Ships
- IJN Murasame Captain from 15 November 1940
Lieutenant Commander Naoji Suenaga of the Imperial Japanese Navy became captain of the destroyer Murasame on 15 November 1940. A lieutenant commander was the officer the fleet usually placed in command of a destroyer, and Murasame was already a worked-up ship of the Combined Fleet when he took her.
Murasame was a Shiratsuyu-class destroyer, finished at the Fujinagata yard in Osaka in January 1937. She displaced a little under 1,700 tons in standard condition and was fast enough to keep station with the cruiser squadrons. Her main battery was 127-millimeter guns. The weapon her design treated as decisive was the 610-millimeter torpedo: eight tubes in two quadruple mounts, with reloads aboard for a second attack in the same night action.
Suenaga came to a ship that had been in commission for nearly four years, so the hull and the machinery were already familiar to her crew. Through the last year of peace a destroyer captain was judged on night torpedo drill, gunnery, quick answers to a division commander’s signals, and a boiler plant that could still make full speed after long weeks at sea. The Combined Fleet ran those exercises hard in 1940 and 1941, because Japanese destroyer doctrine expected the first heavy blow of a fleet battle to be delivered in the dark.
In the war that opened in December 1941, Murasame went south with the invasion forces. She screened transports during the landings in the Philippines and the Netherlands East Indies, and later joined the night supply runs that carried troops and cargo through the Solomon Islands. Early in March 1943, after a delivery to the garrison at Vila on Kolombangara, Murasame and the destroyer Minegumo were caught in Blackett Strait by American destroyers and sunk.
Suenaga’s captaincy of Murasame began on 15 November 1940, while the destroyer was still training for a war she would fight across the South Pacific. The appointment set him over one of the fleet destroyers that carried the navy’s torpedo doctrine from the exercises of the last peace year into the campaigns that followed.