Joint Microsoft founder Paul Allen has been searching for the Musashi for eight years and finally announced the discovery via Twitter, according to the BBC.
Allen (62) told the Washington Post he had long been interested in seeking the ship and others like it:
“Since my youth, I have been fascinated with World War II history, inspired by my father’s service in the U.S. Army.
The Musashi is truly an engineering marvel and, as an engineer at heart, I have a deep appreciation for the technology and effort that went into its construction.”
The ship was discovered following a survey carried out by Allen’s yacht, the Octopus, and then an “autonomous underwater vehicle” actually found the wreck on the sea floor.
The Musashi was sunk by U.S. dive bombers and torpedo bombers from different aircraft carriers during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines in October of 1944 and thus shared the fate of other capital ships like the German battleship Bismarck, the demise of which was caused by a Royal Air Force plane’s torpedo; and the ships of Force Z, the HMS Repulse and Prince of Wales, sunk in December, 1941, by Japanese aircraft. Thus the mighty battleship, which had ruled the waves since the Napoleonic Wars was rendered obsolete by a new technology, bomb-and-torpedo-carrying aircraft.
The Musashi and her sister ship, Yamato, are the largest battleships ever built, in terms both of water displacement and size of main armament; the ships carried 18-inch guns, according to Wikipedia, and are usually compared to the German super-battleship Bismarck and the USS Iowa class battleships.
The Musashi was named after Miyamoto Musashi (Musashi Miyamoto in the Japanese name order) a Sixteenth Century samurai who became a famous swordsman, founder of a sword-fighting school, painter and author of the Gorin-no-Sho, or Book of Five Rings.
