Imagine being ordered to sail the largest battleship ever built into enemy waters, run it aground on a beach, and fight as a stationary gun battery until it is destroyed. That was the plan for the Yamato in April 1945. This episode draws on U.S. Navy after-action reports, Japanese officers’ memoirs and naval doctrine analysis to reconstruct Operation Ten-Go, the last desperate sortie of the Imperial Japanese Navy, launched after Emperor Hirohito asked whether the Navy had no more ships.

We cover the fierce internal opposition from officers who called the mission absurd, the port workers who secretly pumped in more than a one-way supply of fuel, and the final party the night before departure. Then we follow the fleet as American submarines broadcast its position in the clear, Vice Admiral Mitscher launched nearly 400 carrier aircraft before Spruance’s battleships could intercept, and coordinated waves of fighters, dive bombers and torpedo bombers hit the Yamato’s port side until she capsized and exploded in a mushroom cloud visible 200 kilometers away.

• Why shame and inter-service rivalry, not strategy, drove the Navy to sacrifice its flagship
• How the Yamato’s colored anti-aircraft fire revealed the weakness of manual range estimation
• The counter-flooding order that drowned crewmen without warning to keep the ship upright
• Over 4,000 Japanese dead against 10 American aircraft and 12 men lost
• How the battle ended the battleship era and shaped Allied thinking about invading Japan