Pacific ships

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Aitoku, Ichiro

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The service table compiled by Hiroshi Nishida, the movement records of the three ships he commanded, and one postwar interrogation of a Second Fleet staff officer fill in a career. They do not fill in a man. No letter, memoir, photograph identified as his, wife, child, or quoted remark has turned up in the sources checked for this essay. What follows is the life the paper will support: a Kagoshima graduate who stood fifty-ninth in a class of eighty-nine, spent the outbreak of the Pacific War at a desk in the Naval General Staff, and held his only wartime cruiser command on a ship that had already been broken once and would be broken again after he left her.

Origins

He was born on 17 December 1896. Nishida gives the birthplace only as Kagoshima. Parents, family occupation, and any connection to the old Satsuma naval families are not in the record. A Japanese compilation of Naval Academy graduates lists him as a product of Kagoshima First Middle School (鹿児島一中). That list has not been checked against the academy register, and nothing in this essay depends on it.

On 24 November 1917 he was commissioned a midshipman with the forty-fifth class of the Naval Academy at Etajima, eighty-nine graduates, his place fifty-ninth. The head of the class was Prince Hiroyoshi of Fushimi. One place above Aitoku, fifty-eighth, was Aruga Kōsaku, who would die in command of Yamato in April 1945. The academy order is a fact about a twenty-year-old. It is not a forecast. Aitoku was not near the top, and he was not discarded. The navy later sent him through the A-course of the Naval Staff College, the course that made staff officers, and in the end it made him a rear admiral. Nishida records no order or medal against his name. The same tables record medals for some of his classmates. That absence may be incomplete bookkeeping. It is recorded here only as an absence.

Formation

His first sea duty was the armored cruiser Asama, from the day he was commissioned. On 11 July 1918 he was transferred to the battleship Yamashiro. He was promoted sub-lieutenant on 1 August 1918, then sent, on 1 December, to the basic course at the Gunnery School and, on 23 May 1919, to the basic course at the Torpedo School. From the end of 1919 he served in the destroyers Murasame and Nashi. The itinerary of the class training cruise, if Asama made one with him aboard, is not in the table.

In November 1920, still a sub-lieutenant, he joined the light cruiser Tama as an equipping officer while she was fitting out, and on 1 December, promoted lieutenant junior grade, remained aboard as ship's company. A year later he was in the destroyer Isonami. In December 1922 he was acting division officer in the light cruiser Tenryū. Promoted lieutenant on 1 December 1923, he took the advanced course at the Torpedo School. From December 1924 he was communications officer and division officer of the light cruiser Sendai. The same pair of jobs, on the light cruiser Natori, came in December 1927, and again on the battleship Hyūga in December 1931. Between the cruiser billets he taught at the Torpedo School, from December 1928, still as a division officer of the school. The pattern in the table is torpedo training and, repeatedly, the communications department of a ship. No efficiency report says what kind of officer that made him.

Staff work started before the staff college. From 1 December 1925 he was assistant staff, then staff, of the 5th Squadron. From 1 December 1926 he was assistant staff, then staff, of the 1st Expeditionary Fleet, the navy's China-station command. He was a lieutenant in his late twenties. The table does not say which river, which port, or which incident, if any, he saw. He left that fleet in December 1927 for Natori.

On 30 November 1929 he was promoted lieutenant commander and entered the Naval Staff College as an A-course student, the college's twenty-ninth class. He came out to Hyūga on 1 December 1931. A year later, 15 November 1932, he joined the staff of the 2nd Fleet. The Shanghai fighting of that year was already over. Nothing in the table puts him in it.

On 15 November 1934 he was attached to the Naval General Staff and assigned to the 8th Section of the 4th Bureau. On 3 December he became a staff officer of the General Staff proper. The 4th Bureau was the communications department. A later, simplified organization chart in the Japanese Wikipedia gives the 4th Bureau a 9th Section for communications planning and a 10th Section for codes, and does not list an 8th Section inside that bureau at all. Section numbers moved. What the 8th Section was doing in the winter of 1934–35 is not established here, and Aitoku's name is not attached to any paper it produced.

From 31 October 1935 the table has him concurrently a General Staff officer, an instructor at the Naval Staff College, and a staff officer of what Nishida's English renders as the "Military General Staffs." Japanese compilations that repeat the same career read that last post as the Army General Staff. The appointment gazette has not been seen. He was promoted commander on 15 November 1935 and stayed in that cluster of Tokyo duties until 1 December 1937, when he became a staff officer of the 4th Carrier Division. That lasted until 22 March 1938. It was the second year of the war in China, and carrier divisions were being used against Chinese cities, but the table does not say which ships, which raids, or what a staff officer of three and a half months' tenure decided. He went back to the Naval Staff College as an instructor. From 1 April 1939 he also taught at the Naval Paymaster Academy. From 13 July 1939 he was again a General Staff officer while keeping both instructorships.

His first command was not a cruiser. On 15 October 1939, still a commander, he took the minelayer and netlayer Yaeyama, relieving Captain Okada Tametsugu, a classmate, who went to the General Staff. Yaeyama, completed at Kure in 1932, was the first Japanese warship built with an all-welded hull. The ship was at Amoy on 26 September 1939, three weeks before he joined her. On 15 November 1939 he was promoted captain. The movement record then goes blank until 20 July 1940, when Captain Yamamori Kamenosuke relieved him. Whatever Yaeyama did on the China coast in those nine months is not written in the tabular record used here. A Chinese compilation that otherwise copies Nishida's dates says he "led troops in the invasion of China." That sentence is not a source.

The handover itself does not line up. Nishida dates Aitoku's attachment to the Sasebo Naval District from 10 June 1940, and to Yokosuka from 20 July. Yamamori's own table, and the Yaeyama record, date Yamamori's assumption of command to 20 July 1940, and the ship record says Aitoku was then reassigned to Sasebo. For about six weeks the two compilations cannot both be a clean change of command. On 8 August 1940, by Nishida, he was chief of the 9th Section of the 4th Bureau of the Naval General Staff. From 15 November 1940 he was also chief of the 11th Section of the same bureau. He held both chairs until 10 January 1943.

The war, as the appointments show it

He was in Tokyo when the war began. The 9th Section, in the organization remembered afterward, was communications planning: plans, control, training, equipment, and the policing of communications. A privately circulated memoir by Samejima Sunao, who held the 9th, 10th, and 11th Section chairs later in the war, describes the 11th as communications intelligence, later folded into a special-duty group. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey's summary of navy planning says communication planning sat in the Fourth Department and radio intelligence in a special section. Aitoku's dual appointment, 9th and 11th, not the 10th, which handled codes, fits that division if the later descriptions still applied in 1940–42. They may have. His own files, if he kept any, are not in the sources used here. He was a section chief of the communications department through the decision for war, Pearl Harbor, Midway, and the first year of the Solomons. The table records the chair. It does not record a single recommendation he made, or a single one he lost.

On 10 January 1943 he was attached to the Yokosuka Naval District, a holding order. On 28 January he took command of the escort carrier Unyō, the converted liner Yawata Maru. He was forty-six. He had commanded one small minelayer, three years earlier, and had been ashore ever since.

Unyō had just come out of drydock at Yokohama and shifted to Yokosuka. On 1 February she sailed with thirty-six twin-engine Ki-48-II army bombers of the 208th Light Bomb Regiment. She was at Truk on 7 February, sailed on the 11th with the escort carrier Taiyō, and was back at Yokosuka on the 17th with Taiyō and the destroyer Hibiki. On the 24th she sailed again with Taiyō, escorted by Hibiki, reached Truk on 2 March, left on the 6th with Taiyō, Ushio, and Hibiki, and was at Yokosuka on the 12th. She sailed on 20 March, was at Truk on the 25th, sailed on 5 April, and was at Yokosuka on the 10th. On 14 April Captain Seki Ikuya relieved him.

That is the whole of his carrier command: three round trips in eleven weeks, moving aircraft between the homeland and Truk. Anthony Tully's movement record, which later follows Unyō through a torpedo hit, a bow torn off in a storm, and her sinking by Barb in September 1944, records no attack on her during Aitoku's weeks. Those later disasters belonged to other captains. He had already gone to a cruiser.

Mogami

On 14 April 1943 he became commanding officer of Mogami. The ship he inherited was not the cruiser that had fought in the Java Sea and the Bay of Bengal, and not the ship that had rammed Mikuma at Midway. Since September 1942 she had been in dock at Sasebo, her two after turrets removed, the quarterdeck rebuilt to stow reconnaissance floatplanes, her light anti-aircraft battery replaced by triple 25 mm mounts, a Type 21 air-search radar fitted. The new Aichi E16A floatplanes were not ready. She would go to sea with older Petes and Jakes. Captain Sasaki Seigo, another class-45 officer, had had her through the conversion. Aitoku took her in the yard.

She was recommissioned on 30 April 1943 and assigned to the First Fleet. On 1 May she left Sasebo. On 2 May she anchored at Hashirajima and began battle training. The American landing on Attu on 12 May pulled the Combined Fleet into a reaction that never became a battle. Admiral Koga Mineichi sailed from Truk toward Yokosuka with Musashi, Jun'yō, Hiyō, Tone, Chikuma, and destroyers. On 20 May Mogami, Kumano, and Suzuya left Tokuyama. On 22 May they entered Yokosuka, and the same day Mogami collided with the oiler Toa Maru in Tokyo Bay. The damage was slight. Koga's force, joined by Zuikaku, Shōkaku, Zuihō, Agano, and Ōyodo, never sailed for the Aleutians. Attu had already fallen. Mogami left Tokyo Bay on 31 May and was back at Hashirajima on 2 June.

On 8 June, a little after noon, the battleship Mutsu blew up at her buoy between Hashirajima and Suō-Ōshima. Fog had cut visibility to about five hundred yards. The forward half sank at once. The stern stayed afloat until early the next morning. Of 1,474 people aboard, including flying cadets and instructors from Tsuchiura who were on a visit, 1,121 died. Fusō, moored nearby, got boats away and rescued 353. Destroyers arrived later, and so did boats from the light cruiser Tatsuta and from Mogami. Mogami's own movement record says her boats searched and found no one. The two records are by the same compilers and they do not match in tone: one places her boats in the rescue, the other says the boats came back empty. Both can be true if Fusō had already taken off the living. Neither record says what her captain did beyond the fact that the ship he commanded sent boats. Captain Miyoshi Teruhiko of Mutsu was among the dead. The navy hid the loss. Aitoku's name is not in the investigation.

On 9 July the movement record says Mogami embarked an army detachment and supplies at Ujina and, in the next sentence, that she sailed from Shinagawa for Truk. Ujina is the army port at Hiroshima; Shinagawa is on Tokyo Bay. The entry as printed cannot be both the start of one uninterrupted passage. She sailed in a large force: Shōkaku, Zuikaku, Zuihō, Chūyō, the seaplane carrier Nisshin, Tone, Chikuma, Agano, Ōyodo, and destroyers. On 11 July Sturgeon and Searaven sighted the force and could not attack. On 15 July Tinosa fired four torpedoes at Zuihō and missed, and Pogy sighted the ships and could not shoot. They entered Truk unharmed. On 19 July Mogami left again with Nisshin, Tone, Chikuma, Ōyodo, Agano, and five destroyers, reached Rabaul on 21 July, landed the troops, sailed on the 24th, and was back at Truk on the 26th. Ferry work again, this time in a heavy cruiser, with submarines on the route and no hit on his ship.

September and October were sorties after American carriers that the fleet did not find. On 18 September Vice Admiral Ozawa took out a first section that included Yamato, Nagato, Shōkaku, Zuikaku, Myōkō, Haguro, Mogami, Chikuma, Tone, and light cruisers, answering raids on Tarawa, Makin, and Abemama by Rear Admiral Pownall's Lexington, Princeton, and Belleau Wood. No contact. The ships were back at Truk on 25 September. On 17 October, on intercepted radio traffic that seemed to promise another raid on Wake, Admiral Koga took the fleet to Eniwetok: three battleship divisions, the carrier division, Cruiser Divisions 4, 7, and 8. Mogami went with Suzuya. They reached Eniwetok on the 20th, steamed to a point 250 miles south of Wake, made no contact, and were back at Truk on the 26th. For two months the fleet he was in put to sea against American carrier raids and did not find them.

Rabaul

On 3 November 1943 Mogami left Truk with Cruiser Divisions 4 and 7 and Chikuma to strike the American landing at Bougainville. Captain Tsuneo Shiki, senior staff officer to Vice Admiral Kurita, commander of the Second Fleet, described the force afterward for the Strategic Bombing Survey: Atago, Kurita's flag, with Takao, Maya, and Chōkai; Cruiser Division 7, Kumano as flag, Suzuya, and Mogami; Tone and Chikuma; and destroyer squadrons built around Noshiro or Jintsu, and around Agano. On the way, Chōkai and two destroyers were detached to a tanker that a submarine had damaged. The rest arrived at Rabaul shortly after sunrise on 5 November and began to fuel. Captain Ōmae, who was present at the interrogation, said a recommendation had already been made to stay away from Rabaul because of the air attacks. About an hour after arrival the harbor was hit by dive bombers from Saratoga, with Princeton flying fighters and torpedo planes in the same strike. Rear Admiral Frederick Sherman's Task Force 38 had run all night to get within range. Halsey had sent the only two American carriers in the South Pacific because he expected the cruisers, once fueled, to come down on the beachhead at Cape Torokina.

Shiki, speaking in Tokyo on 20 November 1945 from memory of many ships, said Mogami took one bomb on the aircraft stowage deck aft, that a fire broke out, and that she had twenty casualties. The cruiser's movement record says something else: a 500-pound bomb between No. 1 and No. 2 turrets, near misses, a fire, nineteen men killed and thirty-seven wounded, and a section of the starboard bow blown out above the waterline so that her best speed was twelve knots. Bruce Gamble, writing in 2019 from Japanese records of the raid, puts a thousand-pound bomb between the first two turrets, nineteen dead, and a flooding of the forward magazines to keep the ammunition from going up. The forward hit, the ruptured bow, and a death toll of about nineteen are the account the ship record and Gamble share. Shiki's aft hit and his round number of twenty casualties are the account of the fleet staff officer who was there and was not on Mogami. The bomb weight is not agreed. This essay does not choose a deck for the dead.

What the morning did to the force is clearer. Maya was gutted by a fire in an engine room. Takao lost a turret. Atago was damaged by near misses, and her captain was killed. That captain was Nakaoka Nobuki, Naval Academy class 45, in Atago since December 1942. He was Aitoku's classmate. Shiki counted eighteen dead on Atago, the captain among them; later accounts say twenty-two. The number is disputed. The death is not. Most of the ships got underway during the attack and came back into the harbor about 1400. There was talk of still taking troops down to Bougainville. Vice Admiral Kusaka, commanding the Southeastern Area Fleet, decided the force should leave. Mogami's record has her sailing on 6 November with Suzuya, Shimakaze, and Tamanami, and entering Truk on the 8th. Shiki remembered the cruisers, Mogami included, sailing after sunset on the 5th and making Truk on the 7th, and he thought the damaged Atago, Takao, Tone, and Mogami left Truk for Japan between 9 and 15 November. The ship record keeps her at Truk for emergency repair by the repair ship Akashi until 16 December, then sends her to Kure, arriving 21 December, into dock on the 22nd. A staff officer compressing a fleet's wounds two years later is the weaker witness for one cruiser's subsequent dates. The repair timeline used here is the ship's.

She had been sent against the Bougainville landing. She was bombed at anchor in Simpson Harbor and left with a hole in the bow and her best speed cut to twelve knots. Her captain was not among the dead. The sources do not say whether he was on the bridge, in a control station, or knocked down. They do not say what he wrote in the action report. If that report survives in the archives, it was not in the English compilations used here.

On 1 January 1944 she was detached from Cruiser Division 7. Eight single 25 mm mounts were added on the after deck while she was docked, bringing the light anti-aircraft battery to thirty-eight barrels. She undocked on 17 February. On 8 March she left Kure with Zuikaku, Kongō, Haruna, and Destroyer Division 10. Lapon sighted them on the 11th and could not attack. On 14 March Zuikaku and Mogami put into Seletar, at Singapore. On the 15th and 16th she unloaded army supplies. On 16 March she went to Lingga Roads and resumed battle training. On 10 April 1944 Captain Tōma Ryō relieved him. Aitoku had had her for a year lacking four days: a conversion completed, a collision, an anchorage disaster, two troop runs, two empty fleet sorties, and one bomb.

He did not take her to the Philippine Sea, and he was not on her bridge in Surigao Strait. On 25 October 1944, under Tōma, Mogami went into the strait with Nishimura's southern force, was hit by gunfire, collided with Nachi, lost her captain and her executive officer on the bridge, and was scuttled later that day after bombs finished what the night had started. One hundred ninety-one of her crew and one civilian died. The man who had relieved him in April was killed in command of the same ship. That is succession, not a judgment on either captain. The record does not say whether Aitoku, by then a rear admiral at a school, knew the details, or when.

Ashore, while the sea closed

On 10 April 1944 he was again attached to Yokosuka, waiting. On 20 April he became chief instructor of the Naval Anti-Submarine School and chief of its research department. The Naval Mine School had been renamed the Naval Anti-Submarine School on 25 March 1944, less than a month before he arrived. The Japanese account of the renaming says it answered a new emphasis on anti-submarine fighting and the large number of escort vessels then being built. The Japanese account of the school, which cites the Defense Agency's war-history volume on the protection of shipping, says the equipment was three 100-ton tugs for sonar drill and, later, the old destroyer Sawakaze, and that this was not enough. It lists principals. It does not list the chief instructor, and it does not mention Aitoku. He held the job for a year. On 15 August 1944 he was given additional duty attached to the Sasebo Naval District and to the Takao Guard District. Those extra titles were dropped on 1 October. Nothing says whether he went to Takao, or why the titles were added. On 15 October 1944 he was promoted rear admiral, still chief instructor and still head of the research department. He never flew a flag at sea.

The school closed on 15 July 1945. He was already gone. On 1 April 1945 he became chief of the administrative department of Yokosuka Navy Yard and chief of the yard's worker-training center. The sources record the titles. They do not record a decision, a raid he rode out, or a shop he kept open. Aruga, the classmate ranked one place ahead of him, was killed six days later when Yamato went down southwest of Kyushu. Aitoku's war ended in a yard office. On 20 November 1945 he was transferred to the reserve, three months after the ceasefire of 15 August and eleven weeks after the surrender signed on 2 September.

After

Nishida's last line is the death: 4 February 1974, aged seventy-seven. No place of death, no occupation for the twenty-eight years after demobilization, no family, no book, no testimony at a trial, no interview. The Chinese compilations that copy his career say his decorations are unknown and his writings unknown. That is a way of saying the compilers found none. It is not evidence that none existed.

What he left, on the evidence in hand, is a service record and three ships' logs. The first ship, Yaeyama, was sunk by American carrier aircraft south of Mindoro in September 1944, under another captain. The second, Unyō, was torpedoed and sunk in the South China Sea that same month, her captain going down with her. The third, Mogami, lies in Surigao Strait. He outlived all three, and he outlived the classmate on Atago and the classmate on Yamato. The cost that can be counted in his presence is the crew of Mogami on the morning of 5 November 1943, nineteen or about twenty men, and whatever the unrecovered communications files of 1940–42 would have shown him arguing, which they have not shown. The family he left, if he had one, is not in these sources. The character under pressure is not either, except in the only form the paper allows: he stayed in command of a damaged cruiser from Rabaul to a dock in Japan, he was sent to teach anti-submarine warfare in the year the escorts were losing, and when the record ends he is a name, a set of dates, and a death in 1974.