Ships
- IJN Ayanami Captain from 12 September 1941
Commander Eisuke Sakuma became captain of the destroyer Ayanami on 12 September 1941, relieving Tokiyoshi Arima. Ayanami was a Fubuki-class ship of Destroyer Division 19, in Destroyer Squadron 3 of the First Fleet, and she had already served off the China coast. In the last weeks of peace Sakuma took her south from Kure. The division sailed on 20 November and reached Samah, on Hainan, six days later, where the transports for the Malaya landings were gathering.
On 4 December Ayanami left Samah with the invasion convoy. Through the opening of the Pacific War she screened the troopships along the Malay Peninsula and met British aircraft while that landing was going in. On 19 December, working with Uranami and Yugiri, she took part in the gun attack that sank the Dutch submarine O 20 and in the rescue of thirty-two survivors from the water.
Sakuma kept the destroyer with the southern advance into 1942. She escorted the cruisers covering the landings at Bangka, Palembang, and the Anambas Islands. On 17 February she touched a coral reef off Durai in the Anambas and suffered minor damage; three days later she entered Cam Ranh Bay for emergency repairs. Once back in service she covered the landings in northern Sumatra and at the Andaman Islands in March. At Midway in early June she screened Admiral Yamamoto’s Main Body, well clear of the carrier battle.
From August 1942 Ayanami ran troops and supplies down to Guadalcanal by night. Her last sortie was the second night of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, 14–15 November. She sailed with a sweeping group under Rear Admiral Shintaro Hashimoto in the light cruiser Sendai. Hashimoto sent Ayanami around one side of Savo Island while the rest of the group took the other. Late that night her lookouts sighted an American column. Sakuma made it out as four destroyers with a heavy cruiser astern, ordered guns and torpedoes to starboard, reported the contact, and closed at about thirty knots. The large ships were the battleships Washington and South Dakota, with the destroyers Walke, Benham, Preston, and Gwin.
In the fight that followed, gunfire and torpedoes from Ayanami, the light cruiser Nagara, and Uranami sank Preston and Walke, left Benham mortally damaged, and badly damaged Gwin. Washington then found the Japanese destroyer and wrecked her with heavy shellfire. Ayanami got off a shell at the battleship that fell short of a hit. The barrage left her burning and unable to steam, killed members of the crew, and wounded Sakuma. He ordered the men off. Uranami took aboard the greater part of the survivors. Sakuma reached the western shore of Guadalcanal in a boat with about thirty others and joined the Japanese troops already on the island. Ayanami sank southeast of Savo Island before dawn on 15 November 1942, and his command ended with the ship.