Ships
- IJN Haruna Captain from 15 June 1943
- IJN Yamato Captain from 25 January 1944
Nobuei Morishita was born on 2 February 1895 in the Chita district of Aichi Prefecture. He went through Meirin Middle School and into the Imperial Naval Academy at Etajima with the 45th class, finishing in 1917, thirty-ninth among eighty-nine graduates. His first sea duty as a midshipman was in the armored cruiser Asama, followed by the battlecruiser Hiei. Over the next twenty years he mixed watch-keeping at sea with staff billets in destroyer and gunboat squadrons and with teaching at the Torpedo School and the Naval College. He made commander in November 1935 and captain in November 1939.
In October 1940 he took command of Destroyer Division 8. On 1 September 1941 he became captain of the light cruiser Oi, and on 25 April 1942 he moved to the light cruiser Sendai, so the opening year of the Pacific War found him in cruisers rather than in the battle line. Fellow officers already spoke of him as a handler who could put a ship where he wanted her, and as a staff mind of unusual clarity. He shared Isoroku Yamamoto's liking for poker, a small window on the detached way he preferred to read a tightening situation.
On 15 June 1943 Morishita assumed command of the fast battleship Haruna. For seven months he had one of the rebuilt Kongo-class ships, in a season when the heavy units spent long stretches at the fleet anchorages and put to sea when American carrier raids pressed the perimeter. On 25 January 1944 he left Haruna for Yamato.
He joined Yamato while she was still in dry dock at Kure, closing a torpedo wound taken the previous December and shipping a much heavier antiaircraft battery. Late in February she was placed, with her sister Musashi, in the First Battleship Division of the Second Fleet. In June 1944 the division sailed with the Mobile Fleet for the Battle of the Philippine Sea. A submarine contact threw the formation into a simultaneous turn, Musashi was slow to answer her helm, and the two great ships nearly came together. Morishita worked Yamato clear. The battle itself was fought in the air, and she came home without a surface engagement.
The voyage that fixed his name came that autumn. Yamato sailed in Takeo Kurita's Center Force against the American landing at Leyte, with Matome Ugaki embarked as commander of the First Battleship Division. On 24 October 1944, in the Sibuyan Sea, carrier aircraft attacked in wave after wave. From the open antiaircraft station at the top of the bridge, Morishita took the wheel himself, a cigarette in his mouth, and walked the ship between the torpedo tracks, some of them passing within a few meters of the hull. Bombs struck and did real damage. Every torpedo missed. He said afterward that once his mind was clear and empty, a ship of some seventy thousand tons began to feel no larger than a destroyer, and he could handle her without strain. The next morning Yamato ran on into the fight off Samar and fired on the American escort carriers and the destroyers and destroyer escorts screening them.
He was promoted rear admiral on 15 October 1944 and remained in the ship. On 25 November he turned the captaincy over to Kosaku Aruga, a classmate from the 45th class, and became chief of staff of the Second Fleet. He stayed with that fleet. On 6 April 1945 the Second Fleet, under Seiichi Ito, left the Inland Sea on Operation Ten-Go, a one-way sortie toward Okinawa with almost no air cover and only enough fuel for the passage out. The next day several hundred American aircraft struck Yamato southwest of Kyushu. She capsized, and her magazines blew up. Ito and Aruga went down with her. Morishita survived, the senior officer among those saved, and the destroyer Yukikaze took him from the water. Watching the attacks, he remarked that they were beautifully done.
In May 1945 he was assigned as a vice chief of staff for shipping supervision on the joint general staff. In September, after the surrender, he commanded the sailor corps at Kure. He ended the war as a rear admiral. Morishita died on 17 June 1960.