Ships
- IJN Nagara Captain from 16 August 1943
Masayuki Kitamura was a career officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy. He was born on 3 October 1894 in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, and he was killed on 9 September 1944. His last active rank was captain, and on the day of his death he was promoted to rear admiral. In the Pacific War his cruiser command was the light cruiser Nagara, which he took as captain on 16 August 1943.
He came from Shimoishibiki-machi in Kanazawa and attended Kanazawa Second Middle School. On 10 September 1914 he entered the Naval Academy with the 45th class. He graduated on 24 November 1917, ranked 88th in a class of 89, and was commissioned as a midshipman. After the ordinary courses at the gunnery school and the torpedo school, he served with the Makō Defense Unit, the Sasebo naval barracks, and the Chinkai Defense Unit. For most of the twenty-six years that followed he was at sea.
His first commands were minesweepers, which he held as a lieutenant from the late 1920s. He commanded Minesweeper No. 5 from November 1929. As a lieutenant commander and then a commander he held four destroyer commands: Kuretake from October 1931, Usugumo from December 1936, a stretch in 1937 that also covered Shinonome, and Natsugumo, whose fitting-out he supervised before becoming her captain in December 1937. In November 1938 he went to Nagara as executive officer. In November 1940 he took command of the 11th Torpedo Division.
The Pacific War opened with Kitamura, still a commander, in charge of the 21st Minesweeping Unit and Minesweepers No. 7 through No. 12. In April 1942 he was given Destroyer Division 17, the Kagerō-class ships Hamakaze, Urakaze, Tanikaze, and Isokaze, and he joined Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s First Air Fleet with Tanikaze as his flagship. He was promoted to captain on 1 May 1942. The division screened the carrier force in the Midway operation, and Kitamura was with that force when the fleet carriers Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu were lost.
On 16 August 1943 he was appointed captain of Nagara, then flagship of Rear Admiral Tamotsu Takama’s 2nd Destroyer Squadron. The same day the cruiser entered Maizuru. The yard fitted a Type 21 air-search radar and a radar-warning set, changed the searchlights, removed a 2.5-meter rangefinder, and altered the aircraft catapult. Noshiro relieved her as squadron flagship on 20 August. After the refit, on 1 November, Nagara became flagship of the Fourth Fleet under Vice Admiral Masami Kobayashi. On 14 November she helped tow the torpedoed light cruiser Agano back toward Truk. On 22 November she left Truk after the American landing on Tarawa, reached Kwajalein on the 26th, and was damaged there by bombers and torpedo planes from the carriers Enterprise and Essex. She was sent home and reached Maizuru on 26 January 1944. In that repair a 140-millimeter gun and torpedo tubes came off so that more antiaircraft guns could be fitted. Kitamura remained her captain through the yard period.
He left Nagara on 7 April 1944. Shinichi Kondo succeeded him, and Giichiro Nakahara was captain from 8 May 1944. Toshio Naoi had commanded the cruiser earlier, from September 1941 into July 1942. On 7 August 1944, on passage from Kagoshima toward Sasebo, Nagara was hit aft by one torpedo from the submarine Croaker and sank off the Amakusa Islands. Nakahara was the captain who went down with her, together with 348 men. Another 235 men were rescued. Kitamura had left the ship four months earlier.
On 7 April 1944 he became operations commander of the 1st Surface Escort Force, responsible for convoys between Southeast Asia and the home islands under the Southwest Area Fleet. The force depended heavily on older warships and converted merchant ships, with few vessels armed for antisubmarine and antiaircraft work, and convoy losses grew severe as Allied attacks on the sea lanes increased. From 24 July to 1 August 1944 he also served as temporary captain of the escort carrier Kaiyo while keeping the escort appointment. He was killed on 9 September 1944, still in that escort post, at the age of forty-nine, and was promoted to rear admiral the same day.