Ships
- IJN Myoko Captain from 5 December 1943
Itsu Ishihara was a captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy whose wartime record is tied to the heavy cruiser Myoko. He took command of her on 5 December 1943, at a moment when the ship was recovering from hard service in the Solomon Islands. A month earlier, on 2 November, Myoko had fought in the night action off Empress Augusta Bay as flagship of Vice Admiral Sentaro Omori, in company with the heavy cruiser Haguro and a destroyer screen. In the confused melee she collided with the destroyer Hatsukaze, and American gunfire and the collision together left her in need of dockyard work. Ishihara came aboard while that repair period was still shaping the ship's next year.
He relieved Teruhiko Miyoshi, who had commanded Myoko through the last stretch of the Solomons campaign. Other officers already associated with the cruiser included Teijiro Yamazumi, Katsuhei Nakamura, Sutejiro Onoda, Hokao Kagayama, and, earlier in her life, Takeo Takagi. Ishihara's own appointment placed him at the head of a veteran Myoko-class ship whose main battery was ten 20-centimeter guns, and whose role by late 1943 was no longer the headlong offensive of 1941 and 1942.
Through the winter and spring Myoko completed repairs and worked back up to operational fitness in home waters, then moved out toward the central Pacific as the Navy gathered what remained of its carrier and surface strength. In June 1944 she sailed with Cruiser Division 5, paired again with Haguro, inside Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita's Vanguard Force of the First Mobile Fleet. That force went to sea for the defense of the Mariana Islands. On 19 and 20 June, in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, American carrier aircraft broke the Japanese air groups in the action later called the Marianas Turkey Shoot. Myoko came through the battle without serious damage and returned with the surviving surface ships, but the loss of trained aircrews left the fleet far weaker for the next fight.
Ishihara was still in command when Japan committed the fleet to the defense of the Philippines. In October 1944 Myoko formed part of Kurita's Center Force for the operation that became the Battle of Leyte Gulf. On 24 October, in the Sibuyan Sea, waves of American carrier aircraft attacked the force as it pushed toward San Bernardino Strait. An aerial torpedo struck Myoko aft. The hit wrecked steering and slowed the ship so badly that she could not stay with Kurita. She was ordered out of the battle line and turned back, while the rest of the Center Force went on, eventually into the fight off Samar the next day. Myoko missed that action because of the torpedo damage, not because she had been sunk.
She made her way south and west toward the fleet's southern bases, patched enough to steam but no longer a full fighting unit of the main body. On 13 December 1944, while she was underway in the South China Sea on passage connected with the Singapore area, the American submarine Bergall hit her with a torpedo aft. The explosion carried away much of the stern. Damage control kept her afloat, and she was taken in tow. Haguro and escorting destroyers helped bring the crippled cruiser into Singapore late in December. There she stayed. The dockyard could not restore her for sea, and for the rest of the war she lay at Singapore as a floating anti-aircraft battery, her guns still useful against air attack even though the ship herself would not fight another surface action.
Ishihara's tour in Myoko therefore covered the ship's last year as a seagoing cruiser: the recovery after Empress Augusta Bay, the Marianas operation, the withdrawal from Leyte after a single torpedo, and the final disabling blow from Bergall. He left the ship in mid-December 1944, as she was being brought into Singapore, and Captain Onoda, already part of her story, followed him in command of a cruiser that would not leave that harbor under her own power again. After the surrender, Myoko was scuttled by the British in the Strait of Malacca in 1946.
The public record of Ishihara himself is the record of that command. From 5 December 1943 he was captain of Myoko through the fleet's last great carrier battle and through the surface offensive that broke up under air attack in the Philippines. The cruiser he handed over was still afloat, heavily damaged, and finished as an oceangoing warship.