Ships
- IJN Nowaki Captain from 10 June 1943 · Relieved on 3 July 1943
- IJN Ushio Captain from 3 July 1943 · Ordered to Yoizuki, February 1945
The name
The characters are not in doubt once the appointment notices are opened. In the Navy's confidential personnel gazette for June and July 1943, and again in the secret gazette for February 1945, the man who moves through Hatakaze, Nowaki, Ushio, and Yoizuki is written 荒木政臣, naval officer number, or whatever the parenthetical is, 二九四. The second character of the given name is 政, government or administration, not 正, correct. Web pages that print 荒木正臣, including some mirrors of the Japanese Wikipedia and the Kantai Collection reference wiki, are wrong about the character. The gazette is the Navy's own hand.
The reading is not settled, and this essay will not pretend that it is. Combined Fleet spells the name Masami. A compiled roster of Etajima class 56 romanizes the same characters as Masatomi and glosses them 荒木政臣. Neither form is written in kana in any document read for this piece. The ordinary name-reading of 政臣 is Masaomi. "Masami" does not fall out of 臣 by any usual reading; it is the spelling in Combined Fleet, and it may be a shortening or a mis-hearing that has stuck. Where a single romanization is unavoidable below, it is only as a label for the man whose orders say 政臣.
What is not known about where he came from
No birth date, no parents, no wife, no children, no hometown address, and no death date turned up in the gazettes, the class list, or the ship articles that otherwise track him. The one personal fact outside the service is on a compiled roster of the fifty-sixth class of the Naval Academy at Etajima, the class that graduated on 16 March 1928: 荒木政臣, recorded there as from Yamaguchi, final rank commander. That roster is a secondary compilation, not the Academy's own register, and it was not checked against the original pupils' list. It is the only source found for the prefecture and the class.
The same roster is enough to throw out a conflicting class number. Combined Fleet tags him "[50]," the bracket it uses for an Etajima class. Class 50's roster, in the same compilation, has no Araki of this name. It does have a Kajiwara Masami. A lieutenant commander in the summer of 1943 is a plausible rank for a man fifteen years out of Etajima; it is an early rank for a man from the class of 1922. The "[50]" is treated here as an error in that table, not as a second candidate.
Nothing was found on his cadet cruise, his schools, a China-war posting, or any ship before the summer of 1941. The years in which a naval officer is made — the long subordinate watches, the first command of a division of men, whatever the China coast did to him — are a blank. The record picks him up only when he is already a lieutenant commander.
A gunboat, then a destroyer that lasted two weeks
The Japanese Wikipedia article on the gunboat Atami, drawing on Nihon Kaigun Shi and citing the personnel gazette of 20 August 1941 (部内限, No. 695), lists 荒木政臣, lieutenant commander, as her captain from that date, in succession to Lieutenant Fukuju Jūzō. Atami was a small ship, a little over two hundred tons, built for rivers and coastal work in China, not for the fleet. The article gives no date on which he left her, and the August 1941 gazette itself was not opened for this essay. If the citation is right, he began the Pacific War in command of a gunboat. What he did with her, and where he went when he gave her up, is not in hand.
The next post the ship histories agree on is a fleet destroyer, and it was brief. Isonami, a Special Type destroyer of Destroyer Division 19, is given 荒木政臣 as captain from 26 March 1943 in the captain list compiled by Toyama Misao and repeated on the Japanese Wikipedia, and the same change of command is in Combined Fleet's tabular record. The March order was not found in a gazette read here. Two weeks is all the secondary record allows him.
On the morning of 9 April 1943, south of Buton in the Celebes Sea, the American submarine Tautog attacked a convoy coming up from Surabaya toward Ambon. The Japanese Wikipedia account of Tautog's sixth patrol, drawn from the submarine's patrol report, says that around 0700 she hit the N.Y.K. ship Penang Maru (彼南丸, 5,214 tons). The ship was beached on Buton in an attempt to save her and sank in the afternoon, at 1335 by that account. Isonami, the escort, took the survivors off. Tautog then fired four torpedoes at the destroyer. The American report, as summarized there, says the destroyer seemed to comb them, and that one torpedo passed close under the stern, turned, and hit. She sank. A torpedo that missed exploded among people already in the water.
Combined Fleet's table puts the loss about thirty-five miles southeast of Wangiwangi, at 05°26′ S, 123°04′ E, and says seven men were killed and nine injured. A Japanese ship-history site gives the same figure of seven dead. Neither figure was copied from a Japanese action report read for this essay, and the position is not identical to the one in the Tautog article (05°31′ S, 123°09′ E). The one fact that does not depend on those compilations is that the man was alive six weeks later. On 26 May, if the dating in the Hatakaze article is right, the Navy gave him another destroyer. He had not gone down with Isonami. Whether he was pulled from the water, or stepped out of a boat onto a beach at Buton, is not written down in anything found here. The gazette that next names him does not mention the sinking.
That silence is its own kind of record. The Navy did not beach him. It put him, almost at once, on an old destroyer doing local work out of Yokosuka.
Two ships, and a command that never left the yard
The confidential gazette issued on 1 June 1943, No. 1129, appoints 海軍少佐 荒木政臣 captain of the destroyer Hatakaze. The orders around his name in that issue belong to the block of late-May appointments; the Hatakaze article dates his specifically to 26 May, which matches the usual way these issues are cited, though the characters 五月二十六日 were not isolated on the page read here. Hatakaze was a Kamikaze-class destroyer of the early 1920s, long past fleet work, employed on escort and local defense. He held her as his proper command for a month.
On 10 June the gazette is explicit. Issue No. 1143, in the volume whose orders open with the line that appointments of 10 June follow, gives 旗風駆逐艦長, Lieutenant Commander 荒木政臣, an additional duty: 兼補, concurrent captain of Nowaki. That is the date the command list gives, and it is right as far as it goes. It does not say the appointment was concurrent, or that his real job that week was still the old destroyer at Yokosuka.
Nowaki was not a ship a new captain took to sea. She was a Kagerō-class fleet destroyer, fifteenth of the type, and she had come home broken. In December 1942, off Guadalcanal, bombs had flooded an engine room and left her unable to steam; Maikaze towed her to Truk, and in February 1943 she reached Yokosuka for real repairs. Her previous captain, Commander Koga Magotarō, was relieved on 10 April 1943. The Nowaki article, citing that day's gazette, says no destroyer captain was appointed in his place until 10 June. The ship sat in the yard without a commanding officer for two months. Araki's concurrent appointment filled the blank on paper. It did not, on any movement record consulted, take the ship out of the dock.
On 25 June, issue No. 1158, the small type beside his name still calls him captain of Hatakaze and concurrent captain of Nowaki, and the order itself appoints him captain of Nowaki. That is the Navy's way of making the second ship the real one. The Hatakaze article says Lieutenant Commander Okada Seiichi was given Hatakaze the same day. Okada's line was not the line read in the gazette; Araki's was. From 25 June he was, on the books, Nowaki's captain and no longer Hatakaze's.
He kept her for eight days.
The gazette published on 5 July 1943, No. 1165, swaps two captains. 荒木政臣, lieutenant commander, whose current post is printed as captain of Nowaki, is appointed captain of Ushio. Commander Kanda Takeo, whose current post is printed as captain of Ushio, is appointed captain of Nowaki. The ship articles date the order 3 July. The publication date, 5 July, is printed on the issue; the characters for the third were not pinned down in the column read here, and a preceding block in the same issue closes with 2 July. The substance is not in doubt. They traded ships. Araki had been the caretaker of a damaged destroyer, and before that, if the captain lists are right, the captain of a ship that sank under him. The Navy sent him to the working destroyer and the more senior man to the ship still in the yard.
Nowaki sailed in August, under Kanda. She was at Leyte in October 1944, under Commander Moriya Setsuji, and she was sunk with all hands on the morning after the battle off Samar, taking with her the Chikuma survivors she had pulled from the water. None of that was Araki's cruise. A line that stops on 10 June 1943 stops before the only command that shows what he was at sea.
Ushio, for a year and a half
Ushio, "flood tide," was a Special Type destroyer, one of the later group, and in July 1943 she was a working escort, not a monument. From the July order until the February 1945 order below, no gazette read here puts anyone else in his place. The Japanese Wikipedia captain list, following Toyama, runs him from 3 July 1943 to the appointment of Lieutenant Commander Satō Fumio on 30 March 1945. Combined Fleet instead has Satō relieving him on 9 February 1945. The February gazette settles the direction of the error. When Araki is ordered to Yoizuki, the small type still calls him captain of Ushio. Satō is not in that order. The 9 February date for Satō is not this man's relief. Ushio may have sat without a captain from his detachment until the end of March. That gap is in the captain list, not in a report of what the ship did in those weeks.
What follows is the ship's war under the only captain the notices allow, told from the destroyer's own diary and battle reports as they are quoted and summarized in the Japanese Wikipedia article on Ushio and, where noted, in Combined Fleet's table. The diary files at JACAR were not transcribed page by page for this essay. Where a figure is given, it is the figure those summaries attribute to the ship's paper.
Through the second half of 1943 the work was the carrier shuttle. Ushio and Akebono took the escort carriers Unyō, Chūyō, Taiyō, and Ryūhō, and the light carrier Zuihō, back and forth between Yokosuka and Truk. It is the dull, lethal routine of that year: long passages, submarine contacts that come to nothing or to everything, a dockyard period in September and October at Yokosuka in which, by the tabular record, her X turret came off and 25-millimeter guns and a Type 22 radar went on. Combined Fleet places her, at the start of December, in the group bringing Maya, Chūyō, Unyō, and Zuihō home from Truk. On 4 December the submarine Sailfish sank Chūyō east of Hachijō. Secondary accounts of that morning give the rescue and the standing-by to Urakaze and Akebono. They do not give a sentence to what Ushio did. He was, if the movement record is right, in the force that lost a carrier and hundreds of men, many of them prisoners of war, and then he went on to the next escort. No letter, no report over his name, says what he thought of it.
In 1944 the division went north, and then south, and then into a battle that was already lost when he entered it.
On 7 July 1944, while Destroyer Division 7 was escorting a convoy in the northern waters, the destroyer Usugumo was torpedoed and sunk. The squadron diary, as quoted in the Ushio article, has the division reporting the loss. Ushio was not the ship that sank. She was one of the ships still there.
On 25 August, in the western Inland Sea, a practice torpedo from Ushio struck Akebono and flooded two boiler rooms. The diary line is blunt: Ushio's torpedo, Akebono's side. It does not say who on the bridge misjudged the run. It happened on his ship, in a fleet that could no longer afford to put holes in itself.
In October he was sent to Leyte with Vice Admiral Shima's Second Striking Force, the force that followed Nishimura into Surigao Strait. Ushio was the left-hand guide destroyer of a column led by Nachi and Ashigara, with Abukuma and the other destroyers. The Ushio diary, quoted in the article, says that in the bad weather he could not make out the land, that the ship grew uneasy and turned, and that she tried to fall in astern of Kasumi at the rear of the column. At 0315 on 25 October, Abukuma fired on her. Friendly fire, in a strait where the first Japanese force had already been destroyed and the second did not yet know it. The diary calls it a mis-fire, 誤射. It does not say whether anyone on Ushio was hit by it.
Nachi collided with the burning Mogami. Shima turned back. Ushio was sent to the light cruiser Abukuma, which had been stopped by a torpedo from an American PT boat — American records say the boat had been firing at Ushio, and that the torpedo found the cruiser instead. He left the formation. Through the morning of the 25th, carrier planes strafed the pair; the diary counts two dead and four badly wounded on Ushio in that attack. They made Dapitan, on the Mindanao coast, at 2230, worked on the cruiser through the night, and sailed for Coron at 0605 on the 26th. From 1006, B-24s bombed them. Abukuma's torpedoes cooked off. At 1242 the cruiser sank, at 09°09′ N, 121°54′ E by the report the article cites. Ushio lowered her boats. The count of people taken aboard, from the Ushio diary as quoted, is twenty-six officers and warrant officers, the cruiser's captain among them, and 357 enlisted men. Ushio's own battle report for the action, again as cited, sums her cost at five enlisted dead and eight enlisted wounded, and a scatter of small holes in the side and the upper works. Rear Admiral Kimura Masatomi, who had shifted his flag from Abukuma to Kasumi before the end, is said in the same secondary account to have signaled the survivors, once Ushio reached Coron: their fight was acknowledged; they were to serve the country through seven lives. The wording is the article's report of a signal, not a document read here.
Five dead on his own deck, and more than three hundred men from a ship his column had also fired on, pulled out of the water because he had been the one told to stay. That is the nearest thing to a portrait the paper record holds. It is not a statement of his character. It is a statement of what the job was, on the only day for which his ship's report was followed far enough to see the numbers.
The week was not over. On 5 November, in Manila, Akebono was set on fire in an air raid and left unable to move. The First Destroyer Squadron diary, as quoted, has Ushio alongside her, fighting the fire and taking her in tow. On 13 November the raids came back. Ushio was moderately damaged. The squadron diary says she could steam on the port shaft only, and that she left Manila at 2330 that night in a scratch force making for Brunei. Combined Fleet's table says a near miss disabled the starboard engine, that her best speed was eighteen knots, and that twenty-three men were dead and ten wounded. Those casualty figures are not the five and eight of the Surigao report, and they were not reconciled against the diary in this research. Two sources, two counts, for the same bad week in Manila. What they agree on is that the ship was hurt and that she got out on one engine.
She went south to Singapore, north again with the damaged heavy cruiser Myōkō, then home with convoys along the Indochina coast. By early January 1945 she was at Yokosuka with her engines finished. The Japanese article says she stayed there, disarmed in the end, and was still afloat at the surrender. The captain who had taken her through Surigao and Manila was no longer aboard.
A new destroyer, and the end of the Navy
Yoizuki, an Akizuki-class destroyer built as an anti-aircraft ship, was completed at Uraga on 31 January 1945. Her first captain was Commander Nakao Kotarō. He was ill. The Yoizuki article says the Navy had already intended to relieve him for that reason.
In the secret personnel gazette, issue 甲第1722号, preserved at JACAR as C13072103500, the order is printed in the usual two sizes of type. Nakao is relieved as captain of Yoizuki and attached to the Sasebo Naval District. 荒木政臣 is appointed captain of Yoizuki. The small type gives his rank and his current post: 海軍中佐, captain of Ushio. The parenthetical 二九四 is the same mark as in 1943. Sometime between the July 1943 gazette, where he is still 少佐, and this order, he had been promoted commander. The promotion order itself was not found. The Yoizuki article dates the issue 15 February 1945 and the order 10 February, and, citing the Eleventh Destroyer Squadron diary, says he reported aboard on 16 February. The appointment lines were read. The date line and the diary entry were not.
He was a commander, at the last, of a new ship that the Navy could barely fuel and could not keep in a fought-over anchorage without hiding her. The ship's own story, in the Yoizuki article and in Combined Fleet's table, is training in the Inland Sea, a mine under her as she left Kure on 5 June, repair alongside, air raids on Kure in late July in which the guns were at times restricted to save ammunition, a near miss that wounded men, and camouflage in the inland sea at the surrender. Those are the ship's months. Which of them he spent on board, and which in a shelter ashore, is not separated out. No action report over his name was read.
The captain list then does something the wartime gazettes do not. It keeps him. From 10 February 1945 the Yoizuki article, citing Toyama for the naval period and the demobilization gazettes after it, runs his title through the dissolution of the Navy: commander, then Second Demobilization officer, then Second Demobilization secretary, then Demobilization secretary, until 15 January 1947. The relieving order is cited as the Second Demobilization Bureau gazette of 28 January 1947. That file was not opened here. If the citation is right, he was still the ship's captain, under whatever civilian-military title the occupation authorities were using, for most of the year in which Yoizuki carried repatriates. The article notes that the actor Takarada Akira came home from Manchuria in her. It does not say Araki was on the bridge for that passage, and it should not be read that way.
From 15 January 1947 until 10 February the article says the ship had no captain. Then other men, for a few months, and on 29 August 1947 she was turned over to China and became Fen Yang. His name stops.
The cost, and the after
The cost that can be counted is other people's, on ships he commanded.
On Isonami, if he was her captain on 9 April 1943, the ship was lost while she was stopped to pick up the crew of a torpedoed merchantman, and the secondary compilations say seven of his men died. He survived. The Navy's next use of him was a month on an old destroyer and eight days as sole captain of a fleet destroyer that did not leave the yard.
On Ushio the paper is better, and the numbers are still the ship's, not a judgment. Five of his sailors dead off Mindanao, eight wounded, a cruiser's company taken out of the water after his own column had fired on him in the dark. A practice torpedo into a sister ship. A bomb or a near miss in Manila that left him one shaft and, by one secondary count, more than twenty dead. Then the engines gave out, and the ship that had lasted through almost the whole war sat at Yokosuka until the end without him.
On Yoizuki there is no battle of his to point to. There is a new destroyer finished too late, a mine, raids, and the long administrative afterward in which he remained the man responsible for her until the middle of January 1947.
No decoration was found. No resignation, no court-martial, no letter, no photograph identified as his, no obituary. The class roster leaves the column for his death empty, which in that compilation usually means the compiler did not have a death in action and did not have a date. It is not evidence that he lived to any particular year. After the January 1947 order, the public record consulted here is silent.
Ten days in June 1943, concurrent with another ship, over a destroyer in dock, are what the short command line records. Two months before that, if the captain lists are right, he lost Isonami. For the year and a half after, he kept Ushio afloat through a strait, a cruiser's sinking, and a burning harbor, and then took a last new destroyer into the peace.