Pacific ships

IJN · Commander

Aoki, Kyuji

All captains
KA

Ships

He was an Imperial Japanese Navy officer. The characters used for him in the Japanese compilations that can be checked against one another are 青木久治, read Kyūji, and also written Kyuji or Kyuuji. Those compilations agree on the characters. This essay has not had a clean reading of the appointment gazette itself, so the kanji are as strong as those secondary agreements and no stronger. No conflicting writing of the name turned up.

Not the other Aoki

Taijiro Aoki is 青木泰二郎, Etajima class 41, domicile Tokyo in the same personnel compilation, a captain who commanded the carrier Akagi at Midway in 1942 and who was still alive to be questioned by American officers in Tokyo on 9 October 1945. The Naval Data Base gives his death as 23 November 1962. Nothing in Kyuji's record puts him on Akagi, in the air arm, or in the postwar interrogations.

青木 is a common naval surname. The same personnel file that carries Kyuji also carries other Aokis of other classes, ranks, and specialties. Class 50's compiled roster, the class he belonged to, lists one 青木久治 and no second. The man in this essay is that one: the torpedo officer who became a destroyer captain, and who was lost in the South China Sea in July 1944 while commanding a destroyer division from the deck of a ship he no longer captained.

Origins

No birth date, no parents, no siblings, no wife, and no children have turned up. The Naval Data Base and a compiled roster of Etajima's 50th class both give his middle school as 三重四中, Mie Prefectural Fourth Middle School, and the database adds the prefecture 三重. In the way these lists are built, the prefecture is the registered domicile they inherited from the Navy's own rolls, not a proven birthplace. The Fourth Middle School opened in 1899 and was renamed Mie Prefectural Ujiyamada Middle School in August 1919; the present school traces that line and sits in what is now Ise. A classmate on the same roster is listed under 三重宇治山田中 rather than 四中, so the two labels were not used as if they were interchangeable. Whether Aoki finished under the old name or the new one is not in the sources read for this essay. Ise as a hometown is a reasonable inference from the school and nothing more. It is not stated.

He graduated with the 50th class of the Naval Academy. The class roster dates that graduation, and his first warrant as midshipman, to 1 June 1922, and counts 272 men in the class. The Naval Data Base places him 239th of those 272. That standing is not repeated in the roster consulted here, and the original order-of-merit list was not opened, so the number 239 rests on one compilation. If it is right, he left Etajima in the lower third of a large class. The Navy did not treat that as a bar to a career. It did shape the kind of career he got: old destroyers first, a fleet destroyer only at the edge of the war, and no record, in anything read for this essay, of Naval War College, aviation, or a staff track.

Formation

The rank dates that follow, through his first commands, come from the Naval Data Base unless a gazette is named. They fit the Navy's ordinary calendar, but most of them were not re-read in the Kanpō or the appointment gazette for this essay.

He was commissioned ensign on 20 September 1923 and lieutenant (junior grade) on 1 December 1925. The database then sends him to a division officer's billet at Qingdao, the Japanese naval station on the China coast, without a separate date for the start. On 1 December 1927 he entered the advanced course at the Torpedo School. He finished on 15 November 1928. On 10 December 1928 he was promoted lieutenant and became torpedo officer of the destroyer Numakaze. The same compilation then walks him through the torpedo department of one ship after another: fitting-out duty on the new destroyer Ushio, then her torpedo officer from 14 November 1931; Yukaze from 1 December 1931; Kamikaze; Sazanami from 1 November 1933; the light cruiser Kinu from 15 November 1934. No evaluation, no incident, and no nickname attaches to any of those jobs in the sources used here. What the sequence itself says is that the Navy spent a decade making him a torpedo officer and then, still a lieutenant, gave him a ship.

That ship was Asagao, a Wakatake-class second-class destroyer, already more than a decade old. A captain list drawn from Toyama Misao's Kanchō-tachi no kankanshi, and tied to the Official Gazette of 26 February 1936, has Lieutenant Aoki taking her on 24 February 1936, in succession to Lieutenant Yoshii Gorō. The Naval Data Base has him promoted lieutenant commander on 1 December 1936, while that command was still his. He left Asagao on 15 November 1937. The appointment gazette for that day (extra No. 91) is the citation given for the change. The captain list records his rank at appointment as lieutenant, which does not contradict a promotion eleven months later. Nothing in these lists says what Asagao did under him. Her long wartime escort career belongs to other captains.

The same gazette day, 15 November 1937, made him captain of Tsuta, an even older Momi-class destroyer. The Naval Data Base leaves him there until he appears as captain of Akikaze. The Tsuta captain list, citing appointment-gazette extra No. 140 of 21 February 1938, has him relieved that day by Lieutenant Commander Iwagami Jiichi. There is then a blank until 5 March 1938, when the Akikaze list, citing the gazette of 7 March, makes him captain of that Minekaze-class destroyer. The twelve days are not accounted for.

Akikaze was still a second-class destroyer, but she was a step up from Tsuta, and for five months he held a second ship at the same time. From 1 July 1938 to 1 December 1938 he was additionally captain of Hakaze. On 15 December 1938 he left Akikaze for Minekaze herself, the name ship of the class. The gazette extra of that date (No. 273) is cited for both the end on Akikaze and the start on Minekaze. He kept Minekaze for nearly two years, until 15 November 1940. The lists call him a lieutenant commander throughout. They do not say where the ship went. These were the China-Incident years, and old destroyers of this type spent much of them on local guard and training, but that is the class pattern, not a log of his bridge. No decoration from those years has been found under his name.

The fleet destroyer

On 15 November 1940, the day he left Minekaze, he took Akatsuki. The appointment gazette of that date (No. 555) is the one cited for his relief on Minekaze; Combined Fleet's tabular record and the Naval Data Base both put him aboard Akatsuki the same day. He was a lieutenant commander. Combined Fleet's movement record, in one line, calls him the former captain of Minekaze, which matches. A later line in the same record calls him the former captain of Akikaze. That second label is his command of 1938, not the ship he had just left. Akatsuki was a different kind of command from the old second-class ships: a large fleet destroyer, completed in 1932, in Destroyer Division 6 with Hibiki, Ikazuchi, and Inazuma, under Destroyer Squadron 1 of the First Fleet.

He was promoted commander on 15 October 1941, still in her. The promotion lists put the commander's rank eleven months later. "Commander" is the right English rank for 中佐, and it is the right rank for the Tamanami appointment. It is early for November 1940.

The opening of the Pacific War, in the Combined Fleet record, did not give him a battle so much as a long screening job on the southern road. Late in November 1941, Division 6 left home waters for Mako in the Pescadores. Through the first ten days of December, Akatsuki screened Admiral Kondō's Southern Force main body, distant cover for the landings in Malaya and the Philippines, and touched the troop convoys. She was in and out of Cam Ranh Bay until 20 December, then on the Lingayen support run, then back at Mako. In January and February 1942 the same record has her on the Menado, Tarakan, Balikpapan, and Davao movements, then on the convoys for the Java landings, east and west. At Balikpapan on 29 January, four B-17s attacked; the record says she was not hit. On 17 March, with Hibiki and Ikazuchi, she attacked a submarine off the Philippines. The record does not say the attack succeeded. By the end of March she had brought a convoy from Subic Bay to Kure and gone into dock at Yokosuka, then into drydock at Uraga on 11 April.

On 13 April 1942, still in that dockyard period, Commander Aoki was relieved by Lieutenant Commander Takasuka Osamu. The Naval Data Base and Combined Fleet agree on the day. He had commanded her for seventeen months, including the whole of the southern offensive, and he left her before the operations that later made her name. Under Takasuka she went to the Aleutians and then to Guadalcanal. In the night action of 12–13 November 1942 she was sunk off Guadalcanal with her captain and the division commander. That was not Aoki's death, and it was not his ship anymore. The eighteen survivors were not his crew in the sense that matters: he had been off her for seven months.

A year off the fleet

What the Navy did with him next is the thin part of the record, and it is almost entirely the Naval Data Base. From 1 May 1942 until December 1942 that compilation makes him commander of the 13th Submarine-Chaser Division. It then makes him deputy commander of the Kii Defense Unit, the 紀伊防備隊, without a day for the start, and holds him there until 20 February 1943. No war diary for either billet was opened for this essay. A class roster's note on another officer associates the 13th Submarine-Chaser Division with the North Pacific, but that note is not tied to Aoki's months, and it is not used here as his itinerary. The honest statement is that for about nine months after he left a fleet destroyer, the personnel record puts him on small anti-submarine craft and then on local defense, and does not say what either duty cost him or taught him.

On 20 February 1943 the same record makes him chief of the fitting-out crew of the escort Oki, an Etorofu-class kaibokan building at Uraga. Combined Fleet's record of the ship has him as her commanding officer when she was completed and registered at Sasebo on 28 March 1943, "former captain of Akatsuki." The database has him as captain from that completion until 1 July 1943, when a Lieutenant Commander Kobayashi Hinomoto relieved him. The two accounts agree on the span of the command. They do not agree, because Combined Fleet simply does not mention them, on the subchaser division and the Kii billet in between Akatsuki and Oki.

Oki's record under him is convoy work between Yokosuka and Truk, April through June 1943: the slow escort of army and navy transports, a submarine contact, a counterattack. On 3 June, in Combined Fleet's compilation, USS Salmon fired seven torpedoes at a convoy Oki was escorting and claimed hits she did not get. Oki dropped depth charges, result unknown, and the same account says she found a floating torpedo air flask and sank it with machine-gun fire. That is the most particular thing the compilations record him doing in those three months. He was relieved on 1 July, six days before his next destroyer.

Tamanami

Tamanami was new. She was a Yūgumo-class fleet destroyer, completed at Fujinagata in Osaka on 30 April 1943 under Commander Sakuma Eiji, who had been a classmate, class 50. Aoki relieved Sakuma on 7 July 1943. It is the date in the Japanese captain list, which cites the appointment gazette of 8 July 1943 (No. 1168) for an order dated the 7th. He was a commander. The ship had already finished working up. She had been present, under Sakuma, when the battleship Mutsu blew up in the Inland Sea on 8 June. The towing exercise in which she and Wakatsuki pulled the battleship Nagato also falls before 7 July in the Japanese account of her training. Those episodes are part of her story and not part of his.

From the second week of July 1943 until the middle of June 1944, the movement records are a single kind of life. He took her out of home waters almost at once. Combined Fleet has Tamanami escorting Chūyō and Nisshin from Yokosuka toward Truk between 10 and 15 July, then a troop run from Truk to Nauru and back from 16 to 22 July. The Japanese Wikipedia synthesis, built out of the torpedo-squadron war diaries, has the same Nauru run in company with the light cruiser Isuzu, and on 15 July, on the way out, an American submarine, Tinosa, firing four torpedoes at the carrier force from long range and missing. He spent the late summer and autumn on the Truk–Palau tanker route, on the September sweep toward Eniwetok that never met the American carriers it was sent after, and on escorting Jun'yō back to Kure at the turn of October. On 1 October 1943 Tamanami joined Destroyer Division 32, with Suzunami, Fujinami, and Hayanami, still under Destroyer Squadron 2.

The rest of his captaincy, in both the Combined Fleet table and the Japanese diary-based account, is the same work at a higher tempo. He took heavy cruisers into Rabaul and brought the damaged ones out. He took Shōkaku and Chitose back to Truk. He escorted Mogami home in December for repair. In January and February 1944 he was on the carrier and Musashi movements that emptied Truk just before the American carrier raid of 17 February; Tamanami was gone before that raid, and the men who stayed were not his problem to count. In March, during the Matsu transport to the Marianas, the light cruiser Tatsuta was torpedoed and left unable to steam. Tamanami, sent from Japan to the scene, arrived after Tatsuta had gone down. The Japanese account says he took survivors off the destroyer Uzuki and went back to Yokosuka with the escort Hirado. In April he was on a troop convoy out to Saipan and Palau and home again. In May he helped take Musashi and the light carriers down to Tawi-Tawi, where the Mobile Fleet was gathering for what the Navy still expected to be a decisive battle.

None of these compilations records a night gun action, a successful torpedo attack, or a decoration with his name on it. The job they do record is the one the fleet destroyers had been reduced to by 1943: keep the oilers and the heavy ships moving, hunt submarines that usually got away, and collect the living when a cruiser did not. He did it for eleven months as captain.

The chair that had just been emptied

On 6 and 7 June 1944, off Tawi-Tawi, American submarines took two Japanese destroyers in two days. On the 7th, USS Harder sank Hayanami. She was the flagship of Destroyer Division 32. Her captain, Commander Shimizu Itsurō, and the division commander, a Captain Orita, were killed. The Japanese accounts say the division was suddenly without a commander, and that the flag was shifted to Tamanami.

The appointment gazette of 21 June 1944 (No. 1517), order dated 15 June, is the citation given for the next step. Commander Aoki, who had been Tamanami's captain, became commander of Destroyer Division 32. The officer who took his chair as captain was, in the Japanese captain list and in the gazette citation attached to it, Commander 千本木十三四. The reading of that given name is not settled in the sources used here; Senbongi is the ordinary reading of the family name. Combined Fleet's Tamanami record names the new captain instead as Commander Chihagi Tomiji, class 52, previously captain of Nenohi, and says Aoki remained aboard Tamanami because she was now the division flagship. These two names have not been shown to be one man. What is solid is the date and the change of job: from 15 June 1944 Aoki was no longer Tamanami's captain. He was the senior officer embarked in her, responsible for what was left of the division.

Four days later the division was in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The Japanese account puts Tamanami, Fujinami, and Hamanami in the van force under Vice Admiral Kurita Takeo. Combined Fleet's shorter table says the same of Kurita's van. The battle was a disaster for Japanese naval aviation. The van's surface ships were not the ships that decided it. The accounts consulted here do not give Tamanami a hit, a sinking, or a particular order of Aoki's. He had been division commander for less than a week. The record does not say whether he wanted the job. It says the previous commander was dead and the Navy gave it to the captain who was already on the ship they chose as flagship.

After the battle, the surviving ships of the division did not go home to refit into a new formation so much as they went back to escorting. Combined Fleet has Tamanami taking the tanker Kokuyo Maru from Okinawa through Manila to Singapore between 23 and 29 June, and leaving Singapore again on 2 July, still with that tanker, bound for Manila. The Japanese Wikipedia account, citing the war diary of the auxiliary oiler Kyokutō Maru (旭東丸), has Tamanami and Fujinami from 2 July escorting that ship, with the damaged light cruiser Kitakami, from Singapore toward Manila and Japan. The tanker on the last voyage is a conflict between the two compilations, noted below. The shape of the voyage is not. He was at sea, in his old ship, under another man's captaincy, taking a tanker up the South China Sea.

7 July 1944

Before dawn on 7 July 1944, west of Manila, USS Mingo sank Tamanami.

The American side, as repeated by Combined Fleet and by uboat.net from the usual postwar credit lists, puts the sinking about 150 nautical miles west-southwest of Manila, at 13°55′ N, 118°30′ E. Mingo was on her fourth war patrol. Her commanding officer was Lieutenant Commander Joseph J. Staley, Jr. The Japanese Wikipedia account, which cites both Mingo's patrol report and the Kyokutō Maru diary but prints a different fix, puts the ship at 14°19′ N, 117°57′ E, and tells the attack in more detail than either Combined Fleet or the submarine's published summary. In that telling, around 0200 Tamanami detected a submarine and turned to attack; Mingo had four targets on radar and took the oncoming ship for a Fubuki-type destroyer making about 23 knots; she rode out a pattern the article numbers at twelve depth charges; four torpedoes from the stern tubes missed; about an hour later four from the bow tubes hit with three, and the destroyer sank by the bow. Fujinami, seeing the fire, turned back, searched, and dropped more charges, and found nothing to rescue.

That torpedo count and that Japanese position were not re-read here in Mingo's report or in the oiler's diary. They are what the Japanese article says those documents contain. Combined Fleet's sentence is shorter and harsher in a different way: she blew up and sank with all hands, including the commander of Destroyer Division 32. The Japanese article's casualty figure is 276 dead, the division commander and the captain named among them. The ship's listed peacetime complement was 225, so 276 is a wartime figure if it is a figure at all, and no name-by-name roll was found to test it. "All hands" and "276" cannot both be checked from here. They agree on the result that matters for him. There is no survivor story, no rescue of the admiral's staff, no later letter. Fujinami looked and did not find them.

He had been the ship's captain until three weeks before. On the morning she was sunk he was embarked as the division commander, and the man who died as captain was the officer who had relieved him on 15 June. The division had already lost one commander and one flagship, to Harder, on 7 June. On 7 July it lost the replacement commander and the replacement flagship, to Mingo, in the same kind of fight: a fleet destroyer hunting a submarine and losing.

Tamanami was struck from the Navy list on 10 September 1944.

The after

There was no afterlife in any source consulted, because there was no one left to have one. No obituary, no family notice, no recollection by a subordinate, and no American interrogation. The class roster's whole remark on him is the rank 大佐, the school 三重四中, and the place and job: South China Sea, commander of the 32nd Destroyer Division.

The rank is the part that does not sit still.

He had been a commander, 中佐, since 15 October 1941. The Naval Data Base ends its entry "died when Tamanami sank, captain." The class roster's final rank column says captain, not rear admiral. Combined Fleet's Akatsuki record annotates him "captain, posthumously," which is how that project marks a one-grade posthumous promotion. The Japanese Wikipedia narrative of the sinking calls him 青木大佐 and adds, in parentheses, that he was advanced to rear admiral. The same article's own captain list does not give him that rear admiral's rank. It does say that Senbongi, the captain, was promoted to captain on the date of death. A footnote on the narrative points at the Navy appointment gazette, Class A, No. 1638, issued 6 November 1944, order dated 7 July, page 33 of that issue, in the file the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records numbers C13072101800, and the editor's label on the footnote is "Aoki (posthumous promotion)."

That file was downloaded. It is a fifty-page image of appointment gazettes from early November 1944. The vertical text did not yield a reliable reading, so this essay cannot say what page 33 actually promotes him to. Until it does, the rear admiral rests on one sentence in one article. The captain rests on the personnel database, the class roster, and Combined Fleet's posthumous annotation, which are independent of each other in the way compilations can be and still all wrong together. The better-supported final rank is posthumous captain. It is not certain.

The gazette, if the citation is right, was dated four months after the sinking. That delay is ordinary for 1944, when the appointment office was months behind the deaths. It is not evidence of a controversy about him. It is evidence that by November the Navy was still processing July.

No will, no grave location, and no Yasukuni enrollment were confirmed here. The class roster is the nearest thing to a memorial line: a captain, from a Mie middle school, lost in the South China Sea as commander of Destroyer Division 32.