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Operation Ten-Go was the last major Japanese naval operation in the Pacific Theater of World War II. Other renderings of this operation's title in English include Operation Heaven One and Ten-ichi-gō. In April 1945, the Japanese battleship Yamato, the largest battleship in the world, along with nine other Japanese warships, embarked from Japan on a deliberate suicide attack upon Allied forces engaged in the Battle of Okinawa. The Japanese force was attacked, stopped, and almost completely destroyed by United States (U.S.) carrier-borne aircraft before reaching Okinawa. Yamato and five other Japanese warships were sunk. The battle demonstrated U.S. air supremacy in the Pacific theater by this stage in the war and the vulnerability of surface ships without air cover to aerial attack. The battle also exhibited Japan's willingness to sacrifice large numbers of its people in desperate attempts (see kamikaze) to slow the Allied advance on the Japanese home islands. By early 1945, following the Solomon Islands campaign, the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the once formidable Imperial Japanese Navy's Combined Fleet was reduced to just a handful of operational warships and a few remaining aircraft and aircrew. Most of the remaining Japanese warships in the Combined Fleet were stationed at ports in Japan, with most of the large ships at Kure, Hiroshima. With the invasions of Saipan and Iwo Jima, Allied forces began their campaign against the Japanese homeland. As the next step before a planned invasion of the Japanese mainland, Allied forces invaded Okinawa on April 1, 1945. (Full article...)