Ships
- IJN Asashio Captain from 20 May 1939
- IJN Yukikaze Captain from 25 July 1941
Kenjiro Tobita was a commander in the Imperial Japanese Navy whose career at sea is tied to two fleet destroyers in the years around the start of the Pacific War. He came from Satsuma in Kagoshima, from the district now called Satsumasendai, and he went from the local middle school into the Naval Academy with the fiftieth class. He had the reputation of a plain-spoken, large-spirited Satsuma man. He held his destroyer commands as a commander and ended the war as a captain, ashore with naval aviation.
On 20 May 1939 he became captain of Asashio, the ship that gave her name to a class of large destroyers completed in the late 1930s for work with the main fleet. The class was a step up in size and gun power from the destroyers Japan had been building a few years earlier. The appointment put him in command of one of those new ships while the Navy was still filling out its destroyer divisions.
On 25 July 1941 he became captain of Yukikaze. She was a Kagero-class destroyer, a further development of the same fleet-destroyer design, and she had been in commission since January 1940. By that summer she belonged to Destroyer Division 16 with Amatsukaze, Tokitsukaze, and Hatsukaze, in Destroyer Squadron 2. Tobita commanded the ship herself. He was still her captain when the war opened in December.
Yukikaze sailed from Palau for her first operation under him, the landing at Legaspi on Luzon, and she was off that beach on 12 December 1941. On 24 December she covered the landing in Lamon Bay. American P-40 fighters strafed her there. A fuel tank was punctured, six men were lightly wounded, and a torpedo tube was hit. The torpedo did not explode. The repair ship Akashi mended the damage at Davao on 27 December, and the destroyer was back at Palau on the 29th. On 4 January 1942 she was in Davao with the rest of the division when B-17 bombers struck the anchorage. The heavy cruiser Myoko was hit. Tobita’s handling of Yukikaze kept her clear of the bombs.
He then went south with the advance into the Dutch East Indies. On 9 January 1942 Yukikaze left Davao Bay in the second escort unit of Destroyer Squadron 2, under Rear Admiral Takeo Takagi’s Eastern Invasion Force. She covered the Kema landing in the Menado operation on 11 January, Kendari on 24 January, Ambon on 31 January, and Timor on 20 February. From 27 February she took part in the Battle of the Java Sea, the first large fleet action of his command. After the fighting she took aboard about forty Allied sailors from the ships lost in that battle.
In June 1942 Yukikaze screened transports of the Midway invasion force. Her gunners fought aircraft while the carrier battle was decided to the north. After the four Japanese carriers were lost, the transport group withdrew, and Tobita brought the destroyer back to Kure. On 22 June 1942 he turned her over to Ryokichi Sugama and went to the Kagoshima Naval Air Group. He became commanding officer of that air group on 1 July 1944. On 19 March 1945 he became commanding officer of the Fukuoka Naval Air Group, in the last spring of the war.
Yukikaze stayed with the fleet after he left. Later captains included Masamichi Terauchi and Keiji Koyo. She fought on through the Solomons and the Philippines, went out with the battleship Yamato on the Okinawa sortie in April 1945, and was the only destroyer of her class still afloat at the surrender. Tobita’s own cruise in her was the opening half-year: the Philippine landings, the East Indies, the Java Sea, and Midway.