Ships
- IJN Mochizuki Captain from 15 December 1938 · Relieved on 15 October 1940
- IJN Yukikaze Captain from 23 June 1942
Commander Ryokichi Sugama was an Imperial Japanese Navy officer whose commands linked an older destroyer of the China war with one of the best-known destroyers of the Pacific War. He came from Sendai in northeastern Japan. Men who served on his later ship remembered a calm captain with a mild face.
On 15 December 1938 he took command of Mochizuki, a Mutsuki-class destroyer completed at Uraga in 1927 and armed with 120-millimeter guns and triple torpedo tubes. For nearly two years he kept that ship on the China coast, where destroyers of her age screened troop movements as the war in China continued. He was relieved on 15 October 1940, well before the fighting spread across the Pacific.
He returned to a destroyer bridge on 23 June 1942 as captain of Yukikaze. The Kagero-class ship had been built at Sasebo and commissioned in January 1940. Under Kenjiro Tobita she had already screened the opening campaigns in the south and had come through the Battle of Midway. Sugama joined her at Yokosuka while she was being put back in order after that battle.
In July 1942 Yukikaze left Yokosuka escorting the transport Nankai Maru toward Rabaul. On 14 July she was assigned to Destroyer Squadron 10 of the Third Fleet. Early in August she sailed from Truk with the damaged heavy cruiser Mogami and the repair ship Akashi, and she brought them into Kure on 12 August. She then spent time on training duty with the carrier Hiyo. On 26 October 1942 she screened the carriers at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands.
Her hardest surface fighting under Sugama came in the night action off Guadalcanal on 12–13 November 1942. Yukikaze closed with the American screen in a melee that left the destroyers Laffey and Cushing sunk, Sterett badly damaged, and O'Bannon hit. She was still fit to fight when the night ended. In February 1943, when the troops on Guadalcanal had to be taken off, Sugama and the captain of Hamakaze told a planning conference that the last lift should be made by destroyers, and the other destroyer captains agreed. Yukikaze went in with that force and carried men of the Seventeenth Army clear of the island. Through the spring she stayed on transport work in the Solomons, including a run to Rekata on Santa Isabel in company with Amagiri and Mochizuki.
On the night of 12–13 July 1943 she was with the Japanese force at the Battle of Kolombangara. Torpedoes from that destroyer group struck the Allied cruisers, and the destroyer Gwin was lost. Yukikaze again came through without serious damage. The rest of Sugama’s tour was largely escort duty. Late in the year she ran between Japan and Truk with the light carrier Chitose and the destroyer Amatsukaze, and near the atoll her crew reported an attack on a submarine. She was back at Kure in December 1943.
Sugama was relieved there that December, and Masamichi Terauchi took Yukikaze. Keiji Koyo commanded her later in the war. The destroyer went on through the Philippine battles and the April 1945 sortie with Yamato, and she was still afloat at the surrender. Sugama’s own months covered the long Solomon fighting, from Santa Cruz through the Guadalcanal evacuation and Kolombangara. He was one of the wartime captains of that ship who lived on after 1945 into old age.