Ships
- IJN Ushio Captain from 30 March 1945
Lieutenant Commander Fumio Sato took command of the Imperial Japanese Navy destroyer Ushio on 30 March 1945. She was a Fubuki-class ship, built at Uraga and completed in November 1931, and by the spring of 1945 she was the last destroyer of that class still afloat. Early in the year she had come back to Yokosuka with her machinery badly damaged after the fighting in the Philippines, and the repairs that would have made her a seagoing ship again were left unfinished.
His command was a harbor command. Through the spring Ushio lay at the Yokosuka naval base while fuel, dockyard time, and crews went to ships that could still operate. On 10 June 1945 the Navy placed her in fourth-class reserve, the rating given to a ship held out of operations. From then on Sato's duty was the care of a moored warship, her remaining armament, and the men kept aboard her.
On 18 July 1945 carrier aircraft of the United States Pacific Fleet struck Yokosuka. Ushio fired her anti-aircraft guns with the other ships in the anchorage as the raid fell on the harbor, where the battleship Nagato lay. The destroyer came through the attack still afloat. She was in the same berth, with her engineering repairs still unfinished, on 15 August, when Japan surrendered.
After the surrender the crew turned Ushio over to the occupation forces. The Navy removed her from the list on 15 September 1945. She was stripped of her weapons and fittings and remained at Yokosuka until she was broken up in August 1948. In those last months Sato had command of a destroyer that had been in service since the opening weeks of the Pacific War and now waited out the end of it at her buoy.