Some communications and radar equipment had been damaged.
Then more American aircraft arrived.
Task Group 58.3 aircraft attacked around 12:59 p.m.
Pilots from Bunker Hill and other carriers joined the assault.
Weather remained difficult.
Some American pilots had flown hundreds of miles at low altitude beneath cloud layers to locate the Japanese ships.
When they arrived, the target was easier to identify than before.
Smoke marked the formation.
Yamato was impossible to mistake.
The attacks continued.
Damage control became a battle inside the battle
Large warships are designed around the assumption that they will be damaged.
Compartments can be sealed.
Pumps remove water.
Fire parties attack flames.
Electrical systems have backups.
Flooding can be shifted.
Emergency steering systems can replace damaged controls.
Yamato possessed extensive damage-control capability.
The problem was scale.
A single torpedo hit might be manageable.
Several hits concentrated on one side could overwhelm the system.
Counter-flooding on the starboard side initially reduced the port list.
That action required deliberately putting seawater into parts of an otherwise intact ship.
The purpose was to restore balance.
The cost was reduced buoyancy.
A particularly terrible episode occurred when counter-flooding required spaces on the starboard side to be flooded rapidly.
NHHC records that several hundred crewmen may have drowned inside because there was not enough time to warn them before compartments were flooded.
The ship was being sacrificed internally in order to remain upright.
Even that measure was temporary.
American torpedo pilots began attacking the stern
As Yamato slowed, another weakness appeared.
Steering.
A battleship that cannot steer cannot evade attacks.
American pilots deliberately targeted the stern in an effort to damage steering systems and propellers.
The concept was simple.
First remove maneuverability.
Then the ship becomes easier for every aircraft following behind.
Yamato eventually became caught in an uncontrolled turn.
Her speed fell.
The giant battleship that had been designed to exchange long-range gunfire with an enemy battle line was now struggling simply to maintain direction while aircraft arrived from multiple angles.
The circle was closing.
More bombs destroyed more of the antiaircraft defense
Yamato took additional bomb hits through the superstructure.
The effects accumulated.
Light antiaircraft mounts were destroyed.
Crewmen were killed.
Command spaces were damaged.
Smoke reduced visibility.
One bomb hit the area where wounded men had been gathered and killed wounded sailors along with medical personnel.
This is one of the details hidden by the phrase “Yamato took several bomb hits.”
A battleship is a city made of steel.
Thousands of people occupy hundreds of spaces.
A bomb that lands on one section does not strike an abstract machine.
It enters compartments filled with men.
The damage therefore increased both mechanically and humanly.
Every dead engineer, electrician, pump operator, signalman, gunner, corpsman, or damage-control specialist made the next emergency harder to manage.
Eventually there were too few systems and too few men left to correct what was happening.
Yamato's list became irreversible
The most important visible change was the increasing lean toward port.
At first, counter-flooding corrected part of it.
Then more torpedoes hit.
At 2:07 p.m., another torpedo struck on the starboard side.