Talk:Nagato/@comment-58.3.14.249-20131022074520/@comment-122.131.158.83-20131023165314

A better translation, I think, would be: "To sink in battle... not that light... my long-cherished ambition..."

There's a misperception that Battleship Nagato was sunk by a nuclear bomb during Operation Crossroads (one website described it as, "She survived the first two nuclear blasts but the third sunk her" - there were only two blasts in Crossroads; Charlie was canceled, and by the time of Wigwam 1955 Nagato had already sunk), but strictly speaking this was not the case. Nagato was already lightly damaged when she was converted to an air defense platform during the war, and she was actually leaking as she was being moved to Bikini. They patched up the leak, and she was stable during both Able and Baker tests. What actually happened was that Baker's blast caused a tsunami that caused Nagato to start listing to starboard. Because she'd become highly radioactive thanks to Baker, crews couldn't board her to correct her list. This proved fatal over the next five days because a Japanese battleship with a pagoda mast was seriously overbalanced and needed immediate corrections when it started to list to prevent it from continuing to. On the night of July 29 1946, she finally capsized and sunk.