Pacific ships

IJN · Commander

Motokura, Masayoshi

All captains
MM

Ships

Masayoshi Motokura was an officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy and a graduate of the 51st class at Etajima. Before the war he commanded the destroyer Hatsushimo. In April 1941 he became captain of Yugiri, and he still held that command when the war opened.

Those first months took Yugiri with the troop convoys into Malaya, onto the gun line off Endau, out into the Indian Ocean, and then on the run toward Guadalcanal. Yuji Yamada flew the flag of Destroyer Division 20 in her. Yamada was not her captain.

Motokura was still aboard on 28 August 1942 when a bomb hit the bridge and killed Yamada. Motokura was not among the dead. On 3 September he left Yugiri for Tokitsukaze. He relieved Giichiro Nakahara, who had been chosen to command Destroyer Division 24 and took up that post a week later.

Tokitsukaze was a destroyer of the Kagero class, and Motokura's first passage in her was a return to home waters. The carrier Taiyo, torpedoed on 28 September, left Truk on 4 October with Tokitsukaze and Sazanami as escorts and reached Kure on 14 October. Early in 1943 he had Tokitsukaze on the fast destroyer lifts that took Japanese troops off Guadalcanal.

On 3 March 1943, in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, Allied aircraft hit the convoy she was escorting toward Lae. The attack left Tokitsukaze dead in the water and killed nineteen of her crew. Motokura ordered the ship abandoned, and Yukikaze took the survivors off. Aircraft found the drifting hull southeast of Finschhafen the next morning and sank it. The Navy removed Tokitsukaze from the list on 1 April 1943, and his command of her ended the same day.

In September the Navy gave him a new ship still fitting out at Maizuru. On 17 September 1943 he was named fitting-out officer of Hamanami, a destroyer of the Yugumo class. She completed on 15 October, and he became her captain that day. After working up with Destroyer Squadron 11 in the western Inland Sea, she joined Destroyer Division 32 on 15 December. Nakahara, by then a captain, commanded the division.

In 1944 Hamanami went to sea for the Battle of the Philippine Sea. In October she sailed with the First Diversion Attack Force into Leyte Gulf. On 26 October she helped scuttle the crippled light cruiser Noshiro. She took off Rear Admiral Mikio Hayakawa, commander of Destroyer Squadron 2, and later put him aboard the battleship Yamato.

Her last voyage was troop convoy TA No. 3, from Manila toward Ormoc on Leyte. On 11 November 1944 aircraft of the American fast carrier force caught the convoy in Ormoc Bay. Hamanami sank there, and so did the destroyers Shimakaze, Wakatsuki, and Naganami, together with three transports. Sixty-three of her men were killed and forty-two were injured. Asashimo rescued 167 survivors. Motokura was among them, and so was Captain Ichitaro Oshima, commander of Destroyer Division 32.