Yamato was the largest battleship ever built, nine 18.1-inch guns, 410 millimeters of belt armor, sixty-four thousand tons of steel that no treaty-legal warship on earth could match gun for gun. On April 7, 1945, she never fired a shot at an enemy ship.

This documentary reconstructs Operation Ten-Go minute by minute: the Surface Special Attack Force under Vice Admiral Seiichi Ito, the light cruiser Yahagi and eight escorting destroyers, the submarines Threadfin and Hackleback that spotted the sortie leaving the Bungo Strait, and the 386 aircraft of Task Force 58, flown from carriers including Hornet, Essex, Bunker Hill, and Yorktown, that found her in the East China Sea. It covers the design decisions of the 1930s that built Yamato in secrecy, the loss of her sister ship Musashi at Leyte Gulf, the doctrine that concentrated torpedo hits on a single side of the hull, and the two hours that ended the battleship as a weapon of war.

Figures are drawn from official US Navy after-action reports and standard published accounts of Operation Ten-Go and the Yamato-class battleships.

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