What You Need to Know: The Yamato-class battleships were the heaviest and most powerfully armed battleships ever constructed, designed by Imperial Japan before World War II to assert naval dominance.

Yamato was the lead ship of her class, constructed under extreme secrecy at the Kure Naval Arsenal in Hiroshima Prefecture. Ordered in 1937 as part of Japan’s rapid naval rearmament following ...

Imported from Germany in 1938, the lathe was used at the Kure Naval Arsenal to curve the barrels of Yamato’s main guns, the largest in their class at the time, and other essential parts.