with Skate. Morison, in his official work on US naval operations in World War II, implied that she was on passage from Truk to Kavieng. In New Ireland when the attack was made but this is incorrect in both the light of Japanese records and the calculations of the distance and time involved.



After the attack, Yamato's speed was unimpaired and she continued on to Truk anchoring later the same day. Eventually, after a vacillating delay of five days, her cargo of troops and stores was off loaded. Any extension of her mission was cancelled. This may well have been a prudent decision because had she completed her sortie she would probably have been attacked by aircraft from two US carriers which were deployed to intercept just such traffic.As her subsequent experiences during the Battle of Leyte Gulf and in the South China Sea demonstrated, she had immense resilience under attack, but such an encounter in a less critical operation would have been, to say the least, ill-judged.



Fortunately, nobody was killed in the attack and as her cargo was being off loaded divers were sent down to inspect the damage and make temporary repairs. Truk had always been more of an anchorage than a fleet base and had few repair facilities, despite allied assumptions to the contrary, and so a return to Japan was inevitable after the torpedo attack. With one escorting destroyer, Fujinami, she sailed from Truk for the last time on 10 January 1944 and docked at Kure six days later. It was to