The Yamato Fallacy

Do you remember the time of your life when you realised that Santa Claus isn't 'real'?

Well, I had a similar realisation yesterday when I read a book I picked up at the library:

Title: Imperial Japanese Navy battleships 1941-45

Author: Stille, Mark.
Publisher: Oxford, UK ; New York, NY : Osprey Pub., 2008.

Call No.: 940.545952 STI

Since I was a kid, I had this notion that the Japanese super-battleship Yamato had a semi-mythical status, thanks to the Star Blazers anime and to me & my brother's childhood hobby of collecting Tamiya scale models which included the 1:700 scale model of the IJN Yamato.

Imagine my surprise when I read the Introduction of the book, which summed up the performance of the ten Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) battleships as such:

"Japanese pre-war strategy still saw the battleship as the final arbiter of
fleet action. Held in reserve for the expected decisive fleet engagement, the
Imperial Navy's battleships saw relatively little service during the early and
middle parts of the war. Eventually, all of them were committed to stopping the
US advance, and all but one was destroyed by the war's end."

Further reading indicated that like any inter-war navy, the IJN had assumed that the battleship would be the Holy Grail of naval defence and had built their naval strategy around it. Secondly, emphasis was placed on spotting and engaging enemies at a range beyond the enemy's gun range. However, the US Navy soon shifted focus to the development of aircraft carriers and carrier aviation, and battleships proved useless without adequate air cover.

Apart from this strategic flaw, Japanese warships tended to fare poorly in terms of quality, compared to those of other navies. For instance, the Yamato had chinks in its armour which made it vulnerable to enemy shells. And the way the major pieces of armour were laid made it impossible to replace its engines should any of them fail.

Come to think of it, it wasn't too longer ago that everyone assumed that bonds would be the safest form of investment... :-)