Ships
- IJN Tenryu Captain from 5 December 1942
Mitsuharu Ueda was a captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy whose wartime command is tied to the light cruiser Tenryu. He took that ship on 5 December 1942, late in a year when the fighting around Guadalcanal had already worn the fleet hard.
Before that appointment he had served in staff and training roles that kept him close to the navy’s schools and to the officers who ran them. Among the men who crossed his path in that period were Mitsutaro Goto and Shinpei Asano, both of whom later held seagoing commands of their own.
Tenryu was an old light cruiser, launched in the years after the First World War and still useful in 1942 as a fast escort and as a flagship for smaller forces. By the time Ueda came aboard she had already spent months in the Solomon Islands, running troops and supplies down the slot and screening destroyers in night actions.
Ueda’s time in command was short. On the night of 18 December 1942, while Tenryu was covering a reinforcement run toward Madang on the north coast of New Guinea, the American submarine Albacore hit her with a torpedo. The cruiser sank in the early hours of 19 December. Ueda was lost with the ship, along with a large part of her crew.
His recorded command, then, is a single ship and a span of two weeks. In that brief interval he took an aging cruiser into the waters off New Guinea and did not come back.