Well, they did the article within a historic perspective, i.e., at the tim eof the Battle of the Phillipines.
So with theat, that provided 2 task units to fight it out.....IJN had Yamato with 4 cruisers and about 10 detroyers against USN with 2 Iowa Class BBs, 5 cruisers and 10 DDs.
Bottomline was the secondary units would fight it out with the American superiority in radar opening fire first to keep the IJN DDs away from the Iowas because of the threat of torpedo fire.
The main battle between the Yamato and the Iowas would go the Americans way but not because of the way you might think. The telling difference in this would not be the 18 inch v the 16 inch but the Yamatos six 6 inch versus the Iowas combined 5 inch. The contention was that most of the damage done by surface fire to IJN battelships (i.e. Kirishima v South Dakota) was due to the amoutn of secondaries that the American ships could fire which drenched the superstructure and deck with multiple salvos. What this would result in would be a loss in electrical power adn centralized fire control leaving direct control on each gun mount causing the fire to less and less accurate.
The contention was the Yamato would try concentrate on a single Iowa with 2 forward turrets and enagge other with aft.
Final outcome was that the Yamato would end up a burning hulk and slowly finished off by torpedos from US DDs, one Iowa heading to the yard with extensive topside damage, and the IJN secondary untis driven away by fires shifted from second Iowa combined with each side losing a few DDs.
Sounds like a reasonable scenario to me.... |