Musashi rolls over and sinks after waves of American carrier strikes
For two years, Musashi had been the pride of the Japanese fleet, a 72,000-ton battleship built to outgun anything afloat. On October 24, 1944, while steaming through the Sibuyan Sea as part of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita's Center Force, she was caught by aircraft from the USS Intrepid and other American carriers. Over several hours the planes returned in wave after wave, hitting her hull with an estimated nineteen torpedoes and seventeen bombs. By evening she listed past thirty degrees and rolled under at 7:36 p.m., taking Captain Toshihira Inoguchi down with her.
Musashi's sinking confirmed what the U.S. Navy had bet its entire Pacific strategy on: that carrier aircraft, not battleships, now decided naval battles. Halsey's Third Fleet planes needed no battleship duel to kill the heaviest warship ever built, a lesson that shaped American naval doctrine for the rest of the century.
QHow many ships did it take to escort the crippled Musashi after Kurita abandoned her?
Kurita left Musashi behind at 3:30 p.m. to keep his Center Force moving, then reversed course and found her still afloat at 4:21 p.m. He detailed a heavy cruiser and two destroyers to stand by the wounded battleship rather than risk his whole formation. That escort could do nothing about the flooding below decks. The gesture bought Musashi a few more hours before she went under at 7:36 p.m. Kurita then pressed on toward Leyte Gulf with the rest of his force, leaving the escort ships to handle the rescue effort alongside Kiyoshimo and Hamakaze.
QWhat happened when one of Musashi's own guns misfired during the attack?
During the battle a shell fired from Musashi's own main armament detonated inside the barrel of the middle gun in Turret No. 1, wrecking the turret's elevating machinery. The malfunction happened separately from the American bomb damage that also struck that turret, meaning Musashi lost part of her offensive power to her own ordnance failure before the day was through. For a ship built around nine 18.1-inch guns as her defining strength, losing a gun to an internal detonation rather than enemy fire was a strange footnote to her final battle.
QWhy did Musashi's crew counterflood the ship twice in opposite directions?
Damage control teams fought two separate lists. Early in the attack they reduced a 5.5-degree starboard list down to just 1 degree by counterflooding compartments on the opposite side. But continued torpedo hits reversed the problem entirely, pushing the ship into a 6-degree list to port instead. Crews had to reverse their counterflooding strategy mid-battle, flooding different compartments to correct a tilt running the opposite way from the one they had just fixed. The bow eventually sank 4 meters and forward freeboard dropped 1.8 meters, numbers logged by a crew tracking a losing fight compartment by compartment.
