Why Japanese Battleships Were So Tall — Pagoda Mast

In the 1930s, the Imperial Japanese Navy took steel, glass and optics and stacked them tier upon tier up to a hundred and thirty feet above the waterline. Platforms, bridges, rangefinders and searchlights, piled one on top of another until the ships looked like floating temples. Western observers called it a pagoda mast, and it gave those ships one of the most recognizable silhouettes of any warships ever built — a shape no other navy came close to, identifiable at a glance, at long range, and from the air. This is why Japanese battleships were built so tall, and why the battle those towers were designed to win never came. Subscribe for more WWII naval history:    / @nauticallore   Credits Written, Researched, and Edited by Michael Narration by Benjamin Pemberton