World War Two for the day

The BBC has an article about a long-lost battleship:

American billionaire Paul Allen has announced the discovery of the famous World War Two Japanese battleship, the Musashi, more than seventy years after it was sunk by US forces. Allen said the vessel was found by his private exploration team at a depth of more than three thousand feet on the floor of the Sibuyan Sea off the Philippines.
The Musashi and its sister vessel, the Yamato, were two of the largest battleships ever built. American warplanes sank the Musashi (photo, top and photo, bottom, at right) on 24 October 1944 during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, believed to be the biggest naval encounter of World War Two, in which American and Australian forces defeated the Japanese.
Allen announced the discovery on his Twitter page, which also showed photos of the submerged vessel. He began his search for the Musashi eight years ago, "because since my youth I have been fascinated with Second World War history", according to CNBC.
The Musashi was found in the middle of the Philippine archipelago using an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) after Allen's team had carried out a thorough survey of the seabed.
The Musashi was a "mighty battleship" with "mammoth eighteen-inch guns", the Navy's website says. Its twin ship, the Yamato (photo, bottom, at left), was damaged in the fighting, according to the Navy, and American warships finally sank it a year later as it tried to get to Okinawa.

The Musashi
Constructed: March of 1938
Sunk: October of 1944
Length: 862 feet
Speed: 27 knots
Crew: 2,399
Aircraft: seven
Armament: nine eighteen-inch guns with a range of more than twenty miles
Machinery: Twelve oil-fired burners
Weight: 73,000 tons, fully loaded

Coming under sustained American aircraft attack in her final days, the Musashi defended itself by firing its huge anti-aircraft weapons into the sea "to make huge geysers aimed at knocking down American torpedo bombers", the WW2 Database website says.
"Running into one of these geysers would be like running into a mountain," pilot Jack Lawton recalled. "Without adequate air cover, however powerful Musashi was, she was helpless against multiple waves of attacking aircraft," the website says.
After the final attack ended in mid-afternoon, the vessel was hit by twenty torpedoes, and seventeen bombs; there were eighteen near-misses.
By early evening, the Musashi capsized and sank. More than a thousand of its crew were killed, with the loss of eighteen American aircraft.
Seattle, Washington-born Allen, 62, founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975, and is believed to be the fifty-first richest person in the world, with a net worth of nearly eighteen billion dollars, according to Forbes Magazine.
Allen describes himself on his website as a philanthropist, investor, entrepreneur, author, and space pioneer. He is currently working on an initiative called Stratolaunch, set up to enable "cost-effective" cargo and manned missions to go into space. He launched SpaceShipOne, a suborbital air-launched space plane, in 2004.

Rico says that, as ever, it is good to be the prince, even if it's of Microsoft...