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 ...

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 ...

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.