Ships
- IJN Akigumo Captain from 22 December 1941
Commander Masahira Soma became captain of the destroyer Akigumo on 22 December 1941, as the ship came home from the Hawaii operation. He moved to her from the Kure Naval Arsenal, where his recent work had been inspection in the torpedo department and the steel department, with membership in the torpedo experimental section and the naval supply department. He succeeded Terumichi Arimoto, who was sent to the destroyer Kagero after that ship's captain collapsed from a stroke on the return from Pearl Harbor.
Akigumo was the last of the Kagero-class destroyers, completed at the Uraga yard on 27 September 1941. She had entered the war without a destroyer division of her own, attached instead to Carrier Division 5 as a screen for the carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku, and she had just finished that duty on the Pearl Harbor raid. Under Soma she stayed with the carriers. In January 1942 she went out to Truk and covered them during the strikes on Rabaul and along the New Guinea and Bismarck coasts, then returned to patrol in home waters.
In April she sailed again with the carrier force for the raid into the Indian Ocean. During the operations around Ceylon her station was with the replenishment ships. On 10 April 1942 the navy ended her solitary assignment and placed her in Destroyer Division 10 with Kazagumo, Makigumo, and Yugumo, in Destroyer Squadron 10 of the First Air Fleet.
That division carried Soma through the Midway operation and into the Solomon Islands. Before dawn on 27 October 1942, after the carrier battle off the Santa Cruz Islands, Akigumo and Makigumo closed the American carrier Hornet. She lay abandoned and still afloat after American attempts to scuttle her had failed and the last American ships had been driven off. Soma opened with gunfire aimed below the waterline. The two destroyers then put torpedoes into Hornet, and she sank. He also had a signalman sketch her final list and trim under a searchlight, a drawing he wanted for the Naval General Staff, since the darkness ruled out a photograph. The lamp brought a puzzled challenge from Makigumo, which could not see why Akigumo was lighting herself in submarine water.
Soma kept Akigumo through another year of escort and fleet duty among Japan, Truk, and the Solomons. His last passage in command brought the escort carriers Zuiho and Chuyo into Yokosuka. On 11 November 1943 he turned the ship over to Atsuo Iritono and returned to Kure, to the arsenal's torpedo research department. Akigumo was lost on 11 April 1944 off Zamboanga, torpedoed by the American submarine Redfin while Iritono was still her captain.