Quote:
Originally Posted by Raptor1
I'm not certain, but didn't the USN only know for certain about the Yamato fielding 18.1" guns after the war was over? I know they were officially designated as 16" guns by the Japanese in order to hide their true caliber.
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Good point!
A quick search on this led me to a fascinating article:
http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-084.htm
Indeed the US had a very poor idea of what Yamato was like. It appears they had virtually no idea what the ship even looked like, or how many guns it had until August '42 (!) It was not until early 1944 that they had air recon photographs of the ship to estimate that the guns were larger than 16" and the the ship was larger than 60,000t (as opposed to 35-55,000t estimates in previous years).
Nevertheless, shrewd of them to consider it an extreme threat and counter it with numbers. When in doubt, prepare for worst-case.