If greatness can be measured by size, Yamato was indeed the greatest battleship ever built. Her hull was 863 feet long—longer than all but America's Iowa-class ships. Fully loaded, Yamato displaced about 70,000 tons of water, outweighing even the biggest Allied battleships by more than 20 percent.
The largest and most powerful battleships ever built, Japan's Yamato and Musashi, were constructed secretly. These behemoths carried nine 18-inch/45 guns, the largest caliber guns ever mounted on a battleship, and their broadside weight was more than twice that of the Bismarck's guns.
Yamato 's Last Voyage. On her last morning, before the first American planes intercepted her, Yamato would have appeared indestructible. After all, she was the heaviest and most powerful battleship ever built, carrying the most formidable guns ever mounted at sea.
USS Missouri (BB 63)
The wreck you see was once the most feared warship in the world. Even now — 60 years after it went to the bottom — the Nazi battleship Bismarck is still a fearsome sight.
Why the USS Missouri has been described as the most famous battleship ever built - USS Missouri (en)
The Bismarck was the most feared battleship in the German Kriegsmarine (War Navy) and, at over 250 metres in length, the biggest. Yet, despite its presence, it would sink only one ship in its only battle. So what exactly made the Bismarck so famous?
USS Constitution, also known as Old Ironsides, is a three-masted wooden-hulled heavy frigate of the United States Navy. She is the world's oldest ship still afloat.
During the war, Tang was credited with sinking 31 ships in her five patrols, totaling 227,800 tons, and damaging two for 4,100 tons.
Yamato fought Allied ships only once, in the Battle of Samar Gulf, where she sank one American escort carrier and one destroyer.
Yamato settled on the seafloor 1,200 feet down and about 50 miles southwest of Kyushu, Japan. Experts believe that a fire raging in the battleship's aft secondary magazine caused tons of ammunition to ignite almost simultaneously, producing the blasts that tore the ship in half and sank her.
The world's biggest warship, the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, arrived in Oslo on Wednesday for a stopover criticised by neighbouring Russia as an "illogical and harmful" show of force.
In November 1944, the submarine Sealion did what no other American sub in World War II did: sink an enemy battleship.
Changing roles and a lasting legacy
With the sinking of Kongō, Sealion became the only allied submarine to sink an enemy battleship during World War II.
Weighing 72,800 tons and outfitted with nine 18.1-inch guns, the battleship Yamato was Japan's only hope of destroying the Allied fleet off the coast of Okinawa. But insufficient air cover and fuel cursed the endeavor as a suicide mission. Struck by 19 American aerial torpedoes, it was sunk, drowning 2,498 of its crew.
USS Nevada (BB-36)
The "Mighty Mo" was the last American battleship ever built and the last to be decommissioned. The surrender of the Japanese on the deck of the Missouri brought the Second World War to an end and remains one of the most impressive highlights in her illustrious 50-year career.
Jaime I. This is the last of the three España class dreadnought battleships constructed in Spain between 1910 and 1920, to standards predating the First World War. These ships were remarkable in naval history as the smallest dreadnought battleships ever built.
The U.S. Navy's newest warship, USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000) is the largest and most technologically advanced surface combatant in the world.
On the morning of May 27 the King George V and the Rodney, in an hour-long attack, incapacitated the Bismarck, and an hour and a half later it sank after being hit by three torpedoes from the cruiser Dorsetshire. Of the some 2,300 crew aboard the Bismarck, only about 110 survived.
Designated BB-2 in 1896 because it was the second "modern" battleship made for the U.S. Navy, the Massachusetts was so poorly designed that it was considered obsolete and retired from the fleet just five years after it was launched.
The Iowa-class battleships are the most heavily armed gunships the United States Navy has ever put to sea, due to the continual development of their onboard weaponry.
Twelve aircraft carriers were sunk by the enemy during World War II -- five fleet carriers, a seaplane tender and six escort carriers. The loss of the Bismarck Sea was the last time that a U.S. carrier went down due to enemy action.
1. The Wilhelm Gustloff (1945): The deadliest shipwreck in history. On January 30, 1945, some 9,000 people perished aboard this German ocean liner after it was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine and sank in the frigid waters of the Baltic Sea.