Launching aircraft was only the first step.
The airplanes had to form up.
Navigate.
Find a moving target at sea.
Identify friend from enemy.
Coordinate attack directions.
Manage fuel.
Return hundreds of miles.
Find their carriers again.
Land on moving flight decks.
Refuel and rearm if necessary.
Each part required training.
The strike was an industrial process performed in combat.
Japanese antiaircraft fire could not break that process
Ten aircraft were lost.
That is not insignificant to the crews involved.
Operationally, it was tiny compared with the size of the strike.
If 386 aircraft were launched and ten were lost, more than 97 percent of the launched force survived the mission, although not every aircraft reached or attacked the target.
The Japanese ships therefore could not impose losses high enough to interrupt the American attack.
That is often the hidden measure of air defense.
A defense does not have to shoot down every attacker.
It needs to make attacking prohibitively costly or disrupt enough aircraft to prevent effective weapon delivery.
Yamato's defenses did neither.
The photographs became part of the battle's historical power
American aircraft photographed Yamato repeatedly.
One image shows her turning beneath bomb splashes.
Another shows fires burning.
Another captures the final catastrophic explosion.
NHHC preserves many of those photographs today, including images from planes associated with carriers such as Yorktown.
The photographs create an unusual historical record.
Yamato had been one of Japan's most secret ships.
Clear wartime photographs of her were relatively limited.
Her destruction, however, was photographed from above by her enemy.
Much of the world's visual memory of Yamato therefore comes from the hours in which she died.
The National Archives photographs preserve what reports cannot
One famous photograph shows Yamato's final explosion.
The Navy identifies versions of the image through official photographic numbers such as 80-G-413914, with originals held through U.S. Navy and National Archives collections. NHHC's Bunker Hill history describes the image as the catastrophic explosion that followed Yamato's sinking, probably involving stored 18.1-inch ammunition.
Another National Archives image, 80-G-316085, shows Yahagi under air attack with several attacking aircraft visible.
These are not later paintings.
They are photographs made during the operation.
They show the physical scale of the assault more directly than any casualty table can.
The images also hide almost every human being involved
From several thousand feet, Yamato looks like a shape.
Bomb splashes become white circles.
Smoke becomes a dark streak.
A destroyer appears only as a narrow line.
The thousands of men aboard cannot be seen.
That is why the casualty count changes the meaning of the photographs.
Without the numbers, the viewer sees a ship sinking.
With the numbers, every part of the ship becomes occupied space.
The bridge contains men.
The turrets contain men.
The engine rooms contain men.
The antiaircraft positions contain men.
The medical spaces contain men.
The flooded compartments contain men.
The sea around the wreck contains men.
The aerial view makes industrial warfare look clean.
The casualty reports restore the people.
The loss rate aboard Yamato was extraordinary even by wartime standards
Using NHHC's figure of 3,055 killed out of approximately 3,332 aboard, the death rate exceeded 90 percent.
That rate resulted from several factors.
The ship sank quickly once the final list developed.