Ships
- IJN Uranami Captain from 15 April 1944 · In command when she was lost, 26 October 1944
Masuhide Sako was a lieutenant commander in the Imperial Japanese Navy and the last captain of the destroyer Uranami. He took command on 15 April 1944 and was still in command when the ship was lost on 26 October 1944, in the fighting that followed the American landing on Leyte.
Uranami was a Fubuki-class destroyer completed in 1929. By the spring of 1944 she had already served through the southern campaigns of the Pacific War. Officers who had commanded her in those years included Tsutomu Hagio and Tomoo Tanaka. Sako relieved Tanaka on 15 April 1944, and Tanaka left to take the destroyer Michishio.
The change of command came while Uranami was on escort duty with the light cruiser Kinu. The ships were carrying a convoy onward from Davao toward Palau, and they were at Saipan on the day Sako assumed command. The convoy reached Palau late in April. For the rest of the summer and into the early autumn, his destroyer remained with the cruisers Kinu and Aoba on escort and transport work along the routes into the Philippines.
In the last week of October 1944, Uranami was sent on the first large attempt to reinforce Leyte by sea, a run meant to land troops at Ormoc. Rear Admiral Naomasa Sakonju had opened the movement in Aoba. On 23 October the submarine Bream torpedoed Aoba and left her unfit to continue, and Sakonju moved to Kinu. The next morning, as the Battle of Leyte Gulf began, Uranami and Kinu were bound for Mindanao when carrier aircraft caught them. Strafing killed four men on Uranami and wounded nine, and a punctured fuel tank set her to leaking oil. The ships went on. Transports joined them, and on 25 October the troops were put ashore at Ormoc.
On the morning of 26 October the group was crossing the Jintotolo Channel, between Masbate and Panay, on the way back. About eighty aircraft from the escort carriers Manila Bay, Marcus Island, Natoma Bay, and Petrof Bay attacked with bombs, rockets, and gunfire. Uranami was hit by two bombs and several rockets. The hits killed 103 of her crew, Sako among them, and she sank around noon about twelve miles southeast of Masbate, near 11°50′N, 123°00′E. Three transports that had fallen behind the action picked up survivors that afternoon, 94 of them from Uranami. The Navy struck her from the list on 10 December 1944.