Ships
- IJN Yayoi Captain at the Wake Island attack, December 1941 · Relieved on 5 July 1942
Lieutenant Commander Masaki Kimotsuki of the Imperial Japanese Navy commanded the destroyer Yayoi at the Wake Island attack in December 1941. He stayed in command of her until he was relieved on 5 July 1942.
Yayoi belonged to the Mutsuki class, a dozen destroyers completed in the mid-1920s. She was an older flush-deck ship by the time the Pacific War opened, armed with 4.7-inch guns and torpedoes and used for escort work and the support of landings. Ships of her type made up much of the destroyer strength sent with Japan’s opening moves across the central and south Pacific.
In December 1941 Yayoi sailed with the force assigned to take Wake Island. The first attempt to land troops, on 11 December, was driven off by the island’s coastal guns and by the few American fighters still able to fly. Destroyers in that attack group were lost in the repulse. A larger force returned before the month ended, and on 23 December Japanese troops captured the atoll. Kimotsuki commanded Yayoi through the operation.
After Wake, Yayoi moved with the South Seas forces into the Bismarck Archipelago and toward New Guinea. In January 1942 ships of her division covered the seizure of Rabaul. In March they supported the landings at Lae and Salamaua on the New Guinea coast. Through the spring and into early summer her duty was the steady work of a fleet destroyer in that campaign: screening transports, standing off beachheads, and operating from the bases at Truk and Rabaul. Kimotsuki was relieved on 5 July 1942.
Yayoi remained in the South Pacific after that change of command. On 11 September 1942, during operations in the Solomon Sea connected with the fighting off eastern New Guinea, American land-based bombers sank her.