The Japanese Battleship Musashi (Super Drawings in 3D)

Description

Musashi battleship was the second ship of the Yamato class of Imperial Japanese Navy during the Second World War. She and her sister, Yamato, were the heaviest and most powerful battleships ever constructed, displacing 72800 tons at full load and armed with nine 46-cm Type 94 main guns. Musashi was commissioned in August 1942 and assigned to the 1st Battleship Division. In early 1943 the ship was transferred to Truk, which was the Empire of Japan’s main base in the South Pacific. During this year she sortied several times with the fleet searching for American forces, without success. In 1944 she was used to transfer forces and equipment between Japan and various occupied islands. In early 1944 she was damaged by an American submarine attack and was forced to return to Japan for repairs. On this occasion she was strongly enhanced with antiaircraft armament. She was present during the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June, but she didn’t engage in combat with the American forces. On 24 October 1944, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, after several hours of fighting, Musashi was sunk by a large number of torpedoes and bombs fired from American carrier-based aircraft. The wreck was located in March 2015 by the team of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, at a depth of about 1350 meters (4430 feet). Review: Largest battleship - That it was not a hardbound book Review: Big ship, beautiful renderings, but little else - The 47th book in Kagero's Super Drawings in 3D series is devoted to the Japanese battleship Musashi, which along with her sister ship Yamato, was the largest, most powerfully armed battleship ever built. Despite its size the ship is covered in 84, 8-1/4" x 11-3/4" pages in a stapled card cover. The text covers parts of four pages, shared with a port and starboard profile and a deck view. The text is generally competent given the limited space available. The loss of the ship gets the most attention. There is a table of characteristics included. The meat of the book are the computer renderings which are outstanding as usual and are enough to award the book four stars alone. These are why the books are as popular as they are, whether one is a modeller or general enthusiast like myself. However, the book suffers from a common weakness in this series: inadequate captioning. I wish the authors and publisher could understand that at least some readers want to learn more about these ships and not just what they looked like at a given time (in the present case this would seem to be at her loss though this is not explicitly mentioned). An example of this is the unique boat and aircraft stowage hangers which go completely unremarked upon in the book. The ship is rendered with boats stored in the well on the stern which was intended to allow aircraft in the hanger to be brought on deck. Now it is entirely possible that the stern well was repurposed for boat stowage at some point; I'm not saying that this is a mistake. I just think the finer points of boat and aircraft stowage deserve some discussion in the text or captions. Another puzzling point is the lack of single 25mm guns. The text implies Musashi had many of these but none are shown. The book includes an unbound foldout with conventional 1:400 scale five view line drawings. There are line drawings of various fittings in larger scales. Recommended but far from the best source of information about this ship or the Yamato class in general.