[Music] the outcome of world war two is at stake over 400 American and Japanese warships do battle at Leyte Gulf it was the largest naval action in history Japan is counting on a secret weapon the Americans know almost nothing about except her name Musashi you'll find in the summer of 1944 the naval intelligence experts groping for an understanding of these huge ships at 72,000 tons she's the largest battleship ever built she's not just 10% bigger than some of these other vessels she's nearly double bristling with anti-aircraft batteries and massive 18-inch guns you can't believe all the firepower that comes up at one time her builders boast she's unsinkable yet in her first major fight this super battleship is sent crashing to the ocean floor but mysteries have always surrounded Musashi now Americans and Japanese researchers are joining forces to unlock her most stubborn secrets honestly smoke this front part is where flooding is taking place why did an unsinkable giant go down so fast was it overwhelming American airpower or a fatal design flaw that sent nearly 1,000 Japanese sailors to their death as hypocrite you know hundreds of people are crying for help in horrified voices as they were all sucked into the waves to unravel the mysteries of Musashi the missing giant must first be found [Music] in February 2011 a research vessel begins a three-week expedition in the civilian sea of the central Philippines you know if this was anywhere else it's the old old coastline would have been changed with buildings and high-rises and all sorts of things and that's not the case here so we know we're looking at basically what the pilots saw 70 odd years ago the expedition is the brainchild of the late Paul Allen co-founder of Microsoft the son of a world war two veteran Allen committed significant resources to searching for the wars most iconic missing shipwrecks among them the mysterious Musashi Rob craft is in charge of conducting all subsea operations Musashi was the pride of the Japanese fleet it was so important to the Japanese people that they didn't even form the population and it didn't son lots of people would like to find the Musashi it's one of the great battleships one of the the truly remarkable ones that haven't been found David Mearns has made a career out of hunting for lost shipwrecks after months spent combing through military archives in the u.s. in Japan he's identified the critical clues he hopes will lead them to Musashi one is visual aerial photographs taken by American pilots during their final devastating attack there's the plane coming in lining up right there to attorney Sachi and this is the next frame and the sequence you can no longer see the plane but we see a torpedo hit clearly recognizable in the background of these photographs is the outline of civilian Island a few miles to the south outside this yeah yeah but there are other clues that may narrow down the search even further and the most important one came from one of the destroyers the Japanese destroyer that was ordered stand by Musashi the Ashima actually took a position for Musashi sinking using the position reported by the destroyer kioshima Mearns and craft have determined a high probability search area the tools selected for the search is called a multi beam echo sounder it's a type of sonar that's mounted on the ship's hull an array of downward looking beams emitting sound waves sweeps across the seabed to create an image of a mile wide swath we're over here on the western side of our box we're running the first line to the east and this happens to be line number 13 and each line should take about four hours and because we're looking for in the terms of the depth of water quite a small target we're mapping the seabed in very very high detail so the byproduct of our search is a really detailed map of this particular part of the Philippines even though Musashi is as big as a 75 storey building the battleship will only show up as a small speck on this vast and unexplored seafloor there's no guarantee she can be found it all depends on her orientation on the bottom if she's in one piece two piece three pieces we should be able to detect that and see that in what they call the back scatter imagery when he hit something hard it shows up as a very very dark object it takes four days to cover the high probability area it yields an impressive picture of a seabed below including a newly discovered sea mount but so far there's no sign of Musashi so our highest probability to begin with was all on the basis of this Japanese destroyer kioshima which gave us a precise sinking position over it's now very clear that that position wasn't dis accurate as I had hoped and the cost of that we're now having to expand the search their focus shifts to the second albeit less precise clue the aerial photographs taken by the American planes attacking Musashi I mean I think it's because if we go down here we're gonna be able to we're gonna be able to get a better feel yeah this cardboard box which has the same field of view as the camera the airman used allows Mearns to get a close approximation of what they saw Musashi would be about two kilometres closer to the island from here during these when these photographs are taken and she sings for hours later with the evidence gleaned from the photos they plot a new series of sonar runs that's what we've covered that red line there anywhere outside of that she could be I would almost be bias it further to the west because in that photograph which is clearly heavy westerly supposed to North but the clock is ticking the expedition only has two weeks left to find the mystery ship musashi was first conceived in the 1930s a time when Japan's efforts to expand its territory and influence in Asia and the Pacific were increasingly blocked by its former ally the United States Japanese national prestige had been dealt an insult by the Washington Naval Treaty just to put it in numbers the treaty created circumstances where for every 100 United States warships that are built the Japanese are permitted 60 it created a future in which the Japanese Imperial Navy was going to be numerically inferior to the United States Navy in response a powerful faction begins advocating for a different strategy toss it on your own doing the law I made akane type will dig it up in Japan at the time had neither the resources nor the budget to build a large number of battleships to fight against the u.s. so they decided to counter quantity with quality that was the idea they came up with quality meant constructing giant battleships that could overcome the enemy's larger numbers the new battleship was called the Yamato class after its prototype to win public support this Navy Handbook likens it to a powerful figure in a popular movie of the time [Music] [Applause] [Music] the Hollywood film about a giant eight creating mayhem in New York was a huge hit with Japanese audiences and so the comparison is not just a comparison evocative of power and strength it's also kind of pointed squarely at New York City and therefore pointed directly at the Americans in March 1938 construction of Musashi began here at the Mitsubishi shipyard in Nagasaki incredibly the giant gantry crane that built her is still in use today the Japanese virtually had to reinvent naval architecture and design of ships to be able to build such colossal vessels work proceeded under a literal veil of secrecy when they were being built they were actually built behind the gigantic curtains that were raised up in the shipyards and so even though friendly people couldn't see what was going on behind there so there's some attempt to keep it a secret a schoolgirl at the time ms Matsuura remembers what it was like I was told never to look in the direction of the shipyard that soldiers are on board keeping watch you must not look but the soldiers will take you away even as a child I kind of sensed that a big war was going to break out on December 7th 1941 that war began in its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor the Japanese Navy used carrier-based airpower to devastating effect against the American fleet ironically that success only reinforced its faith in its own new super battleships a lot of the naval theory at the time was based on this fleet on fleet engagement the Japanese in particular were still hoping for that kind of thing this is how you rest sea control from the other guy you defeat his fleet in August 1942 Musashi began secret sea trials weapons and defenses carefully kept out of sight from enemy spies were put to the test musashi's main armament came in the form of three turrets mounted three type 94 naval guns these were of eighteen inch caliber and were therefore the largest naval guns in use anywhere in the world [Music] to defend herself Musashi was shielded by the heaviest armor ever used on a ship's hull the high-grade steel came from low phosphorus iron secretly mine and Japanese occupied Manchuria for nineteen-year-old Masahiro OSE and the hundreds of young sailors assigned to serve aboard this giant Musashi was a technological wonder we Kaku Danna made after you heard a lot we never thought for a second that Musashi would sink in people would die he believed that such a giant ship could not be taken down to them she was the King Kong of the sea day 14 of the Musashi search expedition at last the team thinks they're onto something she'd be broken in four pieces sooner one of their sonar runs has revealed a promising target in structure things falling up this introduction link lemon essential area engine room break here explosion there and stern it's all gonna be right there and if we capsized it's gonna be over but after making several more sonar runs they've reluctantly reached the conclusion the object is too large you know it's 100 meters bigger than what we're looking for so it's it's 30% bigger thing is definitely something yeah other than yo [Music] after three weeks the expedition is out of time the research vessel must return to port but they've covered a staggering 1,400 square miles an area as big as the state of Rhode Island what we now have is a very highly accurate map of the entire area that we want to search we know where she's not we've ruled out large sways of the civilian sea and their commitment to the task has only intensified everybody's kinda got a lot of blood sweat and tears and trying to find this rack you know you give this personal passion go and trying to find this thing but to succeed they must first find a better tool for searching the rugged sea floor below by the time Musashi joined the Japanese war effort in the Pacific in 1942 the momentum was about to shift the Japanese actually are prevailing at this point because they're better at surface warfare than we are in this early stage in the game but then becomes clear is that anytime the aircraft carriers get involved the whole thing changes the u.s. embraces naval air power in a way that it just hadn't before it revises the way that it trains revises tactics and it revises weapons to the extent that it introduces a new fighter a new dive bomber a new torpedo bomber and it even introduces a new torpedo the mark 13 torpedo was more reliable and could be dropped at higher altitude than its predecessor at the same time American intelligence secured a valuable lead on the island of Tuilagi Americans captured a document that was a worship recognition manual that was to be used by Imperial Navy sailors to recognize their own ships and it had a drawing of yamato-class ship but after that nothing it's as if Japan's most secret weapon had vanished you'll find in the summer of 1944 the naval intelligence experts groping for an understanding of these huge ships and they came up with estimates that were just unbelievable but as they would later discover even those estimates were way too small by June 1944 American forces succeeded in pushing the Japanese fleet totaling some 60 ships and 450 aircraft out of the western Pacific the battle became known as the great Marianas turkey shoot they call it that because they harvest so many Japanese aircraft they shoot them down wholesale the Japanese lose after carrier strength and they lose almost all of their naval aviation American General Douglas MacArthur was now poised to invade the gateway to Japan itself the Philippines on October 20th MacArthur came ashore on the eastern side of Leyte island where American troops encountered little resistance the opinion United of American intelligence agencies was that the Japanese Navy would not come out we based our ideas on the assumption that the Japanese would need a considerable amount of time to train new air crew and pilots for their aircraft carrier groups but American intelligence was ignoring one critical fact Japan's Navy remained committed to fighting a decisive battle at sea its surface fleet was still largely intact led by two Giants Americans had yet to lay eyes on Musashi and Yamato American radio intelligence had knowledge of the movements of these Japanese ships but still not of their characteristics on October 24th 1944 Admiral caritas Center force with 26 ships entered the Cebu E&C two other slightly smaller Japanese fleets approached from the south and north the Battle of Leyte Gulf was about to begin in the morning when carita is crossing the civilian sea the reconnaissance flights pick this up and of course at that point they're aware they got two very large battleships down here American pilots were the first to catch a real glimpse of Musashi and Yamato we knew that they had two big battleships that's about all we knew and it was obviously the biggest thing we'd ever seen although caught by surprise the US Navy was prepared 7th fleet moved to guard the late a landing site itself while 3rd fleet deployed in three groups to the north unfortunately the one element of the 3rd fleet that's closest to San Bernadino Strait is a little bit weaker because it sent one of its carriers off to refuel its sole remaining large carrier was only half the size of the two Giants bearing down on it with 24 more warships in Japan's center force [Music] in late February 2015 Rob craft and David Mearns renew their search for Musashi since they were last here they've found the perfect tool for the difficult task ahead it's now installed aboard the expedition yacht octopus equipped with state-of-the-art deep-sea equipment their key search tool is still so new it's rarely been used in the deep ocean a UV is an autonomous underwater vehicle our a UV is capable of diving down to 1500 meters it takes with it a side-scan sonar system that looks out on the sides and provides us an image of things that may be lying on the seafloor it's survey route is selected based on the bathymetric map that systems engineer Wayne Sadowski compiled during the 2011 expedition this map is of the basically the subsea volcano that we're seeing and so using this map we then program the autonomous vehicle traveling 2/3 of a mile down and a few hundred feet above the ocean floor the AUV Maps the terrain but distinguishing a man-made object among the rugged volcanic outcrops is challenging because the lava rock is as reflective as the acoustic waves are that we use to bounce off the metal of Lusaka after 18 hours the AUV returns to the surface and is brought on board to download the data everybody had a go at looking at the SAS good information Everett what do you see oh it's something shiny there that's the rock no that's a rock no that's something no that's a rock the first a UV survey yields nothing as does the second and I'll tell you that up to that point we were starting to second-guess ourselves we had searched a large portion of the primary search area we weren't finding what we had hoped to find on the third run they finally see something generally when you're finding Iraq it's either happening instantaneously but in this one it was a bit of a slow burner because the sonar image didn't so the shoutout this is Musashi this is where I think it was more of there was an indication something was there for a closer look they launched a remotely operated vehicle or ROV it's a little smaller than a Volkswagen bug but it's it's still quite substantial and it's on a cable as well but in that cable it has power conductors and fiber and through that we get to watch our HD camera that's on the end of a tether it will take the ROV an hour to reach the ocean floor almost a mile below plenty of time to wonder if at last they're going to set eyes on Musashi on the morning of October 24th 1944 the skies over the Cebu Yin sea were filled with over 40 American warplanes u.s. naval aircraft that opposed the Japanese center force and the civilian sea consists of the Hellcat fighter the Helldiver dive bomber and the Avenger torpedo bomber the fighters led the way strafing runs you're gonna go after the battleships because they are the biggest target they can do the most damage to you therefore you want to take them out but the Japanese Gunners were ready unleashing a hail of fire from Musashi's 100 anti-aircraft guns da-da-da-da-da-da-da aerial attacks had become fierce after war broke out so the decision was made to strengthen anti-aircraft defenses and machine guns were also rapidly added but there was no industrial capacity to manufacture bulletproof armor at this point with little to protect them some of the gun crews suffered heavy casualties [Music] under those hunters everything was blown to bits there were pieces of machine gun everywhere with human flesh stuck to them I could not believe they were parts of human beings bob freely was a 22 year old pilot flying an Avenger torpedo bomber that day this guy is so big up there I don't see all the fighters I don't have time to look around the city anybody else because everything happens like that what he did see was a giant battleship below the Musashi has 11 planes coming in on it you're coming down then you start leveling off and all this time they're shooting at you and you don't know whether this bullets gonna hit you so you you get about the distance that you think you should be at the altitude you should be open your bomb bay doors and you're all set his rear gunner watched as their 2,000 pound torpedo slammed into musashi's portside the torpedo bomber is the most effective weapon against the battleship because it can release something that carries a great deal of punch the American mark 13 torpedo carried a warhead of 600 pounds of high explosive that was enough force to punch through a man armor belt Musashi withstood the initial American assault but the attacks kept coming the fleets that are there at Leyte consists of multiple aircraft carriers it's mind-boggling by today's standards how many ships were there and so as a result of that they could continue to attack an attack and wave after wave coming in during the last wave an American pilot took his memorable series of photographs the relentless onslaught began to take a toll when the Musashi loses speed and falls behind then it's obvious because she is damaged so now's the moment to close in for the kill Lionel Guilbeau was the rear gunner the Helldiver bomber my father died above the battleship for the 2,000 pound hole McPherson bomb right down the stack these particulars very formidable ships but they also made very large targets that were easily identified and I think that's one of the reasons a lot of the Aviators concentrated on Musashi and she paid the price as a result Yamato escaped the onslaught but at 7:30 9:00 p.m. four hours after the final attack Musashi crippled yet miraculously still in one piece rolled over and sank you know hundreds of people are crying for help in horrified voices as they were all sucked into the waves in the pitch darkness of the deep sea the ROV pilot carefully maneuvers his vehicle we came across some very small pieces of debris which looked the right age look at the right material but we weren't quite sure everybody was pretty much running on adrenaline at that time it was very exciting the ROV moved slowly through this unfamiliar landscape they took about I guess a half-hour 45 minutes before we started getting into the heavier debris and then it became more and more obvious that's Japanese it's the Japanese warship the minute we found the valve that had the kanji writing on it just like okay this is Japanese now all we have to do is prove that it's the Musashi to do that they need to find the ship's bow there's box too far away of the gossipy [Music] yes the gold paint is gone but the outline of the Imperial Japanese flower emblem is still there as soon as we found the ink chrysanthemum on the bow we knew what we were looking at there wasn't the kind of jumping up and shouting for joy that I have experienced in the past it was sort of a quiet relief we had finally done it at long last Musashi is found but a new and still more intriguing mystery is about to emerge over the next week the search team explores the wreck of the super battleship top it does another one of the mounts for a light seventy years after she disappeared they're compiling the first detailed picture of a lost technological marvel because there are no drawings for the ship and there's only a handful of photographs so we're the first people really to document what she looks like they also find signs of those who sailed her a shoe a helmet and something unexpected on a warship boy that's film that is a filmstrip it's not just a metal ship these are crew that served in it and some obviously died on the site as well so it's important to document that [Music] musashi lies a good distance from the sinking position reported by the destroyer kioshima but that's not the only reason she was so hard to find the Musashi is literally on the side of a volcano and if you've hiked up a volcano before you've know there's great big huge rocks and rock droppings and boulders and so it's hidden inside the geology the difficulty in finding the wreck is also explained by her shocking condition just the complete and utter destruction of the ship itself the stern and the the bow sections are really the only whole parts of the hall that remain the bridge is a somewhat intact from what we can see with the rest you know the center section of the ship which is completely destroyed so essentially it's broken its back in at least two different locations and for a ship that withstood so many attacks from torpedoes and bombs and essentially sank intact that's more than I expected what then could have caused such widespread destruction it's a question which so far has no answer [Music] one of the last pieces to be discovered is Musashi's most potent weapon which is obviously what caught everybody's imagination these special 18-inch guns these guns are held into the body of the ship into the bar bets by gravity alone so when the ship capsizes they're incredibly heavy objects that just fall out that their own weight we found one of these guns after a week of searching by now the expedition has assembled an extensive record of Musashi over a hundred hours of video footage alone we want to make sure that we have fully documented the condition in the state of the raft so we can share that with everybody in you know what we've done here and the data that we've gathered will provide the clues that people can use to recreate or have an understanding of what actually happened the search team has opened a door now others must step in to unravel musashi's final hours in March 2016 a group of Japanese experts assembles in Tokyo to take up the challenge to help them the Japanese broadcaster nhk has created a valuable tool like pieces of a gigantic puzzle it's taken the hours of digital images gathered by the search expedition painstakingly piecing them back together and creating a unique 3d model of the wreck [Music] [Music] [Music] only now is musashi's enormous size apparent at 263 meters some 900 feet she's longer than three jumbo jets to begin with these experts want to find out why ship so many believed unsinkable should fail its first serious test what is that thing that looks like a hole Masami Tezuka has been studying the Musashi for 30 years he believes he's identified one clue a damaged section protruding from the port bow most likely caused by a torpedo strike speed what you saw she would lose speed as a result making it difficult to steer her from an attackers point of view about as dragging would have been easier to hit with bombs or torpedoes the last photo of Musashi shows her down at the bow leading to the belief that flooding here caused her to sink but a new scientific investigation at the university of kobe tells a different story professor Hiro tada Hashimoto a specialist in naval architecture conducted the analysis when he simulates flooding inside the bow the ship does pitch forward but results show watertight compartments in the rest of the ship would not have been affected vocal about it simple business even if the bow including the part protected by armor plating is completely filled with water the ship will still be left with enough buoyancy so this flooding alone definitely could not have caused the ship to sink or capsize to find answers to why Musashi sank these experts will have to look elsewhere starting in the place where Musashi was constructed at the Mitsubishi shipyard in Nagasaki the Japanese team makes an important discovery a file marked Musashi is uncovered in the company archives it contains more than 200 pages of never before released original blueprints by comparing images of the scattered pieces of the wreck with the blueprint the team is able to identify them a pump a boiler all parts protected by the heavy steel armor intended to make Musashi unsinkable so the biggest question is where did the armor go in the high-resolution sonar image of the debris field one structure attracts their attention examining video footage from the area they discover a 90-foot piece of steel it looks like part of the missing armor when they match it up to the 3d model they find it comes from the hull on the port side but how did it come loose Musashi's armor belt was so thick that everyone felt very confident onboard the ship that they could stand up to the punishment of any weapon that could be thrown at it but whereas ships making use of thinner plate it could be welded musashi's armor could not be welded it was simply too thick and so they turned back to the 19th century and simply hot riveted the plates together a company that took part in riveting the armor for Musashi is still operating in Osaka two workers recreate the technique used at the time to join these two pieces of armor plate a special hammer drives the rivet into place Japanese sailors assigned to Musashi had great confidence in the ship they thought it was unsinkable and that's because above deck they saw nothing but guns and firepower but then below deck they were aware that the ship had the thickest armor of any warship in the world but the Japanese investigation team doesn't share the sailors confidence I think rivets were the problem no matter how thick the armor plates were they wouldn't last once the rivers came loose Musashi's armor was attached at a slanting angle to deflect incoming shells she was built to withstand artillery duels against other battleships but instead she was hit by torpedoes and aerial bombs which weren't weapons she expected to face when she was designed if a torpedo from an attacking aircraft struck a joint in the armored plate it could cause rivets to fail and seawater to begin to seep in so how did this apparent vulnerability to torpedo strikes go unnoticed the team discovers early concerns about this possible design flaw a former officer on Musashi who earlier served on her sister ship Yamato made this recording before he died I heard from Yamato screw that during a torpedo attacked although the armor remained intact the rivets were blown off and gradually water started to leak in around the joints it made me realize if we were hit by a lot of torpedoes there would be more flooding and that could be her weakest point Shigeru Maki no a naval designer who oversaw the construction of Musashi reported similar misgivings but later wrote the naval authorities decided to simply patch the armor joint rather than find a permanent solution to the problem in the minds of musashi's 2,400 crewmen many still in their teens or early twenties the Imperial Japanese Navy instilled a beguiling illusion their super battleship was quite simply unsinkable one of them Masahiro OSE believed it to the very end right up until the moment it sank I didn't think it could happen the Musashi wouldn't even budge an inch with a torpedo or two striking her there would be no flooding so we were told Musashi also proved vulnerable to another unanticipated weapon armor-piercing bombs from the air as the search team discovered underwater footage revealed one of several three-foot holes rupturing the ship's deck and a short section of the bow we saw the damage from the bombs so that's corroborating what the US pilots were telling us about the hits they were getting on Musashi these weapons although they are as crude and as simple as they can be sends through the air column penetrate decks and can explode below deck this in the end causes great destruction on Musashi now thanks to the 3d model of the wreck the full extent of that destruction can be seen especially up on the bridge where the captain and many of his officers were stationed a gaping 20-foot hole gouged into the starboard side marks where a bomb struck [Music] one crew member up here miraculously survived kenji Otsuka remembers what happened well he's the he bet again all the desks chairs everything flew to the portside bodies of those who were killed were piled up there to the blast wave knocked us over killing some one man lost everything from his neck up sitting in a chair about ten feet from where I was just dead standing on an open observation deck captain in Oguchi suffered a shrapnel wound in the shoulder protected from the fire himself crewmen kotaki observed what happened I saw him from behind he was covering his shoulder with his hand like this holding binoculars like this and giving commands any ordinary person would have collapsed from such injuries I thought that's a true commander like her brave captain Musashi sustained multiple hits from weapons she was never designed to face incredibly her unusual strength allowed her to go down in one piece leaving one final question what tore her to pieces as she sank [Music] that's a 46 centimeters show right when the search team originally discovered Musashi the turret housing was blown away they couldn't believe the wreckage was spread over such a wide area a square kilometer more than half a square mile most of this shipwrecks that I've done are in deeper water than this and we're seeing debris fields of 300 meters 400 meters so two seas one twice or three times that size is really telling me that not only are we dealing with a large ship but a large ship that has been blown apart how does a ship that left the surface intact now lie shattered over the ocean floor the Japanese team is determined to find an answer to this final mystery of Musashi I'm not sure if it came from a boiler or something else but is it possible this damage was caused by steam exploding one member doesn't think so masataka Yoshida has been studying explosives for over 30 years he believes something else tore Musashi apart I can't think of any explanation besides a gunpowder explosion if an explosion like that occurred their internal parts would have shattered into many pieces but where did this massive explosion take place one piece of debris in particular has caught yashida's attention although mangles almost beyond recognition it's part of the magazine holding the shells for one of musashi's main guns [ __ ] tacky flat C D ro cause I got me another little fix steel like this wouldn't have ended up being so badly twisted if the ship had just sunk since Musashi fired her main guns only a handful of times during her final battle an estimated 160 shells and a hundred tons of gunpowder were still stored inside her suspicions as to where the explosion occurred falls on the second main gun and first-hand reports David Mearns uncovered seemed to support it to see that level of damage on the seafloor it tells me only one thing that the Japanese survivors who heard explosions as it was capsizing those explosions were actually magazine explosions in the final moments as Musashi heeled over in sack a few eyewitnesses aboard a nearby destroyer reported seeing the flash from a small explosion which means that some fires were already burning inside her that makes me think that initial combustion rapidly spread into an explosion gunpowder contains some oxygen so even underwater where there's none under the right conditions the combustive explosion can occur to test his hypothesis doctor Yoshida ran a computer simulation it clearly shows a ship made of heavy steel would have suffered catastrophic damage from an explosion below her second main gun the ship's core would have splintered into hundreds of small pieces with only the bow and stern remaining relatively intact the high-resolution sonar map confirms this is how the wreck rests on the seafloor [Music] David Mearns believes other factors also contributed to the massive damage sustained by Musashi they see that a large section of the bow was imploded and we can look at the drawings and know that there's watertight compartments in there and they've squeezed as the ship sank very quickly as Musashi plummets to the bottom a crushing pressure equivalent to the weight of a car bears down on every square inch when it hits the seabed it's hitting the seabed actually a very high speed probably minimum of 15 knots maybe as much as 25 knots and there's impact damage and all of this was evident in one section of the bound somewhere in musashi's twisted remains lies her captain ko shahira in Oguchi he went down with his ship after handing over his final report in it he wrote I am truly glad that the other battleship suffered almost no damage and I feel some consolation in thinking that Musashi was able to assume the role of a victim [Music] musashi bore the brunt of the American air assault on October 24th 1944 leaving most of japan's center force unscathed including the super battleship yamato undetected admiral Corita and his twenty remaining ships steamed through the night [Music] heading for the American landing site at Leyte to catch the defending force from seventh fleet by surprise on October 25th led by the super battleship yamato the Japanese Navy launched the decisive surface attack it had long sought but a bold strike by American destroyers and destroyer estimates managed to confuse the Japanese commander so Admiral Corita makes the fateful decision to reverse course and in so doing he walks away from what would have been the most lopsided victory of the Japanese Imperial Navy in the Second World War Japan's Navy had camped on winning the world's biggest sea battle to bring America to the negotiating table but they made a fatal miscalculation surface ships with big guns were no longer the dominant force at sea the age of the battleships the building and the loss that much Laoshi is the endpoint and weren't gonna be defeated by another battleship another great battleship but by aircraft and that's when the era of aircraft carriers took off [Music] on October 24th 2016 at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo surviving crew members from Musashi gather to remember their lost comrades the discovery of the wreck and the evidence it reveals of musashi's vulnerability is a cruel reminder this was not the unsinkable battleship they were led to believe her to be but four crewmen tsukuda the wreck still bears an important message [Music] honey you can eat better babe I think Musashi would like the people to know how bravely her crew members fought and died what an astonishing battleship she was how she fought and met her tragic end in the emptiness of war I think those are the messages that the Musashi was to send us [Music] for Bob freely an American pilot who launched one of the many torpedoes that sank her musashi's discovery stirs thoughts of reconciliation I don't want any Japanese survivor to think that I'm trying to law these medals over them our opportunity is we have a common ground they are survivors of the same action that I am a survivor of and I just like to say welcome brother [Music] in the morning we will remember them above the wreck site in the Cebu E&C the crew of the octopus pay their own final respects it is a war grave you know we as sailors and seafarers ourselves they have a lot of respect for what happened here instead of war planes they launched a flight of paper cranes symbol of the peace that has endured for three-quarters of a century between once bitter enemies of World War two [Music] [Music]
