Ships
- IJN Haruna Captain from 20 June 1942
Keishi Ishii was a captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy. On 20 June 1942 he took command of the battleship Haruna, the last of the four Kongō-class ships, built at Kobe as a battlecruiser and later rebuilt as a fast battleship. By the time he came aboard she had already covered the opening southern operations, the Indian Ocean raid, and the carrier force at Midway, where a near miss had lightly damaged her stern.
He relieved Tamotsu Takama, who had commanded Haruna since August 1941 and left her for the 4th Destroyer Squadron. In the reorganization that followed Midway, Haruna and her sister Kongō passed in mid-July to the Second Fleet and formed the 3rd Battleship Division. Hiei and Kirishima went with the carrier fleet. In September the division moved forward to Truk as the fight for Guadalcanal intensified.
On 14 October 1942 Haruna and Kongō closed Guadalcanal at night and bombarded Henderson Field. The shelling tore up the runway and destroyed aircraft on the ground, and for a short time it badly hurt American air operations from the island. Later that month Haruna was with the fleet at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. In mid-November she operated with the carrier force during the naval battle off Guadalcanal, while other ships fought the night surface actions in the sound.
Through the winter and into the spring of 1943 the heavy ships spent long stretches at Truk with little fighting. After American troops landed on Attu in the Aleutians in May 1943, Haruna steamed north toward home waters. Ishii left the ship on 14 June 1943, and Nobuei Morishita succeeded him. For the rest of that year Haruna stayed in the central Pacific, at Truk and in the area of Brown Atoll, without a major action.
Haruna remained in service under later captains, among them Kazue Shigenaga and Masatake Yoshimura. She was still afloat for the fleet's last great sortie, at Leyte Gulf in October 1944, and she ended the war as a wreck in the shallows at Kure after American carrier aircraft struck her on 28 July 1945.