Devils Brigade Seize Yamato!

[JustinT]

(Totally from my immagination here. hehe. )

Spring, 1945. The British admiralty and the US Pacific fleet, knowing the dangers posed by the Yamato, hatch a daring, downright insane plan - seize the battleship right out from under the noses of the IJN. thier secret weapon? The Devils Brigade (off topic - i know theres another name for them but for the life of me it escapes me - i am pretty sure they are the predecessors to the modern Joint Task Forces). several months of planning culminate in a fleet of a dozen modified submarines luckily slipping thier way into Truk where Yamato is moored, and under the cover of darkness and fog, nearly 500 Devils Brigadiers board, and in the blood bath that ensues, miraculously manage to seize the battleship - even more miraculously, without alerting the rest ofthe IJN. Now, with the same dozen submarines for some cover, the Devils Brigade must take the Yamato out and somehow get back to Allied forces - without either side blowing them to atoms in the process.

Ok, Yea, pure fiction, but i beleive there are those far more educated than me on this subject - what are the odds (aside of impossible) of this being accomplished? first, seizing the battleship, then getting her back to the allied fleet in a form of combat ready condition?

I wil lsay this - if in some universe this DID get pulled off - the results would be exceptionally "interesting" to say the least.

[JustinT]

Oh, and, one other thing - providing the entire chain of miracles did go unbroken, then, pair her up with the new Iowas. Just for the sake of making one Hades of a mess.

[Tiornu]

Alas, but as you already suspect, there is zero chance of success just as there is zero chance that anyone would bother to have created such a plan. The Allies have no motive for wanting to steal Yamato.

[Karl Heidenreich]

Tiornu,

I´m not so sure. The allies even bothered to execute a plan to kill Rommel and the Germans bothered to save Mussolini. Yamato was a worthy prize. The problem is that considering a Japanese martial arts proficient crew you´ll need a couple Terminators to achieve some degree of success...

[Tiornu]

Yeah. Unfortunately Arnold is Austrian....
The Allies would not have any use for Yamato. There are no crews available who are familiar with the Japanese equipment. How long would it take simply to convert all the gauges etc to English? There are no factories online to manufacture Japanese ammo and equipment. It would be easier to just finish a couple more Iowas or Alaskas.
The benefit is in getting Yamato out of Japanese employment, and that can be more easily accomplished by sinking her.

[Nellie]

Aircraft was already the main weapon at sea at that time. To risk so much men for overtaken a battleship that way would be stupid in 1944-1945. It was better that was done with a comparatively low loss of men.

[RF]

The main difficulty with such a plan as proposed here is in how the seizors of the ship are expected to sail her with a skeleton crew with no experience of handling such a large vessel, with next to no knowledge of its engineering and weapons systems?

Perhaps a more realistic proposition along these lines might be considered for mid-June 1940, in the last days before the French capitulation - a German airborne assault to seize the French ships Richelieu and Jean Bart before they could escape to North Africa, for the purpose of providing the Kriegsmarine with two battleships to cover Operation Sealion.

Coming back to the original proposition there was of course one action involving ''unofficial'' forces, in this case the ''Calcutta Light Horse'' which were used to penetrate the harbour of Portuguese Goa in India to eliminate a German merchant ship which was sheltering under Portuguese neutrality and sending clandestine intelligence by radio to German U-boats operating in the Indian Ocean. In this case the target ship was sunk in a purported maritime accident and not actually captured/stolen.

[RF]

Another issue here - if Yamato was succesfully seized the seizors would presumably be entitled to salvage rights - how much would such a large ship be worth, would they be paid and would they have to pay income tax on their ''earnings?''