Ships
- IJN Akebono Captain from 18 May 1943
Ietaka Inuzuka was a lieutenant commander in the Imperial Japanese Navy. On 18 May 1943 he became captain of the destroyer Akebono, and with that appointment he took charge of the ship, her officers, and a crew of a little more than two hundred.
Akebono was a Fubuki-class destroyer, one of the large ships Japan had built around 1930 to carry a heavier gun and torpedo battery than foreign destroyers of the time. She entered service in July 1931. Her main weapons were twin 12.7-centimeter gun mounts and nine tubes for heavy oxygen torpedoes, and her design speed was near 38 knots. At the start of the Pacific War she belonged to the 7th Destroyer Division and took part in the opening campaigns through the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies.
Inuzuka came aboard well after those first advances. In May 1943 the navy was spending its destroyers on escort, screening, and fast supply runs while American forces pressed the Aleutians, the Solomons, and New Guinea. A captain’s day turned on fuel, boiler hours, lookouts, and whether the ship could sail on short notice. Night passages and convoy work had become as ordinary as the prospect of a surface action.
The ship he commanded had been built for a gunnery and torpedo fight at long range. By his tenure her usefulness also depended on anti-aircraft fire and on the crew’s ability to control damage when bombs fell nearby. Sister ships were being altered in dockyards to carry more guns against aircraft, and that shift in duty sat with every destroyer captain of his generation. Inuzuka exercised it as a lieutenant commander, the rank in which the navy customarily placed an officer in command of a fleet destroyer of this size.
Akebono continued in service after he assumed command. In November 1944, during the American carrier raids on the ships gathered in the Philippines, she was sunk in Manila Bay. His captaincy dates from 18 May 1943, when he took over a destroyer that had already been at war for seventeen months and still had a long, hard passage ahead of her.