Ships
- IJN Kazagumo Captain from 28 March 1942
Masayoshi Yoshida was a commander in the Imperial Japanese Navy and a graduate of the Naval Academy’s fiftieth class. On 20 January 1942 the Navy named him chief equipping officer of the Yūgumo-class destroyer Kazagumo, then completing at the Uraga Dock Company. The equipping office at the yard opened the next day. The hull had been laid down on 23 December 1940 and launched on 26 September 1941. She was a large fleet destroyer, designed for 35 knots, armed with six 127-millimeter guns and eight tubes for the Type 93 torpedo, and manned by a crew of about 228. Yoshida spent the late winter working her up to service.
On 28 March 1942 the yard finished Kazagumo, the ship entered the Yokosuka Naval District, and Yoshida became her first commanding officer. She joined Destroyer Division 10 the same day. The division had been formed on 14 March around the sister ships Yūgumo and Makigumo, under Captain Toshio Abe, who had not yet taken up the post. Until Abe arrived, Yoshida carried the division commander’s duties as well as his own. On 10 April the division passed to Destroyer Squadron 10 of the First Air Fleet, the navy’s carrier striking force. Abe designated Kazagumo the division flagship on 13 April. On 15 April the Kagerō-class destroyer Akigumo joined, and the division stood at four ships, with Kazagumo the ship on which the commander flew his pennant.
Her first fleet action was the Battle of Midway. Through 4 and 5 June 1942 she screened Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo’s carriers. American dive bombers broke through and left Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū, and Hiryū burning. Kazagumo closed the stricken ships and took men from the water. Yoshida later described the morning Akagi was lost: Nagumo and his staff came off the carrier by boat, boarded Kazagumo, flew the admiral’s flag in her for a short time, and then shifted to the light cruiser Nagara, flagship of the squadron. Looking back on Hiryū, still afloat after the other three carriers were gone, he argued that she should have been scuttled once her survivors were clear.
Yoshida kept Kazagumo with the carriers as the fight moved to the Solomons. In August 1942 she again screened Nagumo at the Battle of the Eastern Solomons. In late October she steamed with the Vanguard Force at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. In November the duty turned from screening to carrying soldiers. From 7 to 10 November she ran troops into Guadalcanal. During the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal she was attached to the bombardment force, and when the heavy cruiser Kinugasa went down she helped take survivors out of the sea. The transport schedule went on at once: a run to Buna on 17 November, another on 22 November by way of the Admiralty Islands, and a passage from Rabaul toward Wewak on the New Guinea coast.
At the start of 1943 the same destroyers reversed the flow of men. On 1 February, and again on 4 February, Kazagumo joined the evacuation of Guadalcanal, lifting troops off an island the navy could no longer feed. Yoshida remained in command through that withdrawal and through the escort and reinforcement work that followed in the Solomons. His tour ended on 14 September 1943, when he turned the ship over to Kanematsu Hashimoto. Hashimoto came from command of the destroyer Shiratsuyu as a lieutenant commander. He was promoted to commander on 1 November 1943 while still captain of Kazagumo.
Kazagumo stayed in service under her new captain for less than a year. On 8 June 1944, while escorting the heavy cruisers Myōkō and Haguro out of Davao in support of the Biak troop movement, she was torpedoed by the American submarine Hake at the mouth of Davao Gulf and sank. The destroyer Asagumo rescued 133 survivors. Shizuo Akazawa, commander of Destroyer Division 10 and embarked in Kazagumo, was killed and was advanced one rank after his death. By then Yoshida’s own career had moved on. After leaving Kazagumo he commanded the 43rd Destroyer Division and later the 41st Destroyer Division. In an account of those commands he returned to the days on Kazagumo, and to the problem of keeping a screen around carriers once enemy aircraft were already overhead.