Ships
- IJN Shigure Captain from 1 December 1944
Lieutenant Commander Manabu Hagiwara became captain of the destroyer Shigure on 1 December 1944. She was a Shiratsuyu-class ship, completed at Uraga in 1936, and by the time he took her she was already known in the fleet as a survivor of battles that had wiped out the ships around her. Hagiwara was the officer who had her at the end.
The command he inherited was the last in a short wartime line. Noboru Seo had her from the opening of the Pacific War into late 1942, and Kamesaburo Yamagami followed him. Through the Solomons fighting, Commander Tameichi Hara used Shigure as flagship while he led Destroyer Division 27. Shigeru Nishino relieved Yamagami in December 1943 and was still in command at Leyte Gulf. On 25 October 1944 Shigure was the only ship of Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimura's southern force to return from Surigao Strait, after the battleships Fuso and Yamashiro, the heavy cruiser Mogami, and the other destroyers of that column were lost. Hagiwara succeeded Nishino five weeks later.
His first heavy duty came in the middle of December. Shigure left the Inland Sea with the new fleet carrier Unryu, bound for the Philippines in company with other escorts. On 19 December 1944 the American submarine Redfish torpedoed Unryu in the East China Sea. The carrier's magazines exploded and she sank within minutes. Shigure was among the escorts that watched the blast and took survivors out of the water.
Shigure then worked south with a small convoy on a roundabout track through the South China Sea, shaped to stay clear of submarines, with Malaya as the destination. Near dawn on 24 January 1945, off the Malay Peninsula in the Gulf of Siam and close to the end of that passage, she raised the alarm. The American submarine Blackfin torpedoed her, and she sank. Hagiwara got clear. In a message sent in the early hours of 28 January he reported one officer killed and thirty-six enlisted men missing, and he put the survivors at seventeen officers and 253 enlisted men.
The sinking closed a run of narrow escapes that had carried Shigure through the Solomons, the Marianas, and Surigao Strait. Hagiwara had been her captain for less than two months. After the loss he was assigned as fitting-out officer of the new destroyer Hatsuzakura, and he later commanded the destroyer Kashi, both of them small escorts of the kind the navy was still trying to finish in the last year of the war.