About 4,040 Japanese sailors died in the surface action of April 7, 1945, if the detailed ship-by-ship figures published by the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command are added together.
The largest share came from one ship.
Of approximately 3,332 men aboard Yamato, NHHC's detailed reconstruction gives 3,055 dead. The light cruiser Yahagi lost another 446 men. Asashimo went down with roughly 330 men and apparently no survivors. Hamakaze lost about 100, while deaths aboard Isokaze, Kasumi, Suzutsuki, Fuyuzuki, and Yukikaze brought the total still higher. Exact figures differ among historical sources, especially for Yamato, which is why some official summaries give a lower overall estimate. The detailed NHHC ship-by-ship figures, however, place the Japanese dead at roughly four thousand men.
The American loss in the direct carrier attack was extraordinarily small by comparison.
Ten U.S. aircraft were lost, and 12 American aviators were killed.
That imbalance explains why the destruction of Yamato's force became more than the sinking of a famous battleship.
It marked the collapse of an entire way of fighting at sea.
The most heavily armed battleship ever built had gone to sea with a cruiser and eight destroyers. Within a few hours, Yamato, Yahagi, and four destroyers were either sunk during the attack or so badly damaged that they had to be scuttled. The four surviving destroyers were damaged. Yamato never came within effective gun range of the American invasion fleet at Okinawa.
What remained afterward was an enormous patch of disturbed ocean, wreckage, oil, men in the water, and a smoke cloud from Yamato's final explosion that witnesses could see from astonishing distances.
For Japan, it was one of the deadliest naval sorties of the war.
For the United States Navy, the engagement demonstrated something that had been developing throughout the Pacific conflict.
The aircraft carrier had become the weapon that decided what battleships were allowed to do.
On April 7, 1945, Yamato never fired her 18.1-inch main guns at another battleship.
She died fighting airplanes.
Yamato had been built for a battle that never came
To understand why the loss mattered so much, it is necessary to understand what Yamato represented.
Japan began designing the Yamato class during the 1930s around a simple strategic problem.
The United States possessed greater industrial strength than Japan.
If both countries entered a long naval building competition, Japan could not expect to match the United States ship for ship.
Japanese planners therefore tried another approach.
Instead of building the same number of battleships, Japan would build battleships individually more powerful than anything the Americans were expected to possess.
Yamato became the extreme expression of that idea.
She displaced more than 60,000 tons when fully loaded and carried nine 46-centimeter, or 18.1-inch, guns in three massive triple turrets. They were the largest-caliber guns ever mounted on a battleship that actually entered service.
The basic theory behind them belonged to an older naval age.
Japanese planners expected the Pacific War eventually to create a decisive fleet battle. American ships would move west. Submarines, aircraft, cruisers, and destroyers would weaken them during the approach. Then Japan's battle line would meet what remained.
The larger guns of ships such as Yamato would help destroy the surviving American battleships at ranges where their opponents would struggle to answer.
The concept was not foolish when it was first developed.
Battleships had dominated naval thinking for decades.
The problem was that naval warfare changed faster than Yamato's strategic purpose could change.
Pearl Harbor itself demonstrated part of the answer.
Aircraft could sink or disable battleships while their carriers remained far beyond gun range.
Coral Sea reinforced the lesson.
Midway made it impossible to ignore.
In those carrier battles, opposing surface fleets often never saw each other.
Aircraft found the enemy instead.
By 1945, the transformation was complete.
Yamato had been constructed as the ultimate ship for a decisive surface engagement.
When her decisive moment finally came, the enemy stayed hundreds of miles away.
Japan had already lost most of the fleet Yamato was meant to lead
The Imperial Japanese Navy that entered 1945 was not the same navy that had attacked Pearl Harbor.
Its carrier arm had suffered devastating losses.
Many of its best pilots had been killed.
Fuel was scarce.
American submarines had attacked Japanese merchant shipping so effectively that the movement of oil and other strategic materials had become increasingly difficult.
Surface ships remained, but their ability to operate freely had collapsed.
The Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944 accelerated that decline.
Yamato's sister ship Musashi was sunk there under repeated American air attack.
Japanese carriers were largely reduced to decoys because their trained air groups had been destroyed or badly depleted.
Cruisers and destroyers were lost.
The Combined Fleet survived in name, but much of the offensive system that had once supported it was gone.
Yamato returned to Japanese waters.
She was still one of the most powerful individual warships in existence.
Her strategic usefulness was shrinking almost every month.
A battleship without fuel cannot operate.
A battleship without air cover cannot safely move near an enemy carrier force.
A battleship whose enemy controls the surrounding sea and sky becomes less a weapon than a target waiting for an opportunity to be used.
By the spring of 1945, Japan was approaching that point.
Then American forces invaded Okinawa.
Okinawa brought the war to Japan's doorstep
American troops landed on Okinawa on April 1, 1945.
More than 60,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines came ashore during the opening phase. American naval forces offshore supported them with carrier aircraft, battleship gunfire, transports, landing craft, supply vessels, destroyers, minesweepers, and an enormous logistical network.
Okinawa was different from earlier Pacific objectives.
It lay only a few hundred miles from the Japanese home islands.