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Admiral lsoroku Yamamoto, the man who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, said that the three great follies of the world were the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids, and the battleship Musashi. Yamamoto understood that sheer size and firepower would not be decisive factors in the battle for naval supremacy in the Pacific.
The Musashi was massive-upright it would have approached the size of the Chrysler Building. Outfitted with eighteen-inch armor plating and nine eighteen-inch guns, the largest ever mounted on a warship, the Musashi was considered by its creators to be invincible and unsinkable. Yet during its two years of active duty with the Combined Fleet, it never fired a single shot against another ship. It was sunk, as Yamamoto had predicted, by torpedoes and bombs.
Akira Yoshimura's dramatic reconstruction of the birth of the Musashi portrays a nation preparing for total war. Under these extreme conditions, courage, genius, and integrity coexisted with brutality, folly, and paranoia. During the more than four years it took to build and outfit it, shipyard engineers and their Navy mentors were faced with seemingly insurmountable technical problems and plagued by natural calamities and the constant fear of espionage. The solutions they found to each successive crisis were sometimes brilliant, sometimes absurd. Battleship Musashi is a tribute to the men who achieved this engineering marvel and a testament to the excesses of bureaucratic militarism.
The Musashi was massive-upright it would have approached the size of the Chrysler Building. Outfitted with eighteen-inch armor plating and nine eighteen-inch guns, the largest ever mounted on a warship, the Musashi was considered by its creators to be invincible and unsinkable. Yet during its two years of active duty with the Combined Fleet, it never fired a single shot against another ship. It was sunk, as Yamamoto had predicted, by torpedoes and bombs.
Akira Yoshimura's dramatic reconstruction of the birth of the Musashi portrays a nation preparing for total war. Under these extreme conditions, courage, genius, and integrity coexisted with brutality, folly, and paranoia. During the more than four years it took to build and outfit it, shipyard engineers and their Navy mentors were faced with seemingly insurmountable technical problems and plagued by natural calamities and the constant fear of espionage. The solutions they found to each successive crisis were sometimes brilliant, sometimes absurd. Battleship Musashi is a tribute to the men who achieved this engineering marvel and a testament to the excesses of bureaucratic militarism.
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The Nagasaki Shipyard was established in 1857 by the shogunal government as the first shipyard in Japan to build western-style ships. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
The Nagasaki Shipyard was established in 1857 by the shogunal government as the first shipyard in Japan to build western-style ships. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Built in the utmost secrecy, Musashi & her twin sister Yamato were the largest battleships ever built.Such was the level of secrecy involved, that when a blueprint went missing the Japanese Naval Police jailed & tortured seven members of the blueprints staff until they eventually discovered that the plan was burnt in error. The scale of these ships was staggering such that the shipyard had to be specially enlarged to accomodate the build & launch. Everything about them was huge, from needing a special freighter built to transport the massive 18" guns from the Yokahama Arsenal to the shipyard for final fitting out, to a powerful tugboat which had also to be built to move the massive ship once she was launched.That said, being groundbreaking in every respect is only valuable when it's of it's time. Sadly both ships were obsolete before they were even launched and even more ironically ,it was the Japanese Navy themselves who demonstrated quite empahatically that the Aircraft Carrier was the new queen of the seas. Both Yamato & Musashi spent most of their lives swinging round their anchor chains whilst lesser members of the Japanese fleet were sent out to combat the Americans. Only when things became desperate were both ships committed to battle & inevitably both succumed to carrier air power. My only real criticism is that in the final chapters the details of the American attacks on Musashi are a bit sketchy, and the translation form the original Kanji is quite quirky, for example it frequently refers to "axles" meaning propeller shafts.That aside any book on these secretive vessels is always more than welcome.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I agree with the previous reviews. This is an interesting read which describes in some details the efforts of building the worlds largest battleship in the port of major city without allowing details to reach the Americans or the British.
The service life of the Musashi is brief relative to the rest of the book.
This is at least in part because the Japanese Navy were conserving this "secret weapon" and massive investment for a critical operation.
There is one paragraph I take excption to where the auther describes the American Dolittle raid on Japan as waking up the Japanese to the threat of aicraft from aircraft carriers. This both incorrect, since it took place after the Pearl harbour attack by Japanese aircraft carriers. It also ironic since it was the American Billy Mitchell who promoted the use of airpower against ships and was court-marshalled for doing so.
The service life of the Musashi is brief relative to the rest of the book.
This is at least in part because the Japanese Navy were conserving this "secret weapon" and massive investment for a critical operation.
There is one paragraph I take excption to where the auther describes the American Dolittle raid on Japan as waking up the Japanese to the threat of aicraft from aircraft carriers. This both incorrect, since it took place after the Pearl harbour attack by Japanese aircraft carriers. It also ironic since it was the American Billy Mitchell who promoted the use of airpower against ships and was court-marshalled for doing so.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
There has been so little published about the Musashi that practically any information relating to this massive ship is welcome. However this book, which puts particular emphasis on the construction of the ship in Nagasaki, will be a great disappointment to anyone with the slightest interest in the Yamato class ships or the IJN.
The first thing you notice is the extremely poor quality of the translation, which has numerous howlers like calling propellor shafts 'axles' and so on. These sorts of errors are so frequent that they soon become a major distraction.
Translation issues aside, what you are left with is a rambling text which retails various incidents during the construction of the ship, without ever providing any precise or particularly useful information. If you are looking for any technical detail about machinery, armour or armament, you will be wasting your time here.
The final section of the book, dealing with the ship's operational history is, if anything, even worse than that dealing with her construction, merely being a stale repackaging of well known facts without adding any new insights.
All things considered, one hardly knows who this book is aimed at, for it is too obscure to appeal to the general reader, and lacks any of the solid scholarship that the specialist expects.
After struggling through it over 10 years ago, I put my copy straight back on the shelf, where it has remained ever since. Unlike other failures I have bought, it is not even big enough to act as a bookend!
The first thing you notice is the extremely poor quality of the translation, which has numerous howlers like calling propellor shafts 'axles' and so on. These sorts of errors are so frequent that they soon become a major distraction.
Translation issues aside, what you are left with is a rambling text which retails various incidents during the construction of the ship, without ever providing any precise or particularly useful information. If you are looking for any technical detail about machinery, armour or armament, you will be wasting your time here.
The final section of the book, dealing with the ship's operational history is, if anything, even worse than that dealing with her construction, merely being a stale repackaging of well known facts without adding any new insights.
All things considered, one hardly knows who this book is aimed at, for it is too obscure to appeal to the general reader, and lacks any of the solid scholarship that the specialist expects.
After struggling through it over 10 years ago, I put my copy straight back on the shelf, where it has remained ever since. Unlike other failures I have bought, it is not even big enough to act as a bookend!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Rivetting Stuff
How do you build a battleship nearly half a mile long in a highly populated city and keep it a top military secret and keep it hidden during construction and keep approx three... Read more
Published on 22 Oct 2009 by Steven Freeman
Interesting book - but fatally flawed by lack of references
This is the naval book equivalent of a TV "Docu-soap". Based on fact, much imagination has been added to make it a good read for the general public. Read more
Published on 20 Aug 2008 by C. E. Taylor
Excellent, read it
I'm not an academic, just a history fanatic, so I can't comment on the historical accuracy, but this is a great book. Recommended
Published on 14 Jan 2007 by Ifor
The lenghts of deception
A very good book!
A real treat if you are interested in pre-Hiroshima Japan. The book convers well the design and build process of Musashi. Read more
A real treat if you are interested in pre-Hiroshima Japan. The book convers well the design and build process of Musashi. Read more
Published on 3 Aug 2006 by Anssi
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