Ships
- IJN Shigure Captain from 13 December 1943
Shigeru Nishino was a destroyer officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy and a graduate of the fifty-fifth class of the Naval Academy at Etajima. By November 1945 his service came to eighteen years, and for most of the Pacific War he commanded destroyers. He had the old destroyer Tsuga from December 1941 until July 1942, then served as executive officer of the Takao Guard Unit until November 1943.
He became captain of Shigure on 13 December 1943, as a lieutenant commander. The ship already carried a name in the fleet. Through the Solomons she had come out of night actions that destroyed the destroyers sailing with her, and at Vella Gulf in August 1943 an American torpedo passed through her rudder without exploding. Nishino relieved Kamesaburo Yamagami. Noboru Seo had commanded her in the first year of the war, and her Solomons reputation was bound up with Tameichi Hara, who had led Destroyer Division 27 with Shigure as his flagship.
His first passage in her was cut short. Shigure left Sasebo on 24 December 1943, collided with a fishing boat in the Bungo Strait, and went back for repairs. In January 1944 she escorted the supply ship Irako from Yokosuka toward Truk, and early in February she took tankers on from Truk to Tarakan and Balikpapan. In the middle of the month, as she was leaving Truk, American carrier aircraft struck the lagoon. Bomb damage sent her home. In the March refit at Sasebo one main-battery turret came off so that more anti-aircraft guns could be fitted.
In June 1944 she went on the attempt to put reinforcements ashore at Biak. Aircraft sank the destroyer Harusame on the run out from Sorong. Nishino kept on, and after dark Shigure was off the landing place with an Allied force already waiting close offshore. There was no landing. The troops stayed on board and the ships turned away. He later described Shigure as the rear ship on that withdrawal, with radar-ranged shells falling around her. Later the same month she was at sea with the carrier force in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, present in the action that cost the fleet the carrier Hiyo.
In October she joined Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimura for the southern thrust into Leyte Gulf. Shigure remained under Nishimura's own orders, beside the battleships Yamashiro and Fuso, the cruiser Mogami, and the three destroyers of the Fourth Destroyer Division. Nishino later said the officers expected to force Surigao Strait and were to attack inside the gulf whatever they found there. He judged the two sides about evenly matched, aside from a possible American advantage in heavy cruisers. Before dawn on 25 October 1944 the column entered the strait and ran into torpedoes and radar-directed gunfire laid for it in advance.
Fuso and Yamashiro were sunk. Mogami was wrecked and lost before the day was over. The three destroyers of the division were lost with them. Shigure reached Brunei on 27 October, the one ship of that force to come back. By Nishino's account he first took the battleship that had fallen out after the opening torpedo hits for Nishimura's flagship, turned south to recover the admiral, and did not find him. A lookout reported a ship like Yamashiro going down. Nishino turned north again, and that second turn left Shigure trailing what remained of the column, where she could still maneuver clear. A hit disabled her power steering, and the crew brought her out on hand steering. He was the only commanding officer of Nishimura's force who lived through the battle.
He left Shigure at the start of December 1944, and Manabu Hagiwara took command. On 24 January 1945 the submarine Blackfin sank Shigure in the Gulf of Siam, with Hagiwara still her captain. Nishino was already with another ship. From February 1945 he served in the new destroyer Natsuzuki, first as chief of her fitting-out crew and then as her captain, and he still had her when the war ended. On 13 November 1945 American officers questioned him at length about the southern battle. They found him ready to answer and judged his account of that night generally sound. He was the captain who had brought the one ship out.