IJN Musashi
by Paul Helfrich

1/700 IJN Musashi (Tamiya)

Here's an out-of-the-box build of the Tamiya IJN Musashi, sister ship of the Yamato, who together were the most heavily armed battleships in history. With a main armament of nine 18" guns, they were designed to be more than a match for anything the US could build. In large measure this was based on the assumption that the US would never build a battleship too large to go through the Panama Canal. This turned out to be wrong - the planned Montana class would not have been able to squeeze through the canal, but American designers were indeed willing to let that go in order to keep raising the ante in battleship power.

The Japanese naval command's most incorrect assumption of all, in building these gigantic warships, was that the battleship would continue to be the principal arbiter of war at sea. They themselves proved it would not, in December 1941. Had the Japanese devoted the resources and labor that went into the Yamato and Musashi to the building of more aircraft carriers and submarines, their wartime results might have been different.

The kit depicts the Musashi early in her career, with a secondary armament of four triple 6" gun turrets. Two of these were later removed, in favor of increased medium and light AA armament. The Tamiya Yamato kit shows that configuration.

You can have a very interesting debate about which were the most powerful battleships ever to put to sea: the American Iowa class, the German Bismarck and Tirpitz, or the Japanese Yamato and Musashi. Most sources I've seen would give a slight edge to the Iowas, but without question the heaviest broadside would have come from the IJN ships. The blast from their 18" main armament was so intense that much of the AA armament had to be enclosed - men in exposed positions would have been knocked unconscious by the tremendous concussion of these massive weapons.

Musashi was sunk by aerial attack in October 1944 as part of the many naval engagements surrounding the US invasion of the Phillipines. She took an incredible number of torpedoes (perhaps as many as 20) and bombs before finally rolling over and sinking.