrecks
- USS Pollack 164 km
- USS Sea Fox 178 km
Other wrecks of the World War II
- HMS Thetis 1918
- Admiral Graf Spee 1939
- HMS Blanche 1939
- HMS Duchess 1939
- HMS Rawalpindi 1939
- HMS Seahorse 1939
- SS Binnendijk 1939
- SS Fanad Head 1939
- Stanbrook 1939
- U-12 1939
All 599 wrecks of the World War II →
Browse more: Open ocean wrecks · East China Sea