The Battleships Yamato and Musashi: Selected Photos from the Archives of the Kure Maritime Museum; (The Japanese Naval Warship Photo Albums)

A “must-have” for anyone interested in this class of ships.

Excellent value for the money, better than expected, Japanese editions of this volume usually go for two to three times the price of this edition. This English version is every bit as crisp and good a quality as the original Japanese edition. Highly recommended! A+++

The book is very well done.My only gripe with book is most of the photos ,I'VE seen before..A lot of U.S.N. picturesof YAMATO sinking in1945 .The photo of the magazine exploding !!!!It looks like a nuke going off! The pictures I likedwere the Barbette being lowered into hole on deck.massive weight,massive job.They call it a turret. It's not .It's a Babette.The pictures of MUSASHI were all.new to me.I like the close up of the,the 3 forward gun turrets and bridge.Greatdetail!!All in all a decent book.Ithink its a little steep in price,for a knockoff .Would I buy another copy.maybe.

Has lots of historic pictures.

It’s a good collection of photos of these magnificent ships. I would say that about 2/3 of them have never appeared in any previous English language book, at least that I have seen and I have read a lot of books on these ships.However, there are several frustrations regarding the photos. Several of the photos are enlargements of a section of a previous photo. Another frustration is that the captions frequently don’t tell the reader anything interesting or useful. For example, the caption for the photo of the “Musashi” on page 59 says “Bridge (enlarged).” There is nothing pointing out (for example) the starfish that supports the radio antennas or the main armament 15 meter rangefinder.I think you already need to be familiar with the ships to appreciate the photos in this book. The captions of many of the photos simply say “During sea trials at…” There are also a couple of captions that are obviously wrong. For example:• Page 35: the caption states “Yamato anchored in Truk lagoon (stern portion enlarged.)” The photo is clearly of the bow section, not the stern section.• Page 92: the caption states “A Zero fighter … as seen from below a jib crane.” The airplane in the photo clearly is not a Zero fighter! It is a biplane, so it isn’t even a “Rufe” floatplane that was derived from the Zero fighter. Based on other books I have read, I think it is an F1M2 “Pete” observation plane.I think that many of these photos were used as the basis for the CGI color renderings in the book “Battleships Yamato and Musashi” by Skulski and Draminski (2017). Most of the photos in that book have been previously shown in other books, including this one. The interesting feature of the versions of the photos shown in the Skulski book is that they have been colorized.A really comprehensive book on the technical and engineering aspects of these ships is “The Yamato Class and Subsequent Planning" by Lengerer and Ahlberg (2014). It is a 542 page book that describes the conceptual development, design, construction, and operational histories in the ultimate detail. The conceptual development of the "Super Yamato" class to be armed with 510 mm guns is discussed in pages 535 - 540. The section “Summary of Service” in pages 28 – 43 is incredibly detailed – almost a day-by-day accounting of the ships’ movements.For yet additional information on this subject, I recommend “Warship Volume VII" edited by John Roberts and published in 1983. It contains a three-part discussion on "The Japanese Super Battleship Strategy" (written by Hans Lengerer) that is well worth reading.

There was no information on the construction or operation of these two huge battleships. The book is not worth the price of the purchase.

Poor. Very few photos were ever taken of the Yamato class ships because of IJN security. This book does not go beyond those very few, most of which have been widely published. Many of the book's photos are simply blown-ups details from the common photos. Many more of the book's photos are simply "class" shots of groups of men with small parts of the ships' superstructures as backdrops. The plans are very few, generally insignificant, and poorly presented. Overall, you are much better off with Skulski's book.

The Kure Maritime Museum's work on the "Yamato" - class battleships provides an excellent guide for someone wanting to build a replica of either vessel. But the photographs are largely limited to their superstructure installations and many of those are duplicates. Unfortunately no shots of either ship under construction, or their interior compartments; rifle turrets in particular, are included. Its however possible such photos were either highly classified or lost prior to or after Japan's surrender.