Yamato by Warlord Games

Victory at Sea: Yamato

The Yamato and her sister ship Musashi were built shortly before the outbreak of World War II. They were the heaviest and most heavily armed battleships ever built; they were armed with nine 18.1" Type 94 main guns – the largest guns ever mounted on a warship.

The battleship's design was a response to the numerically dominant U.S. Navy—the primary threat to Imperial Japan in the Pacific. Although designed in 1937, the battleship was not commissioned until late 1941, a week after the fateful attack on Pearl Harbor. She served as the flagship of the Combined Fleet. From her bridge, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto commanded the fleet at Midway in June 1942, despite it resulting in a disastrous defeat for the Japanese. She was subsequently replaced as flagship by the Musashi and spent most of 1943 and 1944 rotating between ports in a reactive role.

October 1944 was the only occasion on which Yamato furiously fired her main guns in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Yamato had been tasked with repelling the American troops invading the Philippines. Although victory seemed within the Japanese grasp, the ferocity of a counterattack by a light escort carrier group of US Navy Task Force 77 was so great that the Japanese, mistakenly believing they were facing a much larger carrier force, decided to retreat.

By early 1945, naval superiority in the Pacific was firmly in the hands of the US Navy. In an effort to delay the Allied advance, the Yamato was dispatched to Okinawa in April 1945, with no expectation of ever returning. Her orders were to beach herself and fight to the point of destruction. This was not to be, however, as she was sunk by US carrier-bombers and torpedo bombers on April 7, 1945, losing the majority of her crew.

Includes a ship in Warlord Resin.
The model is delivered unassembled and unpainted.