The Ships of Battlegroup: Japan Hyuga (BB)

Displacement	36,000 tons	Belt Armor	12 inches
Overall Length	708 feet	Deck Armor	2.5 inches
Beam	111 feet	Main Turret Armor	12 inches
Speed	25 knots	Main Guns	12 × 14″

Laid down on May 6, 1915, launched on January 27, 1917 and commissioned on April 30, 1918, the ship carried a main armament of twelve 14 inch main guns mounted two per turret; two centerline superfiring forward, two centerline superfiring aft and two centerline superfiring amidships that could fire to both sides. These guns were superior to the 14 inch guns installed in the earlier Kongo and Fuso classes and the superfiring arrangement of the amidships turrets allowed for superior internal arrangements and protection compared to the earlier and otherwise very similar Fuso class. The Hyuga was name ship of a two-ship battleship class (which is, confusingly, sometimes called the Ise class, after the only other ship of the class). The class was propelled by coal-fired turbine engines that had oil-fired supplementary burners. The name "Hyuga" refers to a province in the Japanese home islands.

The Japanese were always worried about the superior number of United States battleships and were always trying to put superior ships into the water. Restricted in tonnage by treaty and unable to afford much new construction, the Japanese poured great efforts into modernizing and updating their battleline during the 1930s. Hyuga went into the yards between 1934 and 1937 for modernization which, among other changes, made her turbines all oil-burners which increased her speed slightly from 23.5 to 25 knots (3–4 knots faster than the existing American battleships), added torpedo bulges, increased antiaircraft protection and increased her displacement from 31,250 tons to 36,000 tons. In addition to modernization, the Japanese Imperial Navy honed a much superior surface night fighting capability with exhaustive training and equipped their cruisers and destroyers with the devastating "Long Lance" torpedo.

During the early stages of World War II, Hyuga sortied a number of times, notably for the abortive invasion of Midway, but avoided real combat. Because they were too slow to accompany the fast carriers, like the similar Fuso class, the older battleships, denied an offensive mission of shore bombardment and held back as a "fleet in being," were of little practical use—they were the wrong ships in the wrong war. In response to Japan’s heavy 1942 losses in aircraft carriers (one at the Battle of the Coral Sea, four at the Battle of Midway and one at the Battle of the Eastern Solomons), from September 1942 through September 1943, she and her sister Ise were converted into "hermaphrodite" battleships by replacing their two aft turrets with a short flight deck, a hanger under it with room for 22 dive bombers or seaplanes, an elevator, two catapults and radar sets. Born of desperation, this conversion proved to be a complete waste of time and effort as, after all that work, no aircraft were ever assigned to either ship; there just weren’t enough pilots.

Both ships accompanied the four remaining Japanese aircraft carriers as a decoy force during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, where all four carriers (including Zuiho and Zuikaku) were sunk but the two hybrid battleship-carriers were only damaged. Hyuga was sunk in shallow water at Kure by aircraft from American aircraft carriers on July 24, 1945. After salvage, she was sold for scrap in 1946.

For contemporary foreign battleships of the same vintage, see: Bretagne, Revenge, and Texas .

For a further discussion of what happened to the battleships of World War One, see the Introduction to these articles.