Ships
- IJN Mutsuki Captain at the Wake Island attack, December 1941 · Relieved on 8 September 1942
- IJN Hagikaze Captain from 8 September 1942
Kenji Hatano was a lieutenant commander in the Imperial Japanese Navy whose wartime commands are tied to two destroyers, the older Mutsuki and the fleet destroyer Hagikaze. He was captain of Mutsuki at the opening of the Pacific War and remained in that billet until 8 September 1942, the day he took command of Hagikaze.
Mutsuki, nameship of a class completed in the mid-1920s, had been modernized before the war and was serving with the destroyer force that covered the assault on Wake Island. In December 1941 Hatano took her into that attack. The first landing attempt, on 11 December, was driven off by the United States Marine garrison; coastal guns and aircraft sank the destroyers Hayate and Kisaragi among the covering ships. A reinforced expedition returned and seized the atoll on 23 December. Mutsuki came through both actions under Hatano.
Through the first half of 1942 he kept Mutsuki in the South Pacific, working from the Rabaul area as Japanese forces pushed into the Bismarck Archipelago, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands. Ships of her type spent those months escorting transports, covering landings, and running between the new bases. By August she was committed to the fight for Guadalcanal.
On 25 August 1942, during reinforcement operations north of Santa Isabel, Mutsuki stopped to assist the damaged transport Kinryu Maru and was caught by United States Army bombers. Bomb hits sank her. Hatano's command of the ship ended officially on 8 September 1942, when he was relieved and ordered to a new destroyer. The loss itself is recorded as the destruction of Mutsuki while she lay alongside a stricken transport, rather than as a sinking credited to any single warship.
That same day he became captain of Hagikaze, a Kagero-class destroyer completed in 1941 and built for fleet work: high speed, six 5-inch guns, and a heavy torpedo battery. She belonged to the generation of destroyers Japan used to screen carriers and heavy ships and to make high-speed runs into contested waters. Hatano's appointment placed him on one of those ships just as the Guadalcanal campaign entered its hardest months.
From September 1942 Hagikaze operated with the main fleet's destroyer divisions in the South Pacific. Her work in that season was the ordinary, dangerous routine of a first-line destroyer: screening heavier ships, escorting, and moving with the night-fighting and reinforcement forces that tried to hold Guadalcanal and the central Solomons. Hatano is recorded as her captain from 8 September 1942. Later changes of command, and the ship's eventual loss in the Solomons the following year, belong to the ship's later history rather than to a second dated command of his.
Among the officers associated with these ships and this period of the war were Jiichi Iwagami, Masahiro Magoshi, and Yoshio Inoue. Hatano's own record, as it can be fixed to the ships, runs from the failed and then successful assaults on Wake in December 1941, through the South Pacific escort war of 1942, to the loss of Mutsuki in August and the transfer, on 8 September 1942, to Hagikaze.