The lengths the Japanese went to in order to prevent the West from finding out about two such colossal projects are pretty funny to read about in retrospect. Musashi, for instance, was built in Nagasaki, a town that is almost entirely built on hills overlooking the harbor, which makes it... challenging... to conceal anything you might be building waterside, but particularly an 863-foot battleship. Oh yes, and there was a United States consulate on one of those hills. So what did the shipyard do?

Curtains made of rope.

Lots and lots and lots of curtains.

(And they built a Not-Strictly-Needed Warehouse to block the American consulate's line of sight.)

Meanwhile—and this is the reason I thought of this here—over at Kure, once Yamato's hull was launched and had to be fitted out dockside, they knew they couldn't keep the existence of the ship a secret any more; so what they did was surround her with smaller ships, not in (as is sometimes supposed) a futile sort of "Foghorn Leghorn hiding behind a sapling" attempt to hide her, but to make it impossible for an observer to see all of her at once, the theory being that this would disrupt the viewer's sense of scale and make it hard to estimate how big the ship was. This is why, for instance, in one of the few good photos of her that I know about, she's parked next to Hōshō, which was tiny by comparison.

And here's the funny part: all that comic-opera stuff worked. US Naval Intelligence had no idea they had a pair of battleships that goddamn big, to the point where when Yamato was first sighted by US submarines and aircraft in '42, ONI assumed the reports must be wildly exaggerated. Even after the war, the occupying naval personnel had trouble believed they had been as big as the Japanese were telling them.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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