The Machines That Built the Shinano (1940-1944)

It's the summer of 1942, inside a covered graving dock on Tokyo Bay. Under a roof of matting and netting, in the half-light, stands a half-built Yamato-class battleship hull, hidden from the sky. Then word of Midway reaches the yard, and the order comes down to cut her open and finish her as a carrier instead. This documentary follows the machines that built the aircraft carrier Shinano at Yokosuka Naval Arsenal, and the story every other account skips: not her famous sinking, but how she was actually built. We start at the machine that made her possible, Dry Dock Number Six, a graving dock 67.5m wide and 17m deep, dug specifically to build the Yamato class, then roofed and screened behind a canopy of sisal matting and camouflage netting and worked by a sealed yard so completely that no official photograph of her construction was ever taken, the only major warship of the 20th century of which that is true. Sources: Joseph F. Enright with James W. Ryan, "Shinano! The Sinking of Japan's Secret Supership" (St. Martin's Press, 1987); combinedfleet.com, "IJN Shinano: Tabular Record of Movement" (Imperial Japanese Navy Page); Commander, Navy Region Japan / DVIDS, "The Yokosuka-built Aircraft Carrier Shinano"; naval-encyclopedia.com, "IJN Shinano (1944)"; Wikipedia, "Japanese aircraft carrier Shinano" and "Yamato-class battleship."