Pacific ships

IJN · Commander

Ashida, Buichi

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BA

Ships

1 September 1940 is the date the later lists use. He came to her from another destroyer on the same order. The collision everyone attaches to Amagiri happened after he had already gone.

The characters read from the appointment orders are 蘆田部一. The 1 September 1940 order and the 25 May 1943 order both print that form, with the grass radical on 蘆. Niehorster’s class roll and his command tables print the shorter form 芦田部一, and so does the Japanese Wikipedia article on Nagatsuki. No furigana was printed on the gazette pages that were read. The romanization Ashida Buichi is what Niehorster sets beside 芦田部一, and what Allyn Nevitt’s Combined Fleet tables use. It is not a reading taken off a Japanese line with kana over it. 部一 was not replaced with another given name. No source read here prints a different reading.

He is not Asano. Asano is 浅野新平, class 45, captain of Tenryū in the second half of 1942. He is not Asakura. Asakura is 朝倉豊次, class 44. He is not Aruga. Aruga is 有賀幸作, class 45, killed on Yamato. He is not the politician Ashida Hitoshi, 芦田均, prime minister in 1948. The kanji, the school, and the death do not match.

The orders are 海軍辞令公報. He was an officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

On 1 September 1940 the gazette styles him 海軍少佐, lieutenant commander, not 海軍中佐, commander. He was a commander by 25 May 1943, when the same ship’s captaincy was taken off him. The day he was promoted between those two orders was not found. The rank 海軍大佐, captain, is a later line, dated the day he was killed and published the next summer. It is not the rank he held when he took Amagiri.

Origins

No birth date was found. No family register, no father’s name, no school before the academy, no wife, no child. The only place attached to him is a column in someone else’s table.

Niehorster’s roll of Etajima class 50, updated 11 October 2014 and made with Jeff Donahoo, lists Ashida Buichi, 芦田部一, final rank Captain, From Fukuchiyama, fate “KIA November 2, 1943 (Hatsukaze).” The same page says the class had 272 graduates and left the academy on 1 June 1922. He is on that roll. He is not on the class 51 roll of the same site. The site’s own destroyer page then contradicts itself: under Amagiri it marks him (51), and under Hatsukaze, Nagatsuki, and the torpedo boat Hiyodori it marks him (50). Nevitt’s tables use [51]. The graduation gazette was not opened. Fukuchiyama is the city in Kyoto prefecture. The table does not say whether “From” means birthplace, domicile, or the place the compilers had. No document read here confirms it. It is used as the compilation’s place, not as a register entry.

A parenthetical number is printed after his name in the wartime gazettes, in the way those sheets mark men. On the May 1943 order the digits were not read the same way twice. They are not quoted. They are not an academy class. Classes 50 and 51 are two-digit numbers. Whatever the parentheses are, they are not that.

If the class 50 date is right, he was a new graduate in the early summer of 1922, in a class of 272, which is a large class for Etajima. Nothing was found that says where he stood in it. No midshipman cruise ship was found. The first time his name appears in a document opened for this essay is five years later, and by then he is already a lieutenant, junior grade, on a destroyer list.

Formation

The peacetime record is three personnel papers and a boat, not a life. No letters, no fitness reports, and no photograph were found.

In the 1927 special maneuvers the Navy Ministry’s file of imperial summons, 「御召状の件」, lists officers of the 26th Destroyer Division for a banquet. The division commander, Commander Saitō Naohiko, is down for Mutsu. The rest of the division, the catalog transcription says, were assigned to Kongō, and the rank 中尉 covers a short run of names: Todoroki Mansaku, 蘆田部一, Nakagawa Toshio, before the next rank, engineer lieutenant. The transcription is the Center’s text of JACAR C04015799800. The page image was not re-read line by line. If the grouping is right, he was a lieutenant, junior grade, in DesDiv 26, summoned with the others to dine aboard Kongō during the exercises of Shōwa 2. It is a list. It is not a description of him.

Seven years later he is a lieutenant, 海軍大尉, in the 11th Destroyer Division. On 12 October 1934 the Navy Ministry approved a temporary clothing allowance for that division, 官房第四四四六号, and the transcribed roll includes 大尉 蘆田部一 among the officers and warrant officers to be paid. The paper is about coats and money, not about a battle. JACAR C05023846500. The image was not re-read past the catalog transcription.

The next paper is the one that puts him in command of something. A draft of 16 December 1936, issued as an order on 20 December, says 鵯艤装員長 海軍少佐 蘆田部一 補鵯水雷艇長. He was already a lieutenant commander. He had been chief of the fitting-out crew of the torpedo boat Hiyodori, and on 20 December 1936 he was appointed her captain. That is JACAR C05034666900, in the Navy Ministry personnel volume for December 1936, again from the catalog transcription. The Japanese Wikipedia article on Hiyodori dates the fitting-out appointment earlier, 15 November 1935, and calls him 大尉 then, and it ends his time as boat captain on 30 July 1938, when it names Ikezawa Masayuki as the next man. Those two dates sit on gazette citations that were not opened. Niehorster’s torpedo-boat page starts him on 20 December 1936, which matches the order, leaves his end date blank, and jumps to Maekawa Kazue on 15 December 1938, skipping the captain Wikipedia inserts in July. The start is a document. The end is not, not in anything read here. Two years in a Chidori-class torpedo boat, or a year and a half, and then a gap until the winter of 1940. What he did in 1939 was not found.

On 25 January 1940 the Nagatsuki article says he became captain of that Mutsuki-class destroyer, and it points at Navy appointment gazette 433 of that day. The gazette was not opened. Niehorster gives the same start, and calls him lieutenant commander, class 50. The end of that command is not the date Niehorster prints. His table runs Ashida on Nagatsuki until 15 October 1940 and starts the next regular captain, Shibayama Kazuo, that day. The order of 1 September 1940, which was read, already takes Nagatsuki away from him. The Wikipedia article fills 1 September to 15 October with an acting captain, Nakamata Isamu. That acting appointment was not read off the page. The 15 October date on Niehorster’s line is the next substantive captain, not proof that Ashida stayed.

The long command

Issue 521 of the internal appointment gazette, 海軍辞令公報（部内限）第五百二十一號, is in JACAR C13072078800. The issue header is on the sheet numbered 0060 in that file. In the lower table of that sheet the order reads, as two crops of the same columns gave it: appointed captain of the destroyer Amagiri; relieved as captain of the destroyer Nagatsuki; 海軍少佐 蘆田部一, with the check mark these sheets use for 免. The block above it on the same sheet closes with 31 August. The compilations and the Wikipedia citation of this same issue date his order 1 September 1940, published 2 September. The closing line 九月一日海軍省 was not in the same crop as his name. It is the date the other authorities give this order, and it is used here as that date, with the bracket not traced column by column.

The man he relieved on Amagiri, on the upper part of the same sheet, is Commander Nakahara Giichirō, 中原義一郎, a full rank above him, sent to the Yokosuka Naval District. Ashida came aboard a Special-Type destroyer as a lieutenant commander. Amagiri was in Destroyer Division 20 with Yūgiri, Sagiri, and Asagiri, Destroyer Squadron 3, First Fleet. He would still be her captain on the morning the war started, fifteen months later, and he would still be her captain in the spring of 1943. No order promoting him to commander, 中佐, was found. The May 1943 relief uses that rank. The promotion sits in the unopened gazettes of those thirty-three months.

There is no diary. What follows is the ship’s record while the lists and the orders say he was in command, not a record of his decisions. The day-by-day table is Nevitt’s, on Combined Fleet, a private compilation. Where the Japanese Wikipedia article on Amagiri adds a fight the table does not name, that is said.

Through the autumn of 1940 and 1941 the division worked with Squadron 3, including the move into northern French Indochina that the article places on the squadron after he joined. Nevitt starts the wartime table with the division already his: 20–26 November 1941, Kure to Samah on Hainan; from 4 December 1941 through 30 January 1942, troop convoys out of Samah and Cam Ranh Bay for the Malaya landings. The Wikipedia article, citing a photographic chronology, says that on 27 January 1942 Squadron 3, flagship Sendai, met the British destroyer Thanet and the Australian destroyer Vampire off Endau, and that Division 20 with Division 11 sank Thanet. Nevitt’s lines for those weeks say only that the division escorted the convoys. The article does not say which ship fired the shot that finished Thanet. He was the captain of one of the four. That is as far as the two sources go.

The same table then has the division with the Bangka–Palembang landing on 15 February, covering minesweeping at Singapore and in the Johore Strait on 21–24 February, with the northern Sumatra landing on 12 March, and with the Andaman landing on 23 March. On 6 April, in the Indian Ocean raid, Amagiri escorted the cruisers Mogami and Mikuma and, Nevitt writes, assisted in the sinking of three merchant ships. The ships are not named in that line. From 13 to 22 April the division went from Singapore by Cam Ranh Bay to Kure and into dock.

On 4–5 June 1942, at Midway, Division 20 escorted Vice Admiral Takasu’s Aleutians screening force, not the carrier striking force. At the end of June it took a troop convoy from Kure to Amami Ōshima and stayed on antisubmarine patrol. In the second half of July it went out again toward Mergui for another Indian Ocean raid, by Mako, Singapore, and Sabang, and the raid was called off because of Guadalcanal. By 17 August the division was at Davao. On 19–23 August it escorted a troop convoy from Davao to Truk. On 24 August it left Truk with Sendai and the transports Sado Maru and Asaka Maru, carrying Kawaguchi’s 35th Brigade toward Guadalcanal.

The run did not land as planned. Nevitt’s entry for 26–28 August says 550 troops were shifted to the destroyers in mid-ocean so they could go ahead, and that on the afternoon of 28 August American dive bombers hit the division. Asagiri was bombed, a torpedo mount exploded, and she broke and sank. Yūgiri was hit on the bridge. Shirakumo was left dead in the water. The division commander, Captain Yamada Yūji, was killed aboard Yūgiri. No successor is named. Amagiri, still with 330 troops on board by that account, took off 135 survivors of Asagiri and towed Shirakumo toward the Shortlands until the cruiser Tsugaru took the tow. She was at the Shortlands on 30 August. A plan to try again that day with Kagerō was cancelled.

He had been her captain for two years that week. The compilation does not say who gave the order to take the survivors, or what he reported, or whether any of the 135 were still alive when they came aboard. It says the ship did it, and the orders say the ship was his. No letter of his was found. The division commander who died was not him. He was the captain of the ship that was still afloat and still full of soldiers.

The weeks after that are the Guadalcanal shuttle, still from Nevitt, still under his command as far as any order shows. On 31 August, eight destroyers under Captain Murakami, Amagiri among them, put about 1,200 men of the Kawaguchi Detachment ashore at Cape Taivu. Her share is given as 150. On 5 September she was in a run with food and ammunition. On 8 September a sweep toward Taivu, after a reported landing, ended in a short fight off Tulagi at 2236 and a return to the Shortlands. On 17 September she and Sazanami carried food and medical stores to Kamimbo. On 1 October Destroyer Division 20 was deactivated and she was put directly under Vice Admiral Mikawa’s Eighth Fleet. Through October she towed barges to Rendova, one trip aborted in a high sea, and on 10 October ran troops to Tassafaronga. On the night of 13–15 October she was with Mochizuki, escorting Chōkai and Kinugasa while Mikawa bombarded Henderson Field. In the middle of November she was on the troop-convoy escort during the naval battles for Guadalcanal. With Mochizuki she is credited with taking off 1,500 survivors of the sunken transports Canberra Maru and Nagara Maru, and with bringing the damaged Sado Maru back to the Shortlands. December is Rekata, Munda, and a tow of the damaged Asashio from the Shortlands to Truk.

From 6 January 1943 she went from Truk to Saipan and then joined the escort of Zuikaku, Mutsu, and Suzuya toward Kure, and docked. Nevitt has her at Kure from 13 January to 10 March, with twin 13 mm guns added forward of the bridge. He was still captain. The yard time is the longest stretch of the war, on this table, in which the ship was not carrying someone else’s infantry. Nothing was found that says whether he went home, or where home was, or whether Fukuchiyama saw him.

On 25 February she was in the reorganized Division 11, Squadron 3, Eighth Fleet, with Shirayuki, Hatsuyuki, and Yūgiri. From 10 to 25 March she went from Kure by Truk and Rabaul to the Shortlands, and the Rekata and Buka runs began again. On 7 April, after a midnight delivery to Rekata, a B-17 strafed her the next day. Nevitt says ten casualties, and she was at Rabaul on 8 April. On 15–18 May she was on an antisubmarine sweep northwest of Kavieng, and when Yūgiri was torpedoed on 16 May, the bow collapsed, Amagiri towed her back into Rabaul. It is the second time in this command that the table has him, or has his ship, bringing in a wrecked sister.

On 25 May 1943 the table says Commander Ashida was relieved by Lieutenant Commander Hanami Kōhei, previous captain of Akebono, and that Ashida went to Hatsukaze. The first half of that sentence matches the gazette. The second half is early.

Five weeks, then the other ship

Issue 1124 of the internal gazette, 第千百二十四號, dated 25 May 1943, is in JACAR C13072091100. The order, read on the page after the issue’s opening sheet, is: relieved as captain of Amagiri; 海軍中佐 蘆田部一; appointed to the Yokosuka Naval District, 横須賀鎮守府附被仰付. Wikipedia calls this page 3 of the issue and glosses the same order. The rank is commander. The new duty is a district attachment, not a ship. Hanami’s appointment to Amagiri is in the same issue, which is why the Wikipedia captain list runs Ashida from 1 September 1940 to 25 May 1943 and Hanami from that day. The ramming of PT-109 was on 2 August 1943, in Blackett Strait, under Hanami. It is the thing Amagiri is known for. It was not his watch.

He was ashore, or at least off a ship’s books, from 25 May until 1 July. Nothing was found that says what the Yokosuka attachment consisted of. No house, no leave paper, no medical note.

On 1 July 1943 the Hatsukaze article, citing issue 1162 of the same gazette series, pages 3–4, JACAR C13072092000, says Commander 蘆田部一 relieved Commander Watanabe Yasumasa as captain. Niehorster dates the same change 1 July 1943 and marks him class 50, with an asterisk that on that site means killed in command. Nevitt says the same day, and still uses [51], and still calls the 25 May relief a direct move to Hatsukaze, which the May order does not say. A page of issue 1162 in the July file does carry a Hatsukaze captain’s line. The name on that line was not read securely enough to quote. The appointment is the article’s citation plus the two compilations, not a second column transcribed here the way the Amagiri orders were. Watanabe had had her since 28 December 1942. She had been torpedoed off Guadalcanal in January, repaired at Kure, and the article says the repair ran until 12 July. He took her on paper eleven days before that date.

Hatsukaze was a Kagerō-class destroyer, Destroyer Division 16. The four months are short, and the sources do not agree on every sailing. The Japanese article has her leaving the Inland Sea on 31 July 1943 with Musashi, flying Admiral Koga’s flag, the Fifth Squadron’s Myōkō and Haguro, and the destroyers Nowaki and Shiratsuyu, joined the next day by Nagara, the carrier Un’yō, and Akebono, and at Truk on 5 August, after a submarine, Steelhead, fired ten torpedoes and missed. It then has her back in Japan, and out of Kure again on 17 August with a fleet that included Yamato, Nagato, and Fusō, at Truk on 23 August. Nevitt’s table for 16–23 August is narrower: with Amatsukaze, she escorted Yamato from Kure to Truk. Both can be true of one sailing only if one of them is incomplete. They are left as two accounts of the August passage, not merged into a single list he is said to have steamed in.

After that the article says escort work out of Truk. Nevitt has a fleet run to Eniwetok and back on 18–25 September, a sortie on 5 October to the torpedoed tanker Kazahaya, another Eniwetok run on 16–28 October, and on 30 October–1 November an aircrew transport from Truk to Rabaul. The article’s October note is the fleet oiler Kazahaya, sunk on 6 October by Steelhead and Tinosa, and Hatsukaze among the ships that went out. The details of who rescued whom were not re-read from a log.

On 1 November the Combined Fleet formed a raiding force under Rear Admiral Ōmori Sentarō against the American landing at Cape Torokina on Bougainville. The Japanese article, citing the war-history series volume 96 for the operational skeleton, puts Hatsukaze in the second guarding unit: Tenth Squadron, flagship Agano under Rear Admiral Ōsugi, with Naganami, Hatsukaze, and Wakatsuki, on the main body’s right front. The transport unit, which included Amagiri under another captain, turned back. The raiding force did not. At 0045 on 2 November Shigure reported the American force, Rear Admiral Merrill’s four cruisers and eight destroyers, and the night action started. The article says the main body and the second unit spent the first part of it avoiding, and that the avoidance put Myōkō into Hatsukaze. The collision time it gives is 0107. Nevitt’s editorial note, from Anthony Tully, says the same minute: Myōkō hit the destroyer’s starboard side forward, nearly at right angles, and the bow came off. Ōmori thought she had gone down at once. The Japanese did not see her again. American radar, in that note, shows the rest of the hull still making ten knots or better, steering west and then north.

What happened after that is where the clocks diverge. The Wikipedia article says the bowless ship was left on the field, came under the fire of the American destroyers, and sank at 0257 at 6°00′ S, 153°58′ E. The footnote on that sinking sentence is Senshi Sōsho volume 96, page 391. The next sentence, “the captain and 164 men were killed,” has no footnote of its own. Tully’s note puts the meeting with Spence at 0310, Hatsukaze still shooting from the after guns, Spence low on ammunition and calling for the rest of Destroyer Division 45, the ship dead in the water at 0335, an after magazine explosion, and the hull gone by 0339, identified on the American side only as a Fubuki-class destroyer. Nevitt’s position is 6°01′ S, 153°58′ E. The same tabular entry says the loss was Commander Ashida and the entire crew. The article’s uncited 164 is not the entire crew if the ship’s usual complement, given in the same article’s table as 239, was aboard. No count of who was actually on board that night was found, and no survivor list was found. The morning-after detail in the article is from Haguro: planking from Hatsukaze still hanging on Myōkō’s port bow, and a petty officer calling it the skin of her forehead. That is a picture of the cruiser, not of the men who had been on the destroyer.

He had been her captain for four months and two days, if the 1 July date is right. He had been at sea, in one command or another, since the torpedo boat in 1936, with one documented gap in 1939 and five weeks at Yokosuka in 1943. The collision was not a choice the sources attribute to him. They attribute it to the cruiser’s turn in a night action in which his unit had not yet fired. No order of his from that night was found. No citation for a decoration was found.

What the paper did afterward

The ship was not written off on the day she sank. The Hatsukaze article says that on 5 January 1944 she was removed from the Kagerō class, from the Navy list, and from Destroyer Division 16, and it points at internal orders, including appointment gazette 1354, issued 5 January and published 2 March, JACAR C13072096400, for the formal end of his captaincy. Nevitt dates the Navy-list removal 3 January 1944. The two dates were not reconciled from the orders themselves. Those pages were not read. His name stays on the captain list, in the article, until 5 January, with the death and the promotion noted inside the line: killed 2 November 1943, appointed 海軍大佐 the same day.

That promotion is cited to appointment gazette 1539, published 19 July 1944, the order dated 2 November 1943, page 41, JACAR C13072100000. The page was not read. The delay is ordinary for a wartime death notice. It means the rank of captain, in the only place it was found, is a rank given on the day of the sinking and printed eight months later.

A separate file at the National Archives, JACAR A12090498600, is titled 故海軍大佐蘆田部一外六名位階追陞の件, the posthumous raising of court rank for the late Navy Captain Ashida Buichi and six others. The catalog dates the papers 30 June to 12 July 1944. The creating line is Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki, Navy Minister Shimada Shigetarō, and the chief of the Bureau of Peerage, Viscount Mushanokōji Kintomo. Tōjō was still prime minister; he left that office on 22 July. The image did not open. The new court rank is not in the title. The other six names are not in the title. No widow is named in anything that was retrieved. The file is evidence that by the end of June 1944 the Navy was styling him a dead captain, and that a court rank was being raised for him in a batch of seven. It is not evidence of which rank, or of who received the notice.

Nothing after that was found. No grave, no hometown notice, no pension paper with a survivor’s name, no postwar memoir that quotes him. The sea kept the ship. The ministries kept the rank.