Ships
- IJN Satsuki Captain from 20 May 1943
Lieutenant Saburo Kojima took command of the Imperial Japanese Navy destroyer Satsuki on 20 May 1943. She was the fifth ship of the Mutsuki class, completed in 1925, and her name was the old word for the fifth month. That spring she was serving the Eighth Fleet from Rabaul, carrying troops and supplies through the Solomon Islands.
On 24 May, four days after Kojima assumed command, Satsuki grounded on a reef southeast of Bougainville. She came off and returned to Rabaul for repairs. The grounding broke into a series of night transport runs, the traffic the Allies called the Tokyo Express, then feeding Japanese positions around New Georgia and on Bougainville.
Once repaired, Satsuki went back to that work. In June and July 1943 she lifted troops to Tuluvu, on the north coast of New Britain, and to Kolombangara. She was with the forces engaged in Kula Gulf on the night of 5–6 July and off Kolombangara on 12 July, and she came through both actions undamaged. On 17 July Allied bombers struck her in the Shortland Islands. The damage sent her out of the Solomons, by way of Rabaul and Truk, to the naval arsenal at Kure.
Later captains of Satsuki included Tadao Iino, who was severely wounded when American aircraft strafed the ship at Kavieng on 4 January 1944 and who died of those wounds. Tadayoshi Sugiyama followed him in command. Satsuki remained on escort and transport duty until 21 September 1944, when dive bombers from an American carrier task force sank her in Manila Bay.