Word: battleships
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...Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, who recently (and somewhat defensively) reaffirmed his faith in the battleship (TIME, April 9), last week had some good words to say for air power: "Without our highly developed and closely integrated air arm, we would, in all probability, still be operating in Allied territory today...
...before U.S. attack, a desperate Japan played small cards for high stakes last week-and lost. In two disastrous days 417 Jap planes went spinning into the sea. In 30 fateful minutes of the second afternoon, two cruisers, three destroyers and her last naval trump, the 45,000-ton battleship Yamato, were battered to the bottom...
...Japanese Navy Ministry must have known that it could not repeat the air blow in sufficient strength. But that night a small Japanese task force built around the battleship Yamato-a light cruiser, a smaller light cruiser and nine destroyers-was permitted to steam out of the Inland Sea, glide through the dark along Kyushu's coasts and turn into the East China Sea on its mission toward almost certain destruction...
...same spot the Prince of Wales and Repulse had been-under heavy air attack without air cover. The fleet fought back hard, zigzagged crazily, poured purple, red, yellow and green antiaircraft puffs into the skies. The Yamato's 16-inch guns roared. But the attack was relentless. The battleship, smashed by eight torpedoes and eight 1,000-lb. armor-piercing bombs, went down in a roaring explosion. The two cruisers and three of the destroyers were sunk, the six remaining destroyers heavily damaged...
These accomplishments, said Admiral King, were the results of coordination of all arms-land, sea, air. Ernest King, a "battleship admiral," gave due credit to air power and especially praised the work of U.S. submarines. But triumphantly he declared: "The renewed importance of the battleship is one of the interesting features of the Pacific war. . . . Battleship fire provides the only gun (or weapon for that matter) which is sufficiently powerful and accurate to knock out reinforced concrete pillboxes eight to ten feet thick. . . . The battleship is a versatile and essential vessel, far from obsolete...