The Japanese Imperial Navy’s Musashi battleship and her sister ship, the Yamato were one of two of the world’s heaviest and most powerfully armed battleships ever built at that time. Displacing 72,800 tons, neither ship survived WWII.
Musashi was constructed under great secrecy and given the codename “Battleship Number 2.” Outfitted with additional communications gear, after 18 months of shakedown cruises and refitting, she became Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s flagship, relieving her sister ship Yamato of the duties. The Musashi also fulfilled her duty by returning Yamamoto’s ashes to Japan after he was struck down by US Army Air Corps fighters in April 1943.
The Musashi was sunk during the Battle of Leyte Gulf after taking 19 torpedo and 17 bomb hits from American carrier-based aircraft on October 24, 1944. The ship sank in 4,430 feet (1,350 m) of water, and out of a crew of 2,399 men, 1,376 were rescued. And there, off the coast of the Philippines she lay at rest, lost to history until she was rediscovered by Allen last week.
The search for the Musashi
It took eight years of detailed historical research and a thorough analysis of the seafloor in the ocean off the coast of the Philippines before Paul Allen and his team were ready to zero in on the right location. The team had to search through four different sinking positions in the Sibuyan Sea.
There were “official” Japanese and U.S. Navy positions, as well as information recorded in the logbook of a Japanese destroyer that stood by to rescue survivors of the sinking. One last record consisted of a drawing by a surviving Japanese crewman who had drawn a picture of where the ship sank in relation to Sibuyan Island. The process was not easy.
The near-to-final process involved using a multibeam echosounder (MBES) that revealed the landscape of the search area, as well as making it easier to pick out targets. When the MBES revealed a large volcanic ridge that created varying depths from 500 to 6,500 feet, the research team switched to using an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). This underwater vehicle doesn’t need to be tethered and is capable of covering a huge amount of terrain.
When anything promising showed up on the AUV’s data feed, the Octo ROV on Allen’s yacht was employed to look even closer at the anomalies. After only three AUV dives, the target was located and Octo ROV subsequently confirmed the wreckage of the Musashi. Since that time, Allen has been tweeting images and videos of the Musashi captured by the Octo ROV, including footage of its enormous 36-by-20-foot (11-by-6-meter) main rudder.
Octo ROV sends back first pictures of Musashi
When the Octo ROV made the discovery, Allen and his team were delighted. “We are proud to have played a role in finding this key vessel in naval history and are honored to share it with the survivors, the families of those who perished and the world,” Allen said in a statement.
An interesting observation was made by David Mearns, a marine scientist on the Musashi research team. He noted the wreck was very damaged. “It appears she suffered at least one, if not two, magazine explosions which would have sheered off the bow and the stern, and its entire middle section of its super-structure.”
The returning video shows the holes in the bow area, apparently made by torpedoes, a torn off propeller and gun turrets and catapults that were broken off. The debris is scattered in areas approximately 2,600 feet by 1,640 feet, according to the research team. The findings have led Naval historian and battleship expert Kazushige Todaka to say he does not believe the Musashi sank just because of the Allied bombings.
Kazushige Todaka thinks the ship blew apart underwater from an explosion inside the ship as she was sinking. “Looking at the material – ships do not get wrecked to that extent from conventional damages. And at that point there was an explosion inside the ship, and it was broken apart. The way the ship was damaged, it was not caused by enemy attack, the American army attack, but I think the explosives aboard the ship exploded, breaking the ship,” he said.
