Ships
- IJN Hatsushimo Captain from 24 August 1944 · In command when she was lost, 30 July 1945. He survived
Lieutenant Commander Masazo Sakawa assumed command of the destroyer Hatsushimo on 24 August 1944, relieving Kouji Takigawa. He came to her from the Minekaze-class destroyer Sawakaze. She was a Hatsuharu-class ship of the 21st Destroyer Division. Satoru Kohama and Atsuo Iritono had commanded her in turn during the earlier campaigns, and Wakaba and Hatsuharu were still her division mates.
In October 1944 Hatsushimo went south with Vice Admiral Kiyohide Shima's Second Striking Force, formed around the heavy cruisers Nachi and Ashigara and the light cruiser Abukuma, with destroyers that included Ushio, Akebono, Kasumi, and Shiranui. On 22 October the 21st Destroyer Division, Wakaba, Hatsuharu, and Hatsushimo, left Taiwan carrying stores for the air units at Manila and entered the bay the next day. On 24 October, while the three destroyers were heading south through the Sulu Sea to rejoin Shima, American carrier aircraft caught them west of Panay. Wakaba was sunk. Hatsushimo and Hatsuharu gathered her survivors and put them ashore at Manila.
Repairs followed at Cavite. Hatsushimo then joined the second TA operation, a night reinforcement run toward Leyte, under Rear Admiral Masatomi Kimura, whose flag was in the destroyer Kasumi. The division came apart around her. Hatsuharu was lost to air attack at Manila in November, and Hatsushimo went on with escort work in the south, including screening for the damaged battleship Haruna and the heavy cruiser Myoko. She was operating from the Singapore area as 1945 opened.
In February she took part in Operation Kita, the passage that brought the aviation battleships Ise and Hyuga and the light cruiser Oyodo north from Singapore toward the Inland Sea. Hatsushimo made that run with the destroyers Kasumi and Asashimo, and the group reached home waters. In April Sakawa took her to sea again in the screen of the battleship Yamato for the Okinawa sortie known as Operation Ten-Go. On 7 April 1945 American carrier aircraft overwhelmed that force. Yamato, the light cruiser Yahagi, and the destroyer Hamakaze were among the ships that went down. Hatsushimo came through the attacks, took survivors from Yahagi and Hamakaze aboard, and turned back for Japan.
The destroyer then moved to the Sea of Japan coast. In May she arrived at Maizuru from Sasebo in company with the destroyer Yukikaze. In June the naval gunnery school in Miyazu Bay used her as a training ship. The ports on that coast were already within reach of American carrier raids, and the ship's war had drawn in from the Philippines and the South China Sea to the bays of home.
On 30 July 1945 carrier aircraft struck the Maizuru and Miyazu anchorages. Hatsushimo was maneuvering at speed in Miyazu Bay under that attack when she also struck a mine. Her crew ran her onto the shore. She settled there and was lost, the last destroyer of the Imperial Japanese Navy to be destroyed in the war. Seventeen men of her company were killed. Sakawa survived the beaching. The command he had held since August 1944 ended on the beach in Miyazu Bay.