Ships
- IJN Asashio Captain from 10 September 1941 · In command when she was lost, 3 March 1943
Goro Yoshii was an officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy and the last commanding officer of the destroyer Asashio. He took command on 10 September 1941 as a lieutenant commander. On 15 October 1941 he was promoted to commander and remained in the ship. He was still aboard when Asashio was lost on 3 March 1943, and he was killed with her. The navy dated a posthumous promotion to captain on the day of his death.
Asashio was the name ship of a ten-ship destroyer class built under the 1934 program. She had been laid down at Sasebo in September 1935, launched in December 1936, and commissioned in August 1937. By the time Yoshii assumed command she served in Destroyer Division 8 with Oshio, Michishio, and Arashio, under Destroyer Squadron 2 of the Second Fleet. On 29 November 1941 the division left the Terashima Strait for Mako in the Pescadores and anchored there on 2 December. On 4 December Asashio sailed with Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo’s Southern Force, keeping well to seaward as distant cover while Japanese troops landed in Malaya and the Philippines.
Through the winter and spring of 1942 the division stayed with the drive into the Dutch East Indies, screening transports and covering landings as the advance reached the eastern islands and Bali. The hardest night of that cruise came on 19–20 February 1942 in Badung Strait. A larger Allied force of cruisers and destroyers arrived to strike the anchorage, and the four Japanese destroyers met it in the dark. Lookouts on Asashio made out two Dutch light cruisers at several thousand yards, and Yoshii turned toward them. Searchlights and gunfire opened the action. In the melee that followed, the Dutch destroyer Piet Hein was sunk by torpedo and the light cruiser Tromp was set on fire by shellfire and forced to retire. Asashio was hit in return and still got clear with the division. On 20 February she was designated flagship of Destroyer Division 8, a duty she kept until the flag shifted to Oshio in mid-March.
In April 1942 the division moved from the Second Destroyer Squadron to the Fourth. In June Asashio went to Midway with the close-support group of heavy cruisers. American carrier aircraft found those ships, and one bomb struck Asashio, killing twenty-two men. She reached port and was repaired. In the autumn she was sent into the Guadalcanal campaign, running with the destroyers that carried supplies to the island. She was at sea for the November battles off Guadalcanal and stayed outside the heavy gun actions. In January 1943 she went back to Japan for a short refit.
The refit was brief. Asashio returned to Rabaul in time to escort a large troop convoy bound for Lae. Oshio had been lost in February, and Captain Yasuo Sato, commander of Destroyer Division 8, had shifted his flag to Asashio. The convoy sailed at the beginning of March 1943. On the morning of 3 March, in the Bismarck Sea near the Dampier and Vitiaz approaches, Allied aircraft found it. The first waves wrecked the transports and left the destroyer Arashio and the transport Nojima stopped and burning. Asashio came through that attack and stopped to take men off the crippled ships. A later strike caught her at that work. Bombs struck in a cluster, she was shaken by the explosions, and she sank within minutes about forty-five miles southeast of Finschhafen, near 7°15′ south, 148°15′ east. Japanese records attribute the fatal attack to United States Army Air Forces B-25s.
Yoshii was killed in the sinking, and Sato died aboard the same ship. Loss of life in Asashio was nearly total. She was removed from the navy list on 1 April 1943, and Destroyer Division 8 was disbanded the same day.