Imperial Japanese Navy History: Tsushima to Yamato

The Imperial Japanese Navy existed from the Meiji era until Japan’s surrender in 1945. In forty years it went from beating Russia at Tsushima to building the largest battleships ever made, opening the Pacific war at Pearl Harbor, and losing almost every major ship it had. The stories here follow that arc through its ships and its battles.

Tsushima and the treaty years

In 1904 Russia sent most of its Baltic Fleet around the world to fight Japan. The voyage took seven months. At Tsushima on 27 and 28 May 1905, Admiral Togo’s fleet, with the flagship Mikasa flying the Z flag, destroyed it for the loss of three torpedo boats. It was the result the navy measured itself against for the next forty years.

Between the wars the naval treaties limited the size and guns of new warships, and Japan built to the edge of them and past it. In 1935 Japan said its new Mogami-class cruisers displaced 8,500 tons. Britain’s Director of Naval Construction said they must be built of cardboard or Japan was lying. Mogami displaced 11,169 tons at trials, and her turrets were designed from the start to take heavier guns.

Yamato was the same habit on a larger scale. Her nine 46 cm guns were the biggest ever mounted at sea, but inside the navy they were called the “special type 40 cm”, and her dock at Kure was covered so nobody could judge her size from the hills.

The opening campaigns

Japan’s war with the United States, Britain and the Netherlands began on 7 December 1941. Within weeks its forces were moving on the oil of the Dutch East Indies. At the Battle of the Java Sea in February 1942, Japanese cruisers and their Type 93 “Long Lance” torpedoes broke up an Allied force under Karel Doorman that had no common signal code and no air cover. About 2,300 Allied sailors died.

The run ended at Midway in June 1942. American codebreakers had worked out that Japan’s target “AF” was Midway, after the island radioed a fake water shortage. Within minutes on 4 June, Akagi, Kaga and Soryu were burning, and Japan lost four carriers in the battle.

Guadalcanal and Leyte Gulf

At Guadalcanal the navy did what it had trained for: fighting at night. On the night of 8 to 9 August 1942, Vice Admiral Mikawa took seven cruisers and a destroyer down The Slot and wrecked the Allied screen off Savo Island. Six months of fighting followed, and more than fifty ships from both sides went down in Ironbottom Sound.

By October 1944 the carriers were still there but the trained pilots were mostly dead. At Leyte Gulf, Ozawa’s nearly empty carrier force drew Halsey north while Kurita’s battleships came through San Bernardino Strait. Musashi was sunk in the Sibuyan Sea. Off Samar, Yamato’s force fell on a group of escort carriers and destroyers, and then broke off.

The last sorties

A month later Shinano, a Yamato-class hull converted after Midway into the largest carrier yet built, left Yokosuka on 28 November 1944. The submarine USS Archerfish sank her seventeen hours later, with 1,435 dead. On 7 April 1945 Yamato sailed for Okinawa and was sunk by aircraft. 3,055 of her 3,332 men died.

Japanese submarines kept fighting to the end. On 30 July 1945, I-58 under Commander Hashimoto torpedoed USS Indianapolis, days after she had delivered the uranium for the Hiroshima bomb. Japan surrendered in August, and the navy was disbanded.