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Build the Musashi: The Birth and Death of the World's Greatest Battleship
Recounts the technical and other difficulties overcome by the Japanese to build the world's largest battleship and how it was sunk
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1991
86 people want to read
About the author
Akira Yoshimura
83 books117 followersPrize winning Japanese writer. Akira Yoshimura was the president of the Japanese writers union and a PEN member. He published over 20 novels, of which in particular On Parole and Shipwrecks are internationally known and have been translated into several languages. In 1984 he received the Yomiuri Prize for his novel Hagoku (破獄,engl. prison break) based on the true story of Yoshie Shiratori.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 30, 2012
Having pulled out of the League of Nations following its condemnation of their invasion of Manchuria, the Japanese laid down two hulls for No. 1 battleship and No. 2 battleship. The managers of the Nagasaki shipyard were sworn to secrecy any violation of which was to be punished by whatever punishment the navy deemed appropriate according to the document they had to sign.
Each ship was huge, and the shipways and cranes had to be completely rebuilt to handle their enormous size and weight which dwarfed anything at sea. Carrying 18" guns they were 124 feet wide (to accommodate the tremendous recoil of the guns) some thirty feet wider than the previous records. and they had 40 centimeter (about 16 inches) thick hulls. Each ship would have both diesel and steam engines, diesel having been unreliable. The hulls were specially reinforced to fend off the new shells that they learned could still damage a vessel even in a near miss. They had to build a new freighter with an especially wide hull to transport the 18 inch-turrets to Nagasaki. They had never made rivets this big before. They needed 4-centimeter diameter (about 1.5 inches) rivets and because of the thickness of the hull had to be precisely made.
The book is as much about secrecy as building the ship with its myriad detail about specifications. The Japanese were obsessed with hiding the ship's construction. They built special hemp screens all around the building site, constructed a warehouse in front of the British consulate which had a view of the harbor, and arrested anyone who even looked at the buildings. The incident of the missing blueprint, which turned out to have been destroyed by a young draftsman hoping to work someplace else in the plant, resulted in the imprisonment and torture of several completely innocent designers before the discovered the culprit. All Chinese were deported and anyone protesting the deportations was placed under special watch. When the ship was finally launched, they organized am air raid drill to keep people in their homes, and when the ship caused a mini tidal wave that flooded several homes - -the water in the bay rose 50 centimeters just from the displacement of the huge ship -- police forbad them from leaving their flooded homes lest they see the size of the ship before it could be moved to another dock and again hidden from view.
All because they were afraid the United States might discover the size of the battleships, a size, as it turned out, that was totally irrelevant since the carriers came to dominate naval warfare. Indeed, their 18-inch guns could shoot over the horizon and dominate all other surface ships, but it was those little winged gnats with torpedoes that spelled its doom. Even the Japanese recognized the ultimate uselessness of these great ships and converted battleships 3 and 4 to aircraft carriers.
The desire for secrecy continued to the end. After its sinking, in order to prevent anyone from learning of the loss, the surviving sailors were stripped of their Musashi identity and assigned to some mythical unit. Many were transported back to Japan and were torpedoed again, rescued, reassigned to another ship and again torpedoed. About 146 made it to Corregidor -they were never allowed to leave the Philippines, again to prevent anyone learning of the disaster, where all but 29 were killed in the defense of Manila.
Marred by a couple of minor errors probably due to errors of translation along with a couple of "then's" where "than''s" were called for, it's a fascinating look at the creation and demise of the great battleships.
Each ship was huge, and the shipways and cranes had to be completely rebuilt to handle their enormous size and weight which dwarfed anything at sea. Carrying 18" guns they were 124 feet wide (to accommodate the tremendous recoil of the guns) some thirty feet wider than the previous records. and they had 40 centimeter (about 16 inches) thick hulls. Each ship would have both diesel and steam engines, diesel having been unreliable. The hulls were specially reinforced to fend off the new shells that they learned could still damage a vessel even in a near miss. They had to build a new freighter with an especially wide hull to transport the 18 inch-turrets to Nagasaki. They had never made rivets this big before. They needed 4-centimeter diameter (about 1.5 inches) rivets and because of the thickness of the hull had to be precisely made.
The book is as much about secrecy as building the ship with its myriad detail about specifications. The Japanese were obsessed with hiding the ship's construction. They built special hemp screens all around the building site, constructed a warehouse in front of the British consulate which had a view of the harbor, and arrested anyone who even looked at the buildings. The incident of the missing blueprint, which turned out to have been destroyed by a young draftsman hoping to work someplace else in the plant, resulted in the imprisonment and torture of several completely innocent designers before the discovered the culprit. All Chinese were deported and anyone protesting the deportations was placed under special watch. When the ship was finally launched, they organized am air raid drill to keep people in their homes, and when the ship caused a mini tidal wave that flooded several homes - -the water in the bay rose 50 centimeters just from the displacement of the huge ship -- police forbad them from leaving their flooded homes lest they see the size of the ship before it could be moved to another dock and again hidden from view.
All because they were afraid the United States might discover the size of the battleships, a size, as it turned out, that was totally irrelevant since the carriers came to dominate naval warfare. Indeed, their 18-inch guns could shoot over the horizon and dominate all other surface ships, but it was those little winged gnats with torpedoes that spelled its doom. Even the Japanese recognized the ultimate uselessness of these great ships and converted battleships 3 and 4 to aircraft carriers.
The desire for secrecy continued to the end. After its sinking, in order to prevent anyone from learning of the loss, the surviving sailors were stripped of their Musashi identity and assigned to some mythical unit. Many were transported back to Japan and were torpedoed again, rescued, reassigned to another ship and again torpedoed. About 146 made it to Corregidor -they were never allowed to leave the Philippines, again to prevent anyone learning of the disaster, where all but 29 were killed in the defense of Manila.
Marred by a couple of minor errors probably due to errors of translation along with a couple of "then's" where "than''s" were called for, it's a fascinating look at the creation and demise of the great battleships.
July 8, 2018
More than half of the book is made up of the challenges and secrecy surrounding the construction of the ship... interesting stuff. The story of the Musashi serves as a cautionary tale... constructing the world's largest battleship while ignoring the emerging dominance of aircraft carriers may not itself have cost Japan the Pacific War, but it certainly didn't help.
August 9, 2016
Extremely fast and easy read, but that wasn't entirely a bad thing. Very interesting history of the building of the battleship takes up the first 3/4 of the book, only the last maybe 35 pages are about the actual active service. Understandably she didn't have an exceptionally interesting service record, but there was so little in the book as to be entirely without note.
October 16, 2019
In the years leading into the Second World War, the Japanese built two battleships of prodigious scale and firepower, the Yamato and the Musashi. Both were lost in the war. Yoshimura describes the building and operational life of the Musashi, built by a private shipyard in Nagasaki under the instructions of the official Kure Arsenal.
These two battleships were the most heavily-armoured, powerfully-armed battleships every built. Yet while they represented the apotheosis of their form, they were launched into a world that had already moved on. Their story is a classic tragedy.
Forget the Bismark or the Hood, or even the Iowa class. These ships fired shells as heavy as a car to a distance of almost 30 miles. In places, their armour was more than two feet thick. Their construction not only demanded bold new techniques to create a foundation on which they could be launched, the work had to be kept secret even from the city of Nagasaki. Since the shipyard was in essence at the bottom of a bowl of hills, this proved to be a challenge, requiring obsessive precautions and restrictions on the docile city population. Even the launching was kept secret. The Allies remained unaware of the true power of these ships until after the war.
In service, Musashi, like its sister ship, proved too vulnerable to the power of the US carrier fleet. As the US forces rebounded back across the Pacific in 1943 and 1944, the two battleships became increasingly fugitive. In the end, both were thrown away in suicidal gestures by a regime that knew it was doomed but was taking its host nation with it. The Musashi fought an incredible last battle. Its stubborn resistance to waves and waves of torpedoes and bombs was an impressive tribute to its designers, constructors and crew. She suffered twenty torpedoes, twenty direct bomb hits and eighteen near misses before she sank. Despite this, more than half her crew survived. Compare this to the four torpedoes and single bomb that doomed the contemporary British battleship Prince of Wales.
Yoshimura provides a clean, brisk account of the men and technical challenges involved in building the Musashi, and of her mostly futile service. If I had one criticism, it would be that the story would have been enhanced by fuller character sketches and more details of the nature of life in Japan at the time. We get glimpses and hints of a culture of rigid obedience: the residents of Nagasaki being ordered to stay inside on certain days, and forbidden from hiking on the hills around the city for years on end. On one occasion a vital blueprint drawing goes missing. The manager in charge of the department considers suicide, until the mystery is solved and the culprit disappears to years of hard labour.
Nonetheless, if you are interested in some of the more off-beat stories of the last war, this is a worthwhile read.
These two battleships were the most heavily-armoured, powerfully-armed battleships every built. Yet while they represented the apotheosis of their form, they were launched into a world that had already moved on. Their story is a classic tragedy.
Forget the Bismark or the Hood, or even the Iowa class. These ships fired shells as heavy as a car to a distance of almost 30 miles. In places, their armour was more than two feet thick. Their construction not only demanded bold new techniques to create a foundation on which they could be launched, the work had to be kept secret even from the city of Nagasaki. Since the shipyard was in essence at the bottom of a bowl of hills, this proved to be a challenge, requiring obsessive precautions and restrictions on the docile city population. Even the launching was kept secret. The Allies remained unaware of the true power of these ships until after the war.
In service, Musashi, like its sister ship, proved too vulnerable to the power of the US carrier fleet. As the US forces rebounded back across the Pacific in 1943 and 1944, the two battleships became increasingly fugitive. In the end, both were thrown away in suicidal gestures by a regime that knew it was doomed but was taking its host nation with it. The Musashi fought an incredible last battle. Its stubborn resistance to waves and waves of torpedoes and bombs was an impressive tribute to its designers, constructors and crew. She suffered twenty torpedoes, twenty direct bomb hits and eighteen near misses before she sank. Despite this, more than half her crew survived. Compare this to the four torpedoes and single bomb that doomed the contemporary British battleship Prince of Wales.
Yoshimura provides a clean, brisk account of the men and technical challenges involved in building the Musashi, and of her mostly futile service. If I had one criticism, it would be that the story would have been enhanced by fuller character sketches and more details of the nature of life in Japan at the time. We get glimpses and hints of a culture of rigid obedience: the residents of Nagasaki being ordered to stay inside on certain days, and forbidden from hiking on the hills around the city for years on end. On one occasion a vital blueprint drawing goes missing. The manager in charge of the department considers suicide, until the mystery is solved and the culprit disappears to years of hard labour.
Nonetheless, if you are interested in some of the more off-beat stories of the last war, this is a worthwhile read.
September 5, 2018
Great book, must read
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August 2, 2011Fascinating account of how superweapons can sound so seductive. Of course they always have an Achilles Heel and the Musashi was no exception (it never fired on another ship).
Also interesting to see the secrecy and groupthink of Imperial Japan in action. No wonder a small number of people were able to push the country to war. The foolhardy machismo of the naval strategists contrasts with the devoted ingeniousness of the shipwrights who, incredibly, did not know what they were building.
Also interesting to see the secrecy and groupthink of Imperial Japan in action. No wonder a small number of people were able to push the country to war. The foolhardy machismo of the naval strategists contrasts with the devoted ingeniousness of the shipwrights who, incredibly, did not know what they were building.
July 27, 2011
Good reading about the feat of building such a large ship as well as the socio political implications of the task. The ship's battle record is accurate, to the point, and even though a little bit short still provides the reader with a good account of its actions during WWII.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews