Ships
- IJN Asagumo Captain from 15 November 1940 · Relieved on 20 August 1941
He is not Robert John Archer, and he is not Arima, Masafumi. He is also not his classmates 有本輝美智, whom one compilation of the Pearl Harbor sailing lists as captain of Akigumo, or 有馬時吉, whom the class roll records killed as captain of Kiyonami. Different names.
The name
The characters in every Japanese list that was opened are 有近六次. The Etajima roll of the fiftieth class prints 有近六次 and romanizes him Arichika Rokuji, from Kobe, final rank captain. A second class roll prints the same characters, the rank 大佐, and the school 神戸一中. The Japanese Wikipedia captain list for Asagumo prints 有近六次 中佐. The order-of-battle page for the Pearl Harbor attack prints 有近六次中佐 as senior staff officer of the screening force. A compiled list of that same force prints 有近 六次 中佐, 海兵５０期. The Army's movement bulletin of 28 September 1944, in the catalog transcription, prints 海軍大佐有近六次. No list that was opened prints 六二.
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey sat him down in Tokyo on 15 and 16 November 1945 and headed the transcript "Captain ARICHIKA, Rokuji." That is the reading the interrogators recorded from the man, or from the interpreter, nine years before the alumni book listed him among the dead. It is not furigana in a gazette. 六次 can be read more than one way. Rokuji is what the class roll and the 1945 transcript agree on, and it is the reading used here. Nothing in the orders that were reached prints a kana beside the name.
The gazettes that the Asagumo article cites for the appointment and the relief were downloaded. They are photographs of vertical type, with no text layer. Automatic reading of them was not good enough to quote, and image captions of the same pages invented 六二 when they were asked to find him. Those captions are not evidence. A search for an officer written 有近六二 found none. The conflict is between a caption that cannot be trusted and a set of lists that agree. The lists are what this essay uses. The glyphs on the November 1940 page were not confirmed by eye.
Where he came from, as far as the rolls go
No birth register, no parents, no wife, and no children turned up.
He was of the fiftieth class at Etajima, the class that graduated on 1 June 1922, 272 men. Two compiled rolls say so, and they agree with each other on the date and the number. They are not the Academy's own register, and they were not checked against it. Both put him from Kobe. One names the school as Kobe First Middle School, 神戸一中. The table of contents of a 1997 book published by that school's naval alumni association, Kōbe Ichichū to Kaigun, places him as 20回-50期: twentieth class of the middle school, fiftieth class of the Academy. The book was not opened. The contents page was. That is the whole of his origins as they stand.
What the Academy did with him after June 1922 — the cadet cruise, the first ships, whether he was a torpedo officer or a navigator, whether he passed through the Naval Staff College — is not in any document read for this piece. The years between a new ensign and a destroyer command in 1940 are a blank. The rolls jump to a final rank. He ended a captain, 大佐, not a flag officer. The class roll that prints ranks says it left the rank off anyone still alive in 1977, or anyone whose rank was unknown. His rank is printed. That is evidence he was dead by then only in the way a compiler's rule is evidence. It is not a death certificate.
Nine months in a new destroyer, and then he was off her
On 15 November 1940 he took the destroyer Asagumo. The Japanese article on the ship cites the confidential personnel gazette of that day, issue 555, and calls him 中佐, commander. A compiled list of destroyer captains gives the same man, class 50, the same dates: 15 November 1940 to 20 August 1941. The next captain on both lists is Commander Iwahashi Tōru. The 20 August order is issue 695 of the same series of gazettes. Both issues were fetched. Neither was readable here. That start date is the date those lists give. The rank, commander, is the rank they give. "Captain" would be the later rank, or a translation that flattens 中佐 and 大佐 into one English word. He was not a captain yet.
Asagumo was an Asashio-class destroyer, two years in commission, in Destroyer Division 9. What he did with her in those nine months is not in the papers read here. The voyage that carried the emperor of Manchukuo, Puyi, is dated by the ship's article to June 1940, under the previous captain. It is not his. The battles that made the ship's name — the Java Sea, the Solomons, Surigao Strait, where she was sunk on 25 October 1944 under Commander Shibayama — all sit after 20 August 1941. They are not his either. Padding his life with them would be a life of the ship.
He left her before the war. Where the 20 August order sent him is the thing the gazette page would settle, and that page was not read. By the time the Pearl Harbor force sailed he was no longer a destroyer captain.
The screening force
The official war history's volume on the Hawaii operation, as the order-of-battle page cites it, puts Commander 有近六次 as 首席参謀, senior staff officer, of the screening force under Rear Admiral Ōmori Sentarō. A separate compilation of the same sailing prints the same line: First Destroyer Squadron, senior staff officer, class 50. The force was the light cruiser Abukuma, Ōmori's flag, and the 17th and 18th Destroyer Divisions, built around the First Air Fleet because the carrier force's own destroyers were too short-legged. The compiled sailing list also puts two classmates in destroyers of that force, 緒方友兄 in Arare and 有本輝美智 in Akigumo. The war-history page's shorter ship list does not name those captains and does not include Akigumo. The book itself was not opened. Neither list is a gazette.
The American transcript, made from him in November 1945, calls him chief of staff to the commander of the First Destroyer Squadron from December 1941 until November 1943. "Chief of staff" is the interrogator's English. The Japanese lists say 首席参謀, and later writers say 先任参謀. Those are the senior staff officer's titles, not a separate proof that he was 参謀長 of a fleet. The two languages are describing one billet as far as the documents can be set side by side: he was Ōmori's senior staff officer, embarked, and he was not commanding Asagumo.
He does not, in the transcript, talk about Pearl Harbor or the run south to the Indian Ocean. Ōmori, questioned the same day, said his own actions were Hawaii, the occupation of the Aleutians, and the battle off Torokina on 1 November 1943, after which Ōmori went to the torpedo school at Yokosuka. Arichika's war, as he chose to tell it, starts in the north.
The islands they were not ready to hold
He said he first heard of the plan to occupy the Aleutians at the end of April 1942. Asked what it was for, he said it was a defensive measure against an American attack from the north. Asked what it accomplished, he said it was not a success, because they had not prepared the airfields and bases the occupation required. That is the judgment he offered, unprompted beyond the question, while the admiral who had commanded him was in the same inquiry. It is the nearest thing to a verdict on his own war that the paper holds.
The occupation force he described left Ōminato about 29 May: Abukuma, destroyers of the 21st Division, the transport Kinugasa Maru with a Hokkaido battalion, a seaplane carrier, a minelayer. The original object was Adak, then Attu. Off in the north Pacific they got the news of Midway. He said the squadron was ordered to join the Midway forces and reversed course, and that in less than an hour the order was superseded by one to occupy Attu instead. Ōmori, the day before, had told a longer and different timetable, with the landing in Holtz Bay on 11 June. Arichika said he thought the admiral's dates were wrong, and that he tied his own to the Kiska landings, which were almost simultaneous and a little earlier. He said records had been found the day before and were being investigated. The interrogator asked how he could be sure. He did not retreat.
On his dates the force was off Holtz Bay on the night of 7 June and the troops were ashore by 2300. The soldiers then walked the wrong way, south across the island to Massacre Bay instead of east to Chichagof, and the ships had to wait while they came down the mountains the next morning. He shifted the flagship from one harbor entrance to the other and watched them come down. Until 10 June the squadron patrolled Attu. Then Abukuma, Wakaba, and another destroyer went to Amchitka to see if an airfield could be built there. Thirty men from Wakaba went ashore at Constantine Harbor. An American plane was reported in the fog, not seen. He sent the landing party back in a hurry, and the ships left at 20 knots. They lay about two hundred miles south of Kiska for three or four days, coming up in the fog when the weather allowed and dropping back when it cleared, because Kiska was being bombed and they wanted to know what the bombing had done before they went home.
He was back at Ōminato about the end of June, and out again. On 5 July an American submarine found three destroyers of the 18th Division anchored just north of Little Kiska before dawn. He described the attack shot by shot, and he called it daring and skillful, admirably executed. The first torpedo sank Arare. The second hit Kasumi just forward of the bridge and nearly took the bow off; it hung down about thirty degrees. A third missed Shiranui and a fourth broke her so that she was held together by the main deck and the centerline. Abukuma, with Wakaba and another destroyer, went in to help. A technician was brought from Yokosuka to decide whether Kasumi's bow should be cut away. He believed it was cut away, and that she was towed home without it. Shiranui was patched at Kiska and towed to Maizuru. The two cripples reached Maizuru around the end of July or the first of August, by way of Paramushiro.
The same day, he said, Nenohi was escorting a tanker, attacked a submarine off Chichagof, and claimed a sinking on the evidence of debris and oil after depth charges. Later that day Nenohi herself, making six knots close to Agattu, was hit by one torpedo from abaft the starboard beam, capsized in two minutes, and sank in five. One boat got away. About twenty men made Agattu in it. Ikazuchi found the smoke and found the boat, and about two hundred men were lost. The oil and the debris are the whole of the evidence he offered for the submarine he thought Nenohi had killed. He did not dress it up.
Through the rest of 1942 the squadron's work, as he told it, was supply. From August to the following February the Fifth Fleet, he said, ran no offensive operations as a fleet. Destroyers and the light cruiser Kiso made the runs to Attu and Kiska. The method was the part he described as if he had built it, because it was staff work. American search planes were assumed to scout a sector out to six hundred miles from Adak and Amchitka. A transport ran to that radius and then dashed through a sector the radio plot said was empty, or down the outbound track of a plane that had already passed. Call signs helped. They did not break the aircraft code. Radar on Kiska helped. The approaches were lettered, and the track was chosen on Abukuma and given to the ships. He said the system worked, and then he described the day it stopped working in the old way: Akagane Maru was sunk by cruiser gunfire, a picket heard it, and Kiso and Sakito Maru turned back rather than steam into the cruisers. After that, single ships were not enough. The runs went in as a fleet.
He talked about Adak, once the Americans had it, as a thorn in the side. The first reconnaissance report, he thought, was around 1 October. What worried him was the speed of the airfield. They had meant to occupy the Semichi Islands and build fields there. They had neither the force nor the time, and they were left holding Attu and Kiska under someone else's bombers.
The morning the cruisers would not die
On 27 March 1943, Tokyo date, he was still in Abukuma, and the Fifth Fleet was taking a convoy to Attu: Nachi, Maya, Tama, the squadron, three transports. The weather on the 25th and 26th had been bad. At 0313 they found that two shapes astern were not their own slow pair, Usugumo and Sankō Maru, but the enemy, bearing 160 degrees, thirteen and a half miles. The transports were sent west. The squadron formed on Abukuma, with Wakaba, Hatsushimo, Ikazuchi, and Inazuma. Nachi opened. The Americans answered. He said Nachi fired torpedoes in the first twenty-five minutes.
In the turn, Tama cut inside and the squadron cut inside Tama. Between half past four and five in the morning Abukuma was the ship the Americans were shooting at. She fired her four port torpedoes at about 15,000 meters and turned north. Between five and six a smoke screen hid the American line. At about half past five Abukuma was told to cross astern and come up on Nachi's south side. Ikazuchi and Inazuma were old and could not keep thirty knots, so he said they eased to twenty-eight. At 0615 Abukuma fired her four starboard torpedoes at about 16,000 meters. A little before seven, Wakaba and Hatsushimo fired six each at about the same range. He thought the torpedoes ran into the group. He did not know if any hit. They were Type 93, oxygen, no wake, set for thirty-two knots, an extreme range he gave as 32,000 meters.
A report of ten or more bombers, which he believed came from Kiska, made them want the action over. So did the fuel of the two old destroyers. The cruiser planes reported little, because of the smoke and, he said, because of the observers. Around seven they saw a cruiser with a list of about fifteen degrees, smoking, and two or three destroyers smoking. The planes later reported the cruiser stopped. American torpedoes exploded short, 1,500 to 2,000 meters on Abukuma's port side. He thought that if they had not exploded early they would have hit her. Shortly after seven they broke off: the bombers, the fuel, and the fact that Nachi and Maya were nearly out of ammunition. Abukuma was not. He said each of her 14-centimeter guns had started with 200 to 250 rounds. They steered west. The Americans went south. He thought they had damaged one cruiser and two or three destroyers, and sunk nothing. On the way west they crossed a large oil slick, and he took that as serious damage.
That is his morning. The battle is the one later called Komandorski. The cruiser that came out of that action damaged, and not sunk, is the one the American accounts name as Salt Lake City. No ship on either side was lost. He did not claim a sinking. Those outcomes are the standard account of the battle, not a report opened here. He claimed a list, smoke, and an oil slick, and he stopped when the fuel and the reported bombers said to stop. The decision to break off was the fleet's, as he told it, and the reasons he gave were practical. He did not decorate them.
Abukuma went to Maizuru, arriving about 10 April, and radar was put on her. The squadron flag shifted to Kiso while she was in dock. In May the Americans landed on Attu. He was at sea in the attempt to do something about it, twice, and both times the order home arrived before he got there. Around 12 May, with Kiso, Wakaba, and Hatsushimo, escorting a seaplane carrier, he learned of the landing at noon and thought of a night attack on the 13th. They could not make the distance even at full speed. That night the Fifth Fleet ordered them back to Paramushiro. At the end of May, Abukuma and four destroyers were sent to land provisions and to bring off two officers who knew the ground, a naval commander named Emoto and an army staff officer. They were to slip past the American ships on the night of 29 May. The weather was clear and they had no intelligence, so they waited a day. On the night of the 29th, Colonel Yamazaki signaled that the situation ashore was very grave, and the Fifth Fleet ordered them home again. Yamazaki's garrison died on Attu. The provisions were not landed. The two officers were not brought off. He states the order and the turn. He does not add a sentence about what it cost.
The plan he was told to write
Surface supply to Kiska ended, he said, with a destroyer at the end of February or the start of March. After that, submarines, and he knew of two sunk south of the island. Early in June it was decided the troops would have to come off. The order ran from Vice Admiral Kawase Shirō, then commanding the Fifth Fleet, through Rear Admiral Kimura Masatomi, then commanding the First Destroyer Squadron, to him. He was to draw up the evacuation in time to finish it in July.
What he was given, he said, was Abukuma, Kiso, and Tama; the 6th Destroyer Division, Ikazuchi and Inazuma; the 21st, Wakaba and Hatsushimo; the 9th, Asagumo, Usugumo, and Hibiki; and the converted cruisers Asaka Maru and Awata Maru. He decided the two conversions were too slow, and that Tama was too old and unreliable. He decided there were not enough destroyers, and he asked for six more. He got the 10th Division, Yūgumo, Kazagumo, and Akigumo, and Shimakaze, Naganami, and Samidare. The 6th Division was sent home to Japan.
Asagumo was in the list he was handed. She was the ship he had commanded from November 1940 to August 1941. She was not his to command now. In the withdrawal she sailed in the second group, with Kiso. He was in Abukuma. The nine months in the destroyer and the night he sent her into Kiska Harbor are two years apart, and the second one is a staff officer's, not a captain's.
They left Paramushiro on 7 July, waited about two hundred miles southwest of Kiska, and came home because the weather would not serve. A 2024 newspaper column, not his essay and not a report, says the destroyer captains pressed Kimura to go in anyway, and that Kimura told his senior staff officer to turn back, with the line that if they went home they could come again. The column says Kimura left the details to Arichika, and that the request for radar-equipped destroyers and for a weather officer was Arichika's, and that Kimura's own hard order was that the harbor work had to be finished inside an hour. Arichika's interrogation confirms the shape of that: he had asked for more destroyers, he had thrown out the slow ships, and the embarkation he describes took fifty-five minutes. The quoted sentence, and the scene of the captains urging the admiral on, are the column's. His own essay on the evacuation, "Kiska withdrawal," is in the book Tettai, reprinted in 2017 with two other writers' accounts of Guadalcanal and Kolombangara. It was not opened. What he was willing to say to an American captain in 1945 is what follows, and it is already a plan told by the man who drew it.
The second sortie left Paramushiro at 2010 on 22 July. They ran south-southeast, then east, and waited. At 1700 on 26 July the escort Kunashiri collided with Abukuma. In the confusion astern, Wakaba and Naganami collided with each other. Kunashiri went home to Japan at nine knots, with Wakaba. From a point he gave as roughly 46°40' N, 173°10' E, at midnight on 28 July, they ran straight in, course about 020 degrees, to fifteen miles from Cape St. Stephen. Tama left them there and returned to Paramushiro. The rest, after a brief sight of the cape at about 1000 on 29 July, ran on soundings about a mile offshore, up the west coast, around the north end, and down into the harbor. The navigation was sounding and radar, and on the last leg a radio beacon on South Head.
When Abukuma first sighted the north tip of Little Kiska, it was taken for an American cruiser. Four torpedoes were fired. Two exploded against Little Kiska and two against South Head. He tells it as a fact of the approach, not as a joke and not as a confession. At 1340 every ship went in except Hibiki, which lay off Little Kiska, and Shimakaze, Naganami, and Samidare, which patrolled the entrance. The visibility inside the harbor was good. They embarked 5,100 people, 450 to a destroyer and 1,200 to each of the light cruisers. Underway at 1435. The senior naval officer among them was Rear Admiral Akiyama Katsuzō. The senior army officer was Major General Mineki. He said nobody was left ashore except three dogs. Timed charges were left to go off days later, so the island would still sound occupied. The boats, about five from the shore plus one from each destroyer and two from each of Abukuma and Kiso, were sunk after the loading.
On the way out, two miles south by east of Pillar Rock, an American submarine surfaced about 2,000 meters from Abukuma. They turned forty-five degrees away. The submarine submerged. They resumed, and his group ran at twenty-eight knots to Paramushiro, arriving 1 August. Kiso's group, with Asagumo in it, came in on 31 July. He wondered whether the submarine had reported them, or had taken them for Americans. The center funnel of Abukuma had been painted white so that in the fog she would look like a ship with two funnels. That is the detail he chose to add. A later count of the men taken off is 5,183, in the newspaper column. He said 5,100. The difference is small beside the fact that the garrison came off, and it is still a difference.
He said he left the squadron in November. After Kiska they did convoy work. He has the ships back at Yokosuka on 7 October.
What it cost, and what is left of him
The cost that is in his own account is Attu, not Kiska. He had a plan to land food and to bring off the two officers who could explain the island, and he was ordered home on the night Yamazaki reported the end. He had already been turned back once that month. Kiska is the operation he was allowed to finish, and he finished it by refusing the slow ships, by waiting through one aborted sortie and a collision, and by a harbor hour so short that the torpedoes fired at an island and the three dogs are what he remembered of the margin. He did not describe anyone under him dying in that hour. The men who died in the north, in the story he told, died in Nenohi, in Arare, on the boats that did not get off Nenohi, and on Attu, where he did not arrive.
Nothing in the transcript says he asked for the staff job, or for the destroyer, or to be the man who wrote the withdrawal. The orders are described as orders. The one place he marks a choice as his is the composition of the Kiska force: too slow, too old, not enough destroyers, six more requested, and granted.
After 7 October 1943 the record thins to two dates and a death.
On 27 September 1944 the Army movement bulletin, as the catalog transcribes it, relieved Captain 有近六次 of a concurrent appointment as a member of the Yura Fortress headquarters staff. The next line gives that concurrent post to Captain 中杉清治, a classmate, whose principal duty is given as staff officer of the Osaka Guard District. The catalog prints the fortress on that second line as 出良, one character off 由良. It is the same appointment, mis-set in the transcription, unless a reading of the image someday shows two fortresses. The image was not opened. The order does not say what Arichika's own principal duty was, only that the fortress post had been concurrent and was over. Yura is the Army fortress on Awaji, covering the entrance from the Kii channel toward Osaka. A navy captain holding it on the side is a shore billet at the end of the war. How he got there from Yokosuka in October 1943, and whether the promotion from commander to captain fell in that blank year, is not in any order read here. He is a commander in the Pearl Harbor lists. A 2024 column still calls him commander at Kiska. The September 1944 bulletin calls him captain. The promotion date is missing.
He was alive in Tokyo on 15 and 16 November 1945. The first day's questioning was at the Naval War College. The second day reconvened at the Meiji Building. He had, or someone had, found landing records the day before they asked him about dates. He corrected his admiral in front of the interrogator. He praised an American submarine attack without being pushed to it. He said the Aleutian operation had failed for want of bases. Then the transcript ends.
The 1997 alumni book puts him in the section of men who had died, twentieth class of Kobe First Middle, fiftieth of Etajima, with the date 25 February 1955, Shōwa 30. The same contents list uses that kind of date for deaths, including men whose deaths are known from elsewhere. The page of the book that is his was not read. No obituary, no grave, no cause, no occupation for the nine years after the interrogation, and no family, turned up anywhere else. If he left a wife or children anything, it is not in the records opened here. The essay he did leave, on the Kiska withdrawal, is in print. It was not read for this account. His voice, for now, is the voice in the 1945 transcript: a staff officer who kept the dates, counted the torpedoes, and noticed the dogs.