The 2 Hours That Sank the Biggest Battleship Ever Built: the Yamato

WW2, from the records. https://warshelf.com/ April 7, 1945. At 8:23 in the morning an American Hellcat comes out of the cloud over the East China Sea and finds the largest battleship in the world. Yamato was built to win one great fleet action against American battleships. It never came. Now she sails for Okinawa with a cruiser and eight destroyers, no air cover and enough fuel to get home, on a mission her own admiral called a waste of ships and men. The codebreakers already know the route. Spruance wants his old battleships to meet her. Mitscher launches nearly four hundred aircraft first. They come out of low grey cloud, and the Avengers put their torpedoes into her port side, set to run beneath the armour belt. To stop the list, her officers flood the starboard engine rooms with the men still inside. At 2:23 in the afternoon her magazines explode and the smoke is seen from Kyushu. More than three thousand seven hundred Japanese sailors die. The Americans lose twelve men. And her three great turrets lie upside down on the seabed, their guns never having fired at a battleship.