Ships
- IJN Inazuma Captain from 6 November 1942
- IJN Yukikaze Captain from 10 December 1943
Masamichi Terauchi was born in Tochigi Prefecture in 1905 and graduated in the Naval Academy’s 55th class. He followed the ordinary path of a junior officer until the eve of the Pacific war, and from December 1940 into 1941 he commanded the navy’s No. 14 minesweeper. He ended his service as a commander.
On 6 November 1942 he became captain of the destroyer Inazuma. He held that ship through a hard year of fleet duty and left her when he was ordered to another command in December 1943. Inazuma was sunk by an American submarine in May 1944, months after he had moved on.
He took Yukikaze on 10 December 1943, relieving Ryokichi Sugama at Kure. The Kagero-class destroyer was already famous. Under Kenjiro Tobita, and then under Sugama, she had come through the early battles, and sailors ranked her with Shigure among the destroyers that seemed impossible to sink. Terauchi came aboard a heavy man, a fifth-dan judoka with a handlebar mustache, sweating on the ladder in the December cold. He told the crew that Yukikaze would stay afloat because he was their captain.
Much of 1944 was escort work, screening carriers and oilers, and he is said to have bristled at being kept from a destroyer’s torpedo attack. On 25 October 1944, in the Battle off Samar, Yukikaze ran with the light cruiser Yahagi and the destroyers Isokaze, Urakaze, and Nowaki against the American escort group. Their gunfire fell on the destroyer Johnston, already badly hit and still fighting, and helped put her under. As Johnston settled, with her survivors in the water, Terauchi had the men on his bridge render honors.
Late that November, after seeing the battleship Nagato back toward Yokosuka, Yukikaze sailed with Hamakaze and Isokaze to cover the new carrier Shinano on the run from Yokosuka toward Kure. On the night of 28–29 November the submarine Archerfish torpedoed Shinano, and the carrier sank. Yukikaze took survivors aboard. Terauchi was still in command for the last sortie of the battleship Yamato. On 6 April 1945 Yukikaze left the Inland Sea in the screen of that force, bound for Okinawa. The next day, south of Kyushu, carrier planes struck the formation. He later described standing at the bridge with a cigarette, putting on a show of calm so the men around him would hold. Yamato, under Kosaku Aruga, went down. Yukikaze picked men out of the water, and when Isokaze could not be saved he took her crew off and sank her with torpedoes.
He left Yukikaze in the late spring of 1945, and Keiji Koyo succeeded him. The destroyer was still afloat at the surrender. Terauchi finished the war ashore at Kure, commanding a local defense unit, still a commander. Afterward he worked for the government tobacco and salt monopoly. Years later, asked in front of the ship’s other wartime captains why Yukikaze had never been sunk, he laughed and gave the same answer he had given his crew. He died in Komae, Tokyo, on 19 January 1978, at the age of seventy-two.