Ships
- IJN I-168 (I-168) Captain from 30 June 1942
Commander Kinzo Tonozuka of the Imperial Japanese Navy became captain of the submarine I-168 on 30 June 1942. The boat was a Kaidai-type cruiser submarine, laid down at Kure in 1931, launched in 1933, and completed in 1934 as I-68. On 20 May 1942 she received the number I-168. She was a long-range boat with six torpedo tubes, a deck gun, and a crew that in wartime ran well above her peacetime complement.
He inherited a submarine fresh from the most famous cruise of her war. Otoji Nakamura had commanded her at the start of the Pacific fighting, including the December 1941 patrol off Hawaii in which American destroyers subjected her to a long series of depth-charge attacks and damaged her batteries and after torpedo room. Yahachi Tanabe relieved Nakamura on 31 January 1942. Under Tanabe, I-168 sailed from Kure in late May for the Midway operation, scouted the atoll, shelled it, and on 6 June 1942 torpedoed the damaged carrier Yorktown and the destroyer Hammann. The destroyers that hunted her afterward shook the hull severely. She got clear on reduced power, reached Yokosuka in mid-June, and on 26 June entered the yard at Sasebo.
Tonozuka’s command covered that repair. He took the boat on 30 June 1942, four days after she arrived at Sasebo, and remained captain through July and August while the dockyard worked on the damage left by the depth charges. The attacks on Yorktown and Hammann belonged to Tanabe’s patrol in the first week of June, before this change of command. Tonozuka’s tour stayed with the ship in the yard.
On 31 August 1942 the refit was finished and I-168 sailed from Sasebo. The same day Katsuji Watanabe became commanding officer. Watanabe’s tenure was brief. On 15 October 1942 Sakae Nakajima assumed command and took her back to fleet duty, including later operations out of Truk and in the Solomons and the Aleutians. Nakajima was still captain when the American submarine Scamp torpedoed I-168 off New Hanover on 27 July 1943. She sank with her entire company, reported as 97 men, and was struck from the Navy List the following month. Tonozuka’s place in her record is the two months between the Midway patrol and that return to sea.