Would New Jersey have Survived what Sank Yamato and Musashi?

Comments · 1.2K

• DO

  @donkeyboy585 · 5 years ago

  A big reason all 4 Iowa’s are still here is they never lived in a world where she didn’t enjoy air superiority

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• ED

  @Edax_Royeaux · 5 years ago

  Yamato was being confronted by 8 Aircraft Carriers and 6 Battleships.  No single capital ship was ever built to handle such a disparity of force.

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• H5

  @h545-k9m · 5 years ago

  USN: &quot;We have radar guiding and layers of redundancy in our AA fire control&quot;<br>IJN: &quot;We have stick&quot;

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• SH

  @sharlin648 · 5 years ago (edited)

  Short answer, no. There&apos;s probably not a ship afloat that could take the hammering that sunk these two. Even accounting for the far more potent USN AA defences, if an Iowa was hit by that many torpedoes she&apos;s gonna go over. The Iowa&apos;s had a thin TDS for a ship their size and this was because it was a sacrifice needed for the long, lean hull for their speed. I doubt a modern CVN would remain afloat if they somehow took that many hits. I think the only way you &apos;might&apos; survive is if you did a 1-1 swap with equavalent USN ships. So &nbsp;8 Fletcher/Gearing class DD&apos;s, one CL of some kind (Atlanta probably) and the Iowa. That&apos;s a LOT more 5-inch proximity fused shells and 40mm guns as well as the slathering of 20mm on the Iowa, so attacking aircraft would suffer much heavier losses.<br><br>But if the ship was still hit by the same number of bombs and torpedoes, no she&apos;s just not going to survive that.

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• GH

  @ghost307 · 5 years ago

  Yamato&apos;s armor was defeated and New Jersey had comparable armor (or less) so our girl would have joined Yamato on the bottom of the ocean. Fortunately that never happened so we get to visit her safe and sound in Camden.

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• JE

  @jerryfreemann3490 · 5 years ago

  only Chuck Norris on a dinghy could survive what Yamato and Musashi went through , he would stare the bombs away

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• NI

  @nicbrownable · 5 years ago

  If they announced that they were going to replace my mattress with wooden boards, I would have sunk the boat myself.

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• AN

  @andrewtaylor940 · 5 years ago

  Yamato’s final mission, operation ten-go, really illustrated just how bad the Japanese AA defenses were. She had more AA barrels than any other ship ever built. She had those “magic” 18” AA shells. (Which on top of being utterly worthless against aircraft, can probably be credited for sinking almost as many Japanese Battleships as were sunk by US Battleships. The 16” version of those idiotic shells remain the top suspects in the “anchored in harbor” loss of the IJN Mutsu. Nagato’s sister ship.). Yamato was attacked by 400+ American Navy planes. The air was so full of attacking planes that they had to establish holding patterns to wait in line to attack. The US Navy lost 10 planes that day. Of those 10 planes, 7 were lost to Yamato’s cataclysmic magazine detonation that held the record for largest man made non nuclear explosion up until July 1969 when the second test of the Soviet N1 moon rocket detonated on the pad wiping out much of the Baikanur Cosmodrome. The Yamato’s explosion created a 10 mile high mushroom cloud so any planes nearby when it went up were destroyed. So yeah for all of Yamato’s hundreds of AA barrels, over the course of nonstop concentrated aerial attack by hundreds of planes, they managed to shoot down 3. This is not an impressive record of success.

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• BI

  @Binkophile · 5 years ago

  Ron White said it best: &quot;I don&apos;t know how many it was gonna take to kick my ass, but I know how many they were gonna use.&quot;

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• PE

  @petersouthernboy6327 · 5 years ago

  Fun Fact: an F4U Corsair from Essex put a 1,000 pound GP bomb into the bow of Yamato.

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• PS

  @pscwplb · 5 years ago (edited)

  Here&apos;s a better question: &nbsp;Would the Johnston Atoll have survived what sank Yamato and Musashi? &nbsp; &nbsp;Maybe.

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• DE

  @demoskunk · 5 years ago

  Yamato and Musashi&apos;s length to width ratio gave them a tight turning radius, making them quite maneuverable, and they were both able to dodge numerous bombs that their lookouts actively spotted. &nbsp;The problem is, near bomb misses create underwater shockwaves that can sheer hull rivets and cause water seepage, and there were a LOT of near misses from the hundreds of planes attacking these 2 ships.

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