Ships
- IJN Haruna Captain from 20 December 1944
Masatake Yoshimura was a career officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy, a torpedo specialist who ended the war as a captain. He was born in Fukuoka Prefecture in 1896 and died on 15 February 1978. In 1914 he finished at the prefectural Shuyukan middle school, passed the entrance examinations for both the Naval Academy and the Army Academy, and entered the navy. He graduated with the 45th class on 24 November 1917, placed 52nd in a class of 89.
On 1 December 1924 he began the advanced course at the Torpedo School. From November 1930 he commanded destroyers, often two at a time: Take, with Nashi for the first month; then Kaya; Yunagi together with Asanagi; Isonami; and, for a few weeks in November 1936, Shinonome as well. On 1 December 1936 he went back to the Torpedo School as an instructor. He had already been commander of Destroyer Division 27 since 19 October 1940 when he was promoted captain on 15 October 1941.
That division, with Shigure, Shiratsuyu, Ariake, and Yugure, spent the first weeks of the Pacific war in home waters and met the carrier force returning from Hawaii. In May 1942 Yoshimura took it to the Coral Sea as the screen for the Fifth Carrier Division, his flag in Shigure. At Midway, from 5 to 7 June, the division sailed with the Main Body gathered around Yamato. On 20 July 1942 he left the division and became captain of the light cruiser Tatsuta. He turned that ship over on 7 January 1943.
In January 1943 he took Destroyer Division 10, then running troops through the Solomons. After Kazagumo struck a mine near Kahili on 3 April, his flag moved to Yugumo. That May the division's ships carried the ashes of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto from Musashi to Yokosuka. In the summer the same ships went north for the evacuation of Kiska: one attempt was turned back by weather, and a second lift took the garrison off on 29 July. He left the division on 21 September 1943. On 11 October he was named chief equipping officer of the new light cruiser Yahagi at Sasebo, and on 29 December, the day she was completed, he became her first captain.
Yahagi joined the Third Fleet as flagship of Destroyer Squadron 10. After work in the Inland Sea she went south to Lingga. In the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944 she screened Carrier Division 1 on the day American submarines sank Taiho and Shokaku. In October she sailed in Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita's force for the Battle of Leyte Gulf, through the Sibuyan Sea and the action off Samar, and came home for a refit at Sasebo. Yoshimura left her on 20 December 1944. Her last sortie, with Yamato toward Okinawa in April 1945, was made under another captain.
The same day he took command of Haruna at Kure. She had just returned from Leyte Gulf, where Kazue Shigenaga had been her captain. The ship's wartime captains before Shigenaga were Tamotsu Takama, Keishi Ishii, and Nobuei Morishita. Haruna was under repair, her turrets painted with pale gray stripes, and she was short of fuel. She made no further sortie under Yoshimura. On 1 January 1945 Battleship Division 3 was dissolved and she passed to Battleship Division 1. On 10 February that division was dissolved as well, and she was turned over to the Kure Naval District.
Carrier aircraft struck Kure on 19 March 1945. Haruna, lying in the Etajima roadstead, took one bomb on the starboard side aft of the bridge and suffered only light damage. On 2 April a drifting mine exploded alongside and killed two sailors. On 22 June a B-29 raid put a single bomb into the quarterdeck, again with light damage, and the next day she was towed farther out into the Etajima bight. Carrier aircraft of Task Force 38 attacked her on 24 and 28 July. Over those two days she received thirteen bomb hits and ten near misses. She fought where she lay, her main battery used against aircraft, and at 4:15 on the afternoon of 28 July flooding from a port-side hole settled her in shallow water beside a pier. Sixty-five of her officers and men were killed. Yoshimura remained her captain until 15 August 1945, when he was attached to the Kure Naval District. The wreck was raised and broken up after the war. In November 1947 he was provisionally barred from public office. He later wrote as a naval historian, and his account of Haruna's last gun action, a battleship with no fuel left to maneuver, was published with other writing on the end of Japan's twelve battleships.