Original subtitles

Warships are the ultimate symbol

of a nation's military might.

These things are monstrous wonders of technology.

Enormous vessels, crewed by thousands,

bristling with massive guns and powerful aircraft,

they can deliver terrifying destruction

and turn the tide of history.

The ships were built to win the war.

There was no other reason.

From the beginning of the 20th century

to the present day,

these are the stories of classic warships.

From dreadnoughts to Bismarck,

to Japan's monster sea warrior, Yamato.

The American super ships,

Wisconsin, Lexington, and Enterprise,

to today's cutting edge Royal Navy carriers.

These are the world's greatest warships.

On September the 2nd, 1945,

officers of the Japanese high command

boarded a mighty American battleship

to officially surrender to the allies.

It is my earnest hope that from this solemn occasion,

a better world shall emerge

out of the blood and carnage of the past.

The ceremony took place

on board an Iowa-class battleship,

a huge floating fortress and fitting theater

to end the bloodiest war in human history.

A war that saw the rise

and fall of the greatest warships the world would ever see.

Bristling leviathans capable of brutal violence,

but also facing a fight for survival

from a new deadly threat.

These were the giant battleships of World War II.

The template for these ships

of the 1940s was laid down decades earlier

before World War I,

with the revolutionary HMS Dreadnoughts in 1906.

15 years of nonstop arms race

and then the war itself resulted in huge fleets

of these warrior ships.

As the first world war comes to an end,

dreadnoughts battleships are still the currency

by which nations measure their power and their prestige.

But the cost of having serious naval status

was crippling already weak post-war economies.

Something had to be done.

All the main naval powers, the United States,

Great Britain, Japan, France,

and Italy are invited to Washington for a conference.

And the treaty that results

from that puts a cap on naval spending and naval allocation

for all the signatory powers.

You get arm's limitation

to try and reduce the number of battleships,

the size of battleships,

and the capacity and capability of battleships.

A 10-year hiatus

on battleship building was also agreed,

plus a maximum weight of 35,000 tons.

So when buildings started again in the mid 1930s,

battleship designers were confronted

with a dizzying array of challenges.

A battleship is a compromise

between three primary factors.

That's gunnery, armored protection,

and its propulsion system.

Naval author, Mark Stille,

is an expert on battleship specifications.

The Washington Naval Treaty was in effect

for most of the 1930s up until 1937.

And with that 35,000 ton limit,

it was very hard to build a balanced ship

with heavy firepower, good protection, and a high speed.

You can never fit all of these systems aboard a single hull

to the degree that you might like.

What everyone's doing is looking for innovative ways

of trying to keep within treaty limits,

but at the same time,

give your ship the biggest punch you can.

That punch came from guns

that by the late thirties were more powerful than ever.

So what you're looking at here is a 14 inch naval gun.

This is almost as big as guns get in the Royal Navy.

This can fire a shell that is the weight of a small car.

So that's what naval warfare is at this point in time.

They're hurling basically VW beetles across the sea

at each other in 22 miles range.

So they're firing over the horizon.

They're firing much further than you can see.

For its newest battleship,

the Royal Navy wanted 10 of these guns on board,

but in less turrets to keep the weight down.

So two of the turrets would need

to house an unprecedented four guns.

HMS King George V.

35,000.

Ten 14 inch guns,

16 five-

Four 14 inch guns in one turret.

Now, that is an interesting concept.

It saves a huge amount of weight.

Usually you have two guns per turret,

so you are saving basically 250 tons of steel weight

from the turret alone.

It was a very, very clever and inventive way

of trying to solve a very difficult problem.

They were accustomed to building twin gun turrets.

They'd built the triple turret arrangement,

but they'd never tried a quadruple before.

With the King George V class,

the British thought they'd built the best warship possible

under treaty restrictions.

Germany's New Navy begins

to take powerful shape from the yards-

But not everyone was playing by the rules.

Announced be widened and deepened.

Hitler's Nazi party had risen to power

pledging to rebuild Germany's military might.

He had already def divinely torn up

the hated Versailles Treaty,

which restricted Germany to a tiny coastal patrol navy.

Now on the eve of World War II,

the launch of Bismarck makes a powerful statement.

The Bismarck wasn't only a military weapon,

it was also a status symbol

indicating the regaining of German sea power.

Also a symbol for German technological achievements.

Hitler had agreed with Britain

to stick to the Washington Treaty maximum tonnage.

35,000 tons of German steel is launched

in the presence of the Fuhrer himself.

The truth was Bismarck weighed

over 41,000 tons.

They cheated in their ship sizes.

That extra 6,000 tons is translated into quite a lot

of extra military value.

Bismarck was one quarter of a kilometer long

and 36 meters across her beam,

as wide as an eight-lane motorway.

She was crewed by over 2000 men.

Steam turbines drove three huge screws,

giving the Bismarck a 30 knot top speed

and a cruising range of over 16,000 kilometers.

Her 838 centimeter guns could fire their shells

over 19 kilometers with deadly accuracy.

A thick belt of rock hard armor protected her waterline,

turrets and magazines.

Bismarck was quite simply the most advanced,

most fearsome ship ever built.

Now, Hitler could unleash his rule-breaking secret weapon

on the Atlantic convoys, Britain's wartime lifeline.

May, 1941, German armies controlled half of Scandinavia,

north Africa and most of Europe, but not Britain.

After the REF had repelled his air force

thwarting his plans to invade,

Hitler knew he must still defeat Britain

to win the war.

He focused on its Achilles heel,

the vulnerable, but crucial Atlantic convoys.

Hitler knew that Britain was dependent

on vast amounts of war supplies coming from America

and also coming from the British empire

up around Africa into Britain.

The Germany Navy employed her vessels

not in a vain sea battle in the North Sea,

but against the British lines of communication.

Because these had been identified

as the weak strategic point of Britain.

German naval command made a bold decision.

Bismarck, along with only a heavy cruiser of support,

was tasked to attack Allied shipping.

From its main base at Scapa Flow in Scotland,

the Royal Navy still controlled the North Sea,

so Bismarck sneaked along the coast

of Norway and passed Iceland

where it could get at the vulnerable convoys

settling between Britain and America.

Now, those convoys are perfectly structured

to protect the merchant ships from submarines.

And what you wanna do when you have a submarine threat

is put all your merchant ships together

and surround them by smaller ships

that can sink submarines, job done.

The only time that job isn't done

is if a battleship gets amongst them,

'cause a battleship can sink any one

of those little escorts at long range

and then polish off every merchant ship

firing its main guns at a range of 22 miles.

As Bismarck set sail,

her captain Ernst Lindemann was in optimistic mood.

I have the comforting feeling that with this ship,

I will be able to accomplish any mission assigned to me.

We have for the first time in years,

a ship whose fighting qualities are at least a match

for any enemy.

Had Bismarck succeeded,

had it gotten to a convoy and sunk a dozen ships

and then got home safely,

that would've been something

we'd had real problems dealing with.

Like Hitler, Winston Churchill knew

that the stakes were high.

Britain could not lose what he called,

"this battle of the Atlantic."

"Without victory," he said, "there is no survival."

Next, Bismarck made her dash for the Atlantic past Iceland.

Here, she was detected by British patrols,

realizing this may be their only chance

to catch her, HMS Prince of Wales,

a brand new King George V-class battleship

was ordered to set sail.

Prince of Wales was still being finished

off in Scapa flow.

There were civilian engineers

on the ship finishing off its guns,

but it was dispatched straight away

to go and search for the Bismarck.

Andrew Choong is curator

of the Ship's Plans archive

at the Royal Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

These one's top secret sketches compare Bismarck's design

to the design of the HMS King George V-class.

What the admiralty was extremely keen to know

was how Bismarck compared

to the King George V-class battleships,

which are of course our most modern battleships at the time.

What we are looking at

is a very basic general arrangement drawing

of the two ships.

What is really remarkable about two ships

is not the difference between them,

but how incredibly similar they both are

in terms of the weight of offensive power they both carry.

But with an extra and illicit 6,000 tons

to play with, Bismarck's designers have been able

to build in a clear advantage.

Bismarck is a much wider ship

than the King George V.

This is what allowed the Germans to build in

significantly more watertight compartmentalization.

And this made the ship not only a better

and more stable gun platform,

but also made her that much harder to flood

and therefore sink.

On May 24th, 1941, the Prince of Wales,

along with post World War I battle cruiser, HMS Hood,

caught up with Bismarck.

Hood was Britain's largest warship.

She was fast, but lightly armored

and a soft target for Bismarck.

Her artillery and a level of training

of her gun crews was excellent.

So only shortly after Bismarck had started

to fire at HM Hood, the first shells hit the ship.

One of Bismarck's huge shells

had penetrated Hood's deck igniting the aft magazine

where ammunition and other explosives were stored.

The sailor on board the Prince of Wales witnessed the scene.

The whole of the vast ship was enveloped

in a flash of flame and smoke,

which rose high into the air

in the shape of a giant mushroom.

All the remained apart from bits of wreckage

was a flicker of flame and smoke on the water surface.

There was no time to abandon her.

Out of Hood's crew of 1,418, only three survived.

The brand new Prince of Wales had made a poor showing too,

a revolutionary foregone turrets proving highly unreliable.

Quite often the quadruple turrets didn't work.

No, no, no, no, no.

There are gaps in the operating of the 14-inch turrets.

Despite failings,

one shell had landed a telling blow.

Prince of Whales managed to strike Bismarck

up near the bow, which robbed her of ability

to get about a thousand tons of fuel oil from the bow tanks.

Those hits ended Bismarck's sortie into the Atlantic,

and the decision was made to run down towards France

to try and get her repaired.

Bismarck was on the run

and her commander, Admiral Lutjens,

knew that Royal Navy would be out for revenge.

Seamen of the battleship Bismarck,

you have covered yourself with glory.

The sinking of the battle cruiser Hood,

is not only military but psychological value,

for she was the pride of Great Britain.

Henceforth, the enemy will try to concentrate his forces

and bring them into action against us.

She had been observed by a flying boat

of coastal command in a hunt,

which will echo down the corridors of time.

Almost everything the Royal Navy has

that will float is put into the Atlantic

to try and find Bismarck.

With that many assets looking for Bismarck,

it's very hard for her to get away.

She was leaving an oil trail behind her, she went,

which would make it easier for her to be located.

Eventually, she was attacked

by British Swordfish torpedo bombers.

These old fashioned biplanes came in at 80 miles an hour,

dropped their torpedoes.

One Swordfish torpedo

disabled Bismarck's rudder,

locking her into a tight turn.

With his ship now a sitting duck,

Lutjens sent a defiant final message to his superiors.

Ship unable to maneuver.

We will fight to the last shell.

Long live the fuhrer.

Decisive blow comes at the end.

Bulk of the home fleet catches up with her,

and she's pummeled from long range by British battleships.

HMS King George V ,

sister ship of the Prince of Wales,

was one of the first on the scene.

Her foregone turrets worked better.

And along with HMS Rodney,

they scored hundreds of hits on the stricken battleship.

Even Bismarck's formidable armor could only take so much.

A British eyewitness recalled.

Considering the punishment

she had received already, she fought back magnificently.

And one can but admire the courage of those men.

We passed within a couple of miles of her

just as she sank at 1100 hours,

and by then she was just a smoking rack.

The Navy was out for revenge

and Bismarck paid in full.

At home in Britain,

the sinking is a huge boost for flagging morale.

It was a fine-looking ship,

but she just couldn't take it.

For Germany, the loss is also profound.

The Bismark was cherished as the blossom

of German shipbuilding technology, a powerful ship.

The largest ship afloat, almost unsinkable.

And now this vessel is lost.

And this is of course, a massive psychological setback.

The loss of Bismarck had a profound effect

upon Hitler's strategic thinking vis-a-vis his navy.

He felt very keenly the loss of prestige

that had resulted from this mission, which to be honest,

had been a really bad idea in the first place.

Adolf Hitler really has very,

very little interest in navies.

He famously said at one point that,

"On land I'm a hero, and at sea I am a coward."

Hitler decided his U-boats could take care

of the Atlantic convoys from beneath the waves.

The next month, he turned back to what he knew best,

fighting on land.

In June, 1941, Hitler ordered the invasion

of the Soviet Union.

Within four months, his armies were at the door to Moscow.

The Soviets needed help.

The US and Britain started to send convoys of ships

loaded with crucial supplies of arms,

equipment, and food from Scotland

via the freezing northern ocean

to the northern seaports of Russia.

The convoys were getting through,

and Hitler found his armies fighting Soviets

in American trucks, Canadian tanks and British aircraft.

He needed an effective weapon to try and stop the convoys.

Tirpitz launched in 1941,

was slightly bigger and faster than Bismarck.

She was Hitler's last great battleship,

and she would not follow in her sister's wake.

He doesn't want to risk another prestige ship

on an operation that would probably only result

in its destruction.

It results interprets being sent to the relative security

of the Norwegian fjords.

And we see a very interesting reversion,

almost to first World War naval thinking,

where we have this incredibly powerful warship,

but we dare not use it in case we lose it.

By parking his last great battleship in a fjord,

Hitler had stumbled upon a way

to make Tirpitz very effective without risking her at sea.

Being held in Norway had a paralyzing effect

on the British,

and meant that the British had to keep a number

of their heavy ships in Scapa Flow

as a direct deterrent to the Tirpitz coming out.

The beneficiaries were the Japanese

because the British had to have two fleet carriers

and three battleships tied up in Scapa Flow watching Tirpitz

when they were desperately needed in the far East.

The war was still in the balance,

and Churchill wanted Tirpitz sunk.

It would take the best minds and bravest men two years

to do what must be done.

The sinking of the Tirpitz would be a new victory.

The destruction of this last great visible symbol

of German sea power.

June, 1942, Hitler's jackboot was still firmly

on Europe's throat.

His U-boats were wreaking havoc in the Atlantic.

but what was left of his surface Navy

was deployed with great care.

Tirpitz sculpted in the fjords of Norway,

menacing the convoys that supplied the Soviets

as they pushed back against the German invaders.

Churchill and the admiralty feared the damage

a rampaging Tirpitz could inflict on these convoys.

One was unlucky enough to be at sea

when a message that Tirpitz was on the move was intercepted.

A protective escort was sent to intercept her,

leaving the convoy defenseless against U-boats

and the Luftwaffe.

The threat of Tirpitz coming out was enough for them

to order the scattering of Convoy PQ 17

with the result that that convoy was slaughtered.

The great irony being

that Tirpitz hadn't even really sortied at all

to come after the convoy,

but it illustrates the fear which the presence

of this ship engenders in British naval mines.

So again, you see this worth

and the function of of capital ships,

of huge battleships as symbols of power.

The Tirpitz-induced panic had caused the loss

of 24 out of 35 ships.

Churchill's obsession with attacking

and destroying the ship he called the beast, intensified.

A location was known,

but getting at Tirpitz was a different matter.

She was very well protected, floating in a kind of cage

with a kind of steel nets around her,

protecting her against attacks from U-boats or submarines.

There was a huge number of anti-aircraft batteries around

in addition to her own considerable anti-aircraft armament.

And they had also devices to set up kind of artificial mist

or fog just to cover the vessel from air attack.

Even if all this was overcome,

Tirpitz had a formidable lust line of defense.

So what I'm sat on here is a piece of solid Krupp steel,

14 inches thick.

And this is part of the main armor belt

from the German battleship Tirpitz.

And when you build a battleship,

you can't armor the entire thing.

It would be so heavy, it would sink like a stone.

So all you can do is pick the most important parts

of the ship and protect them.

So this belt was designed to run for hundreds

of feet along the side of the ship,

and that's there to protect the engines,

the boilers, the ammunition magazines, and the shell rooms.

This is basically per Tirpitz, his coat of armor.

A dozen attacks by aircraft from carriers

and long range bombers had made little impact.

But like all battleships, Tirpitz had a soft underbelly.

It was this lightly armored lower hull

that will be targeted next.

So you see attacks by X-Craft miniature submarines,

which can sneak in through the defenses

without anyone seeing and plant charges underneath Tirpitz.

And the impact will kind of shake and damage a hull,

and that works fairly well, but doesn't sink the ship.

With Tirpitz soon fully operational once again,

the British command turned to a man who had a track record

of destroying hard to hit targets.

Barnes Wallace was the man

behind the dambusting bouncing bombs

that had caused havoc in Germany's industrial heartland.

Ian Murray is an expert on his work.

Barnes Wallace is up with the best partition inventors

certainly of the 20th century.

He had such unusual ideas,

many of which were proven to work successfully.

To destroy Tirpitz,

Wallace initially adapted his dambusting bomb

to attack a ship's hull.

He called his idea highball.

The workshops at Portsmouth's historic dockyard

have painstakingly restored a highball

that Ian and his team retrieved

from Loch Striven in Scotland.

It was here bombing runs were practiced

by specialist pilots in aircraft

in preparation for an attack on Tirpitz.

The Mosquito was a small bomber, but it had no armament.

And it was extremely fast.

Squadron of probably nine

of those aircraft would've flown up the fjord,

dropped it at the correct distance.

So the the bomb would've skipped in,

hit the foot thick armor on the side of the ship.

But it wouldn't have exploded there.

It would have continued to spin

and it would've rolled down underneath the keel of the ship

where the steel was only probably an inch or two

at the most, and it would've detonated there

and blown a large hole in the bottom of the ship.

That was all good in theory,

but the Germans were one step ahead

as proven by Tirpitz next mooring.

The Germans very inconveniently had the ship positioned

in a fjord where it was very difficult to attack

by aerial torpedo or with highball

'cause it needed a reasonable run up.

And an approach to the ship

and the fjord would've been very difficult

to attack it broadside on, unfortunately.

The Air ministry asked Wallace to think again.

He revisited an older, more conventional design

for a dambusting bomb.

One that didn't bounce.

Wallace had originally proposed a very large bomb,

which would've gone deep into the ground.

So the Air ministry sort of said,

"Could we try some of those?"

They had success with that six-ton version,

which was called Tallboy.

Tallboy was one of the most awesome weapons

built in Britain during the war.

Only a stripped down Lancaster heavy bomber had the power

to carry the 12,000 pound earthquake bomb.

A normal bomb would just have been a single metal casting

full of explosive with a straight tail on the back.

Tallboy was machined to have a lovely smooth casing,

and they were balanced

so that the weight was distributed equally.

Wallace also borrowed an idea from the Archers,

which on the tail fins of the bomb.

He actually angled them at five degrees.

So as the bomb fell,

and it would've been falling for something like 30 seconds,

the bomb would actually have spun.

And that sort of gyroscopic stabilized it

and it gave it a nice straight flight path

all the way down to the ground.

On November the 12th, 1944,

the 24th mission against Tirpitz was launched.

Two Lancaster squadrons dropped 29 Tallboys

from high altitude over the fjord.

That massive explosion set off the magazines

inside the Tirpitz,

and it turned over within a few minutes.

So Tirpitz, like Bismarck, was lost to history.

Thousands of miles away war was raging in the Pacific,

where the American Navy was unleashing an all new battleship

on the Japanese Imperial fleet.

It remains an icon of American warship building at its best,

the Iowa-class Battleship.

The Iowas have a very good claim

for being the finest battleships ever produced.

They have the right balance of armor, speed and armament.

It's absolutely nailed it.

They were the first US battleships

completely free of treaty restrictions,

which meant that the US could pour the whole

of its production capacity into these vessels.

Almost every battleship

before has had to compromise somewhere.

Those ones get the balance absolutely perfectly.

This is USS Wisconsin,

one of four Iowa-class battleships launched in 1943,

all still afloat as museums.

Follow me into the chartoom.

Clayton Allen looks after Wisconsin,

now permanently moored in the naval port

of Norfolk, Virginia.

We are the last battleship

in the US Navy battleship fleet, BB-64.

There are no more battleships in the US Navy.

So what we're seeing here is Broadway.

It's the longest continuous passage on the ship.

It's 250 feet long. It's six feet wide.

And the sailors adopted that name Broadway

because on a hot summer steamy night

and all the lights are lit up

and so they're trying to connect to home.

The original design compliment

for this ship was to have 1900 men,

but because of the threat of kamikazes,

they added more gunner's mates

that way we could pull watch in the guns 24 hours a day.

They added a thousand extra men.

So about a crew of 2,900.

Crew working inside the ship

in key operational areas were well protected.

This is what we call the Citadel.

And if we were under attack,

you would want to be inside this space.

Inside this 17 inches of armor, the lookouts, the helmsman,

the lee helmsman, the captain, the officer of the deck,

all these men are protected,

and they have to be inside here during combat.

These were very advanced ships,

even by the standards of World War II.

They were very heavily armed with nine 16 inch guns.

Most importantly were their electronic eyes,

their sensor suits

in terms of search radars, gunnery radars.

Now we're gonna go down to the heart and the soul.

We're going down seven decks.

Welcome to engine room one.

We have four engine rooms.

Collectively, each engine room

at maximum speed can produce 53,000 shaft horsepower.

So at 33 knots, or 37 and a half miles an hour,

that's 212,000 shaft horsepower.

That's amazing When you're pushing around 58,000 tons

of ship, men and armor.

With a range of 25,000 miles,

Wisconsin could almost circumnavigate the globe.

So we use a lot of fuel,

2.3 million gallons of fuel every two weeks.

We try and maintain the tank levels at 80%.

We never wanna have to tell the Pentagon,

sorry, we need to get fuel before we go there.

All you do is say, yes, we're headed there now.

When Wisconsin entered the war in April, 1944,

all those formidable capabilities would be fully tested.

Her radar and anti-aircraft batteries were crucial

in protecting against Kamikaze attacks

on the vulnerable US carrier fleets.

But it was when American soldiers had

to fight the Japanese hand to hand

that Wisconsin's big guns would make their mark.

In preparation for an invasion of Japan,

US marines fought a bitter campaign

to clear the Japanese occupiers from islands

across the Pacific region.

From the Marshall Islands to Guam,

from Iwo Jima, and finally to Okinawa.

If we're trying to work our way to Japan,

we know we need to conquer some key island chains

so that we can have a foothold for aircraft.

And so to help with that,

we did shore bombardment in Okinawa again in Iwo Jima,

looking for pill boxes, that kind of thing,

and softening the beachhead.

Tom Mumpower served

as Wisconsin's fire control officer.

We're in Ford main battery plot.

We're gonna control the fire of the turrets from here.

I was in charge of making sure we got a proper solution

on the target we were assigned.

Tom bombarded shore targets in Vietnam

using the same guns as his predecessors

when they supported island landings in the Second World War.

The guys are on the beach and they need help, okay?

They don't have time to wait for an aircraft

to sortie or that kind of thing.

That's where we are very accomplished.

That is once we find the target,

we can land on that target over and over again.

If we were putting troops ashore,

they have no better friend than a Iowa-class battleship.

The Japanese defiance was finally ended

when two atomic bombs were delivered by aircraft.

The greatest ceremonial honor

of the war was given to a ship,

the Iowa-class USS Missouri.

Her four deck was the stage for the allies vanquished enemy

to finally surrender.

The war had been a brutal, humiliating disaster for Japan.

And perhaps nothing embodied the catastrophe

more than the story

of the most powerful battleship ever built.

She is the most superb battleship

that humankind has ever produced.

Unfortunately, that title slips from her grasp very quickly.

In 1940, as war had raged in Europe,

Japan was defiantly building its military strength

for the coming struggle against the USA.

The Imperial Japanese Navy

was already assembling an impressive fleet.

Then they launched the mightiest battleship

that would ever float, the Yamato.

Battleships have got progressively bigger

and more capable.

And the Japanese build the largest super,

super dreadnoughts in the world.

Acknowledging they could never out build America

in quantity, Yamato's designers opted to go big.

They built a battleship that was 70,000 tons,

which gave them a qualitative overmatch

against the likely American battleship of the day.

That was the only chance that Japanese saw

in being successful against the Americans

in a major fleet engagement.

Yamato's hull was huge.

Longer than three Boeing 747s, nose to tail.

She was cladding 23,000 tons of armor

in places over 60 centimeters thick.

But it was her peerless firepower,

which made Yamato so fearsome.

Nine 18 inch guns arranged

in three turrets were the largest ever mounted on a ship.

Yamato was designed to secure and maintain naval supremacy

in the Pacific for Japan.

Yamato, in some respects, in the context of her time,

was the most superb battleship

that humankind has ever produced.

Unfortunately, that title slips from her grasp very quickly.

The Pacific Theater is a very different war,

and battleships play their role,

but there's nowhere, I don't think, where you can see it,

more sharper focus on the fact that battleships have

to be part of a combined cohesive fleet.

In the vast Pacific Theater,

the aircraft carrier is king,

able to deliver ordinance accurately over huge ranges.

After their carrier fleet was decimated

at the Battle of Midway,

Japan's ability to protect its most valuable ships

from US air attack was greatly diminished.

Japanese battleships are being forced

to operate more and more without air cover.

And what this exposes is how incredibly vulnerable they are

if they're not part of a balanced fleet.

Admiral Yamamoto rather disparagingly likened Yamato

to an ancient religious scroll,

the sort of thing old people

in the superstitious hang up on their walls

to give them comfort,

but otherwise of no practical value, whatever.

Despite being fitted

with 162 anti-aircraft guns,

Yamato was kept at bay by the constant threat of attack

by American planes.

By the time the Americans reached Okinawa,

just 257 kilometers from Japan itself,

Yamato was finished as a tactical weapon.

All that was left was for her 3000 crew men

to join their kamikaze pilot compatriots

in the ultimate sacrifice.

She is sent on a do or die mission really

to try and penetrate the American fleet

that is surrounding Okinawa

and supporting the landings there.

She's sent in without air cover.

The theory is she will go in at high speed all guns blazing

and actually ground herself deliberately

as an unsinkable shore battery.

Long before reaching Okinawa,

over 100 US aircraft unleashed a relentless attack.

She put up quite a fight,

but her weaponry was ineffective.

Her crew were not of the quality

that characterized the Imperial Navy

at the beginning of the war.

And she effectively suffered the same fate

of any Japanese warship that tried to put out

of its harbor in the spring of 1945.

Finally, after 17 direct hits,

the pride of the Japanese Navy detonated,

a mushroom cloud, six kilometers high, rose into the sky.

The flash of light was seen from Japan itself.

All hands were lost.

Yamato's inevitable demise

alongside those of Bismarck and Tirpitz

signaled the battleship had had its day.

All big gunfire power alone was no longer enough.

Aircraft carriers were the future.

But there was one extraordinary exception:

America's mighty Iowa-class battleships.

The four Iowas were so capable

and fitted so well into the all powerful US carrier fleets

that they alone of all World War II battleships,

had long post-war careers.

In the decades that followed,

the Iowas bombarded shorelines in Korea and Vietnam,

and following an extensive refit,

were again brought back into service

by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

The Russians at the time, I think in 1980,

had about 1700 active duty ships and we had 400.

And so there's a buildup of the fleet.

And to keep the cost down,

they decided they would bring back ships

that were sitting in ready reserve

and we could build, refit that

and make it a modernized ship.

It was 385 million to bring this ship back to life

and modernize it and bring on computers

and that kind of thing.

But we did some tests and tried to computerize the guns,

but frankly, you can't fix what isn't broken,

and it works really well, manipulated by hand.

Wisconsin last fired her guns

and launched missile's bombarding Iraqi positions

during the first Gulf War in 1991

before being decommissioned later that year.

But Wisconsin and her three sister ships were preserved

as regal reminders of a bygone era.

To me, it's amazing, you know,

built in 39 months by hand, 45,000 tons of steel.

You could use this ship again today.

We gotta throw these chains off

and spruce her up a little bit

and train up some good Americans.

Will they? No, but that's a different story.

Could they? Yes, and that amazes me.

The battleship may have lost its crown

to the aircraft carrier,

but while they ruled, these imperious castles

of steel shaped the history of naval warfare.

The battleship went from being the yardstick,

the currency by which navies measured their worth

and importance right through to a plateau

where they became a vastly important,

powerful, useful naval asset.

And then kind of tipping off the end

where they became a subsidiary, a nice to have platform,

able to provide gunfire support for troops ashore.

I don't think we'll ever forget them.

The 20th century, really,

the first half of the 20th century

is dominated by the battleship.

Next time, the mighty dreadnoughts.

The story of how one man's vision

led to a revolutionary warship

that would spark an arms race.

The message was modernize, modernize or die.

An arms race

that would lead to the First World War

and greatest sea battle the world had ever seen.

It's the story of warships so powerful

that they changed the world.