I am a former US military officer with a life-long love for history, instilled in me by my father who fought against the Germans behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied Europe for 3 years. He was a History professor, too.

Anyhow, I was always fascinated by the war in the Pacific as a kid - thinking that I would have wanted to be one of the carrier pilots alighting from the decks and engaging the enemy over that vast expanse of open blue ocean.

In time I got a BA in history as well.

A few years back, after seeing some photos of a model of the Yamato, I briefly put my other hobby-modeling on hold and spent about 1500 hours building a 1945 Operation Ten-ichi-go 1/200 scale version of Yamato. A link to that model is at the bottom of the main index page.

Anyhow, I found so many rare photos during my research into the ship (for one cannot do a model of this ship justice without first examining all resources and plans that are available in detail).

In an impulsive moment I vowed to create the Internet's only comprehensive Yamato photo library (which was then expanded to include Musashi as well).

Though I did not follow my father into academia, I think that he would have enjoyed this gallery, which captures my passion for the story of Yamato and her doomed crew.

This gallery is a labor of love, meant to open up archival resources to the many Yamato fans world-wide, educate them about the battles these two ships participated in, and perhaps help the Yamato/Musashi ship modeler to improve the accuracy of the kits they are building.

I hope that you will get as much enjoyment out of viewing these photos as I have gotten from finding them.

And now a few random thoughts I penned on Yamato - spread out over the next few pages:

ESSAY ON THE YAMATO - PART I:

The Battleship Yamato only saw battle three times during the entire Second World War (or two times, if you don't count being torpedoed once by the submarine USS Skate in 1943).

While there is some evidence from IJN sources that her guns scored several hits at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944 (described later on under accompanying photos), she was strategically obsolete the day that she was launched, for a mere week and a half earlier, the Japanese had themselves exploded the myth of the battleship during their daring attack on Pearl Harbor with carrier-borne aircraft.

This was to be a war dominated by carrier-borne aircraft, not huge battleships.

And yet.

Despite going down in just over 2 hours of bombardment by US Navy planes off Okinawa on April 7th, 1945, this gigantic ship still captivates the mind and inspires tens of thousands of ship modelers around the world to build the literally dozens of models of this ship, in all scales.

As a Japanese historian once noted - "once you learn the story of the Yamato, it becomes an obsession."

And, I might add, you need not be Japanese to share that obsession. Witness the International Yamato Owners Association, for one, the only qualification for which is having built a 1/200 or larger RC scale model of this ship.

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Thank you for showing these photos some awesome and rare photos of this great ship and her crew and her final captain. Jonathan Albright | October 12, 2008