Ships
- IJN Wakaba Captain, in command on 1 March 1942 · Relieved on 7 November 1942
Lieutenant Commander Masakichi Kuroki commanded the Imperial Japanese Navy destroyer Wakaba. He was in command on 1 March 1942 and remained in that post until he was relieved on 7 November 1942.
Wakaba was a Hatsuharu-class fleet destroyer, built at the Sasebo Naval Arsenal and completed in 1934. After the stability troubles that forced a redesign of Japanese destroyers in the mid-1930s, she went to sea as a fast fleet escort with a heavy battery of oxygen-fueled torpedoes. Before the Pacific War she trained with the destroyer squadrons in home waters.
She entered the war in Destroyer Division 21 with Hatsuharu, Nenohi, and Hatsushimo. In the opening months the division screened invasion forces through the Philippines and the Netherlands East Indies. On 1 March 1942, with Kuroki in command, that first southern campaign was drawing to a close, and destroyers of this kind were turning back toward Japan to refit for the next operations.
In June 1942 the navy coupled the attack on Midway with landings in the Aleutians. Wakaba went north with that Aleutian effort and then stayed on patrol and transport duty between the Kurile Islands and the occupied islands of Attu and Kiska. In July 1942 the American submarine Triton torpedoed and sank Nenohi near Agattu. Wakaba continued in those northern waters through the rest of Kuroki's tour, while the main surface fighting of the year gathered in the Solomon Islands.
On 7 November 1942 he was relieved of command. Wakaba remained in service under later commanding officers. American carrier aircraft sank her in Philippine waters in October 1944, during the campaign for Leyte. Kuroki's months in her covered the passage from the first offensives to the long watch on the northern islands, escorting the ships that kept those garrisons supplied.