Key Points and Summary - The U.S. Navy’s Iowa-class and Japan’s Yamato-class embodied different answers to the same problem: survive enemy gunfire long enough to land decisive hits. Yamato carried the ...

Why is a battleships’s underwater armor important? Battlewagons hurled big cannon shells at each other, not torpedoes, which is why battleships tended to be more heavily armored above the waterline.

Prior to the days of Tomahawk missiles and aircraft carriers, battleships were the way a nation would flex its muscles at sea. In 1941, as the Imperial Japanese Navy was in the midst of its dash ...