Sept. 13, 2024
A Glorious Way to Die: The Kamikaze Mission of the Battleship Yamato
WASHINGTON —
The advent of advanced anti-ship weaponry has revived public debate the last several years over the survivability of the nation’s largest ships in conflict. When asked last year about the vulnerability of aircraft carriers in the era of hypersonic weapons and other modern threats, then-USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) Capt. Paul Campagna countered those concerns, replying, “For anyone that’s worried about the modern threat that’s out there, I’ll just say that the carrier is not on an island…It deploys with the air wing. It deploys with the strike group. It deploys with a layered defense that goes from the bottom of the ocean and out to space, and anyone who thinks that we’re fragile little teacups out there or something like that is grossly mistaken.”
To paraphrase the great Mark Twain, the death of the aircraft carrier has been greatly exaggerated.
But while carriers may not be made obsolete, the second installment of “Editor’s Choice” below examines a 40-year old volume, “A Glorious Way to Die,” that argues that another preeminent force of the seas—the battleship—had, by the start of World War II, been rendered just that by, ironically, aircraft carriers. In his work, author Russell Spur examines the final mission of the largest battleship ever built, the Yamato—a mission that even Japan’s Imperial Fleet leaders thought at best unlikely to succeed, and at worst, suicidal.
—David Byrd, Editor in Chief