Ships
- IJN Shiratsuyu Captain from 15 October 1940
- IJN Kuroshio Captain from 23 February 1943
Nagahide Sugitani served the Imperial Japanese Navy as a destroyer captain and held the rank of commander in the Pacific War. He commanded Shiratsuyu from 15 October 1940 and Kuroshio from 23 February 1943.
He came to Shiratsuyu as a lieutenant commander. She was the lead ship of her class, completed at Sasebo in 1936 for fleet screening and torpedo attack, with five 127-millimeter guns and eight 610-millimeter tubes. In his time aboard she belonged to Destroyer Division 27 of Destroyer Squadron 1 in the First Fleet.
At the opening of the war Shiratsuyu stayed in home waters, screening the battleships. On 18 December 1941 she left Tokuyama with the division, met Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s carrier force returning from Hawaii, and brought those ships into Hashirajima on 23 December. Escort duty followed. With Shigure she took a convoy from Moji to Taiwan in the latter half of January 1942 and was back at Kure on 4 February. On 17 February the two destroyers sailed again, escorting the carrier Zuiho from Yokosuka to Davao on Mindanao, and they returned to Hashirajima on 2 March.
On 15 April 1942 the whole division left Sasebo for Mako in the Pescadores, joined the carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku, and entered Truk with them on 25 April. There Sugitani, by then a commander, turned Shiratsuyu over to Kanematsu Hashimoto. Hashimoto commanded her a few days later at the Battle of the Coral Sea, with the division serving in Vice Admiral Takeo Takagi’s force.
Sugitani also commanded Umikaze, a sister ship of Shiratsuyu, before his next appointment. On 23 February 1943 he became captain of Kuroshio in the rank of commander, taking over while that ship was under repair at Kure after service in the Solomons. Kuroshio was a Kagero-class destroyer of Destroyer Division 15. Shinchiro Maekawa and Tamaki Ugaki had both held the command before him.
His tenure lasted through the spring. Kuroshio went south again in company with Oyashio and Kagero. On 8 May 1943, in a night passage of Blackett Strait off Kolombangara, the three destroyers entered a minefield. Kuroshio struck a mine and sank. Her two consorts were mined as well and were lost to air attack later that day. Sugitani was detached from the captaincy on 1 June 1943. He afterward commanded the Akizuki-class destroyer Suzutsuki.
Shiratsuyu remained in service long after he left her. On 15 June 1944, with Kuro Matsuda in command, she collided with the tanker Seiyo Maru about ninety nautical miles southeast of Surigao Strait and sank. Depth charges exploded among the men in the water, and Matsuda was among those killed. The destroyer was removed from the navy list on 10 August 1944.