Ships
- IJN Suzuya Captain from 1 September 1944
Captain Masao Teraoka took command of the Imperial Japanese Navy heavy cruiser Suzuya on 1 September 1944. She was a Mogami-class ship, already a veteran of Cruiser Division 7, and his tenure was the last she had. He held her for less than two months, and the command ended when she was lost off Samar.
Suzuya had been completed at Yokosuka in 1937 and named for the Suzuya River in Karafuto. Earlier in the war the cruiser had been commanded by Masatomi Kimura, who had her from the autumn of 1940 until late in 1942. Under successive captains she went through the opening operations in the south, the Battle of Midway, the Solomons campaign, and the Battle of the Philippine Sea. After that last action she returned to Kure for a refit. Teraoka assumed command at the beginning of September, as the fleet prepared for a further sortie.
In October 1944 the navy assembled its remaining surface strength at Brunei to meet the American landing on Leyte. Suzuya sailed in Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita's Center Force with the other ships of her cruiser division. The force endured heavy air attack while crossing the Sibuyan Sea, passed through San Bernardino Strait during the night, and at dawn on 25 October stood east of Samar within gun range of a group of American escort carriers and their screening destroyers and destroyer escorts.
As the Japanese ships engaged that formation, carrier aircraft struck back at Suzuya. A near miss early in the action wrecked her port propeller and cut her speed. Around 10:50 a larger strike, on the order of thirty aircraft, attacked her again. Another near miss set off the torpedoes in her No. 1 mount. The blast spread fire through the middle of the ship and wrecked the starboard engine rooms and a boiler room. She lay stopped and burning, and the fires could not be got under control.
The division commander told Teraoka to prepare to abandon, and the ship was given up around 11:50. Suzuya capsized and sank early in the afternoon east of Samar. The destroyer Okinami worked alongside in a rough sea and took off Captain Teraoka together with several hundred of the crew. Other survivors were later picked up by American ships. A large part of the company was killed in the explosions or lost in the water. Suzuya was removed from the navy list on 20 December 1944. Teraoka lived through the war and afterward wrote his own account of the cruiser's last action off Samar.