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Akazawa, Shizuo

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Commander Shizuo Akazawa took command of the destroyer Shiranui on 15 October 1940. That is the smallest part of the record. The characters are not 静夫. The cabinet file that raised his court rank after his death writes the name 赤沢次寿雄, and that is the form used here. The personnel-bulletin citations in the Japanese destroyer histories often print the older forms 赤澤 and 次壽雄. No official kana reading was found in the documents read for this essay. English naval compilations, including Niehorster's Etajima roll and the Combined Fleet movement records, render the given name Shizuo.

He was a destroyer officer of the Naval Academy's forty-ninth class. He took a new fleet destroyer to war in the screen of the carriers, had her broken under him in the Aleutians, commissioned the anti-aircraft destroyer Suzutsuki, and was killed on 8 June 1944 as commander of Destroyer Division 10, embarked in Kazagumo, at the mouth of Davao Gulf. The navy dated a posthumous promotion to rear admiral, and a step in court rank, on the day he died. No letter, memoir, photograph identified as his, wife, child, or sentence of his own has turned up. What follows is the life the paper will support.

Origins

Birth date, parents, and school before the academy are not in the sources used here. An unsourced Chinese compilation gives 8 June 1899, the month and day of his death, and calls his place of origin Tokyo. That birth date is not used. Niehorster's roll of Etajima class 49 lists him as 赤沢次寿雄, later rear admiral, "from" Kanagawa, killed in action on 8 June 1944 with Destroyer Division 10. The same roll dates the class to 16 July 1921 and counts 178 graduates. "From" on that roll is an origin column, not a family register consulted for this essay. His place in the class is not on it. A standing of 123rd of 176, printed on the same Chinese page, contradicts the count of 178 and is not used.

Class 49 was Hara Tameichi's class, and the class of several destroyer captains who died in 1943 and 1944. The roll places Akazawa among them. It does not say he knew any of them, or what kind of cadet he was. Nothing between the graduation date and the summer of 1935 has been confirmed against a gazette or a service table. Fourteen years of a naval life are blank here: midshipman cruise, schools, first ships, the lieutenancies. An unsourced list fills some of those years with gunnery billets in Shirataka, Hyuga, and Ataka, and with command of old destroyers in 1934. It was not traced, and it is not repeated as fact.

Formation

The first command that sits on a cited order is a small one, and it came after a disaster he did not see. On 15 June 1935 Lieutenant Commander Akazawa Shizuo, 赤沢次寿雄少佐, became captain of the torpedo boat Chidori. The Japanese history of the boat cites the official gazette, Kanpo no. 2535 of 17 June 1935, for that appointment, and Kanpo no. 2835 of 16 June 1936 for the officer who relieved him on 15 June 1936. Niehorster's torpedo-boat list prints the same dates but calls him a lieutenant. The gazette-based list says 少佐, lieutenant commander. This essay follows the gazette citation.

Chidori was the name ship of a class whose third boat, Tomozuru, had capsized in a storm in March 1934, with about a hundred dead. Chidori had been out on the same night exercise and had started a search before she was ordered home. The class was then rebuilt: ballast, a lower bridge, lighter guns, half the torpedo armament, speed down to 28 knots. That rebuilding was finished, or finishing, when Akazawa took her. He had her for a year. What she did in that year is not in the boat's published history. He was not her captain when Tomozuru went over, and he was not her captain when Tilefish sank her off Omae-zaki in December 1944.

From Chidori the compiled destroyer list sends him through the old boats that were a lieutenant commander's ordinary work in the later 1930s. Niehorster has him in Hatakaze from 15 June 1936 to 15 December 1937, in Akikaze from 15 December 1937 to 5 March 1938, in Okikaze from 5 March 1938 to 15 December 1938, and, overlapping the last of those, in Harukaze from 15 September 1938 to 15 December 1938. The overlap is in the table. An unsourced compilation times a double command of Okikaze and Harukaze only from 23 August to 15 September 1938 and was not used for the dates. None of these four commands has been opened in a personnel bulletin for this essay, and none of them has a movement record, read here, for the months he held them. They were Kamikaze- and Minekaze-class destroyers, old by 1937. Whether any of them carried him on the China coast is not established. A line in the Chinese compilation that he "led troops in the invasion of China" is not a source.

On 15 December 1938 the same compiler has him as lieutenant commander in command of the river gunboat Toba, until 20 October 1939. Toba was a Yangtze gunboat. Her later fate, surrender at Shanghai in 1945, is not his story. What she did in the ten months under him was not retrieved. On 15 November 1939 Niehorster lists him as a commander, in Oboro. The promotion from lieutenant commander to commander falls somewhere between Toba and Oboro and was not found as a date. The three weeks from 20 October to 15 November 1939 are empty in the tables used here. One unsourced list puts him attached to the Yokosuka Naval District on 20 October. That may be the ordinary holding order. It was not confirmed.

Oboro was a Fubuki-class destroyer. He had her from 15 November 1939 to 15 October 1940, still in peacetime, and the Combined Fleet record of Shiranui names him as her previous captain. Oboro was sunk by aircraft northeast of Kiska on 17 October 1942, under another officer. He had been off her for two years.

Shiranui

On 15 October 1940 he relieved Commander Nakamura Kenji in Shiranui. The Japanese history of the ship cites the Navy personnel bulletin, restricted, no. 543, for that day's orders (JACAR C13072079000). He was a commander, 中佐. Shiranui, "unknown fire," was a Kagero-class fleet destroyer, completed at Uraga on 20 December 1939. She was in Destroyer Division 18 with Kagero, Kasumi, and Arare, Destroyer Squadron 2, Second Fleet, and at the opening of the war she was the flagship of the division commander, Captain Miyasaka Yoshito, a man who had been one of Akazawa's predecessors in Toba. Akazawa was the captain of the ship. He was not the commander of the division.

The Combined Fleet movement record, which takes him as captain from the eve of the war, puts the division at sea with Destroyer Squadron 1 from Saeki to Etorofu, in the Kuriles, on 18–22 November 1941. On 7 December Shiranui was in the screen of Vice Admiral Nagumo Chuichi's carrier force for the attack on Pearl Harbor, and back at Kure on 24 December. Through the first months of 1942 the same record has the division on the carrier raids that followed: Japan to Truk in the second week of January; Rabaul on 20 January; Lae and Salamaua with Shokaku and Zuikaku on the 21st; the landings at Rabaul and Kavieng on the 23rd; a sweep after American carriers in the first week of February, then Palau; Darwin on 19 February, and Staring Bay in the Celebes on the 21st. South of Java at the beginning of March the record says she assisted Kasumi in sinking an unidentified merchant ship. There were air strikes on Tjilatjap on 5 March, and a return to Staring Bay on the 11th. On 27 March the division left again with the carriers for the Indian Ocean. Colombo was struck on 5 April, Trincomalee on 9 April. Shiranui was at Kure on 23 April and went into dock.

None of that is a captain's battle in the sense of a decision the sources attach to his name. He was one destroyer captain in a division, in a screen, on operations whose orders were written above him. The record does not say what he signaled, whom he recommended, or whether the unidentified ship south of Java was his torpedoes or Kasumi's. It says he was in command while the ship did these things.

Midway was the same kind of duty, and not the carrier battle. In late May Destroyer Squadron 2 went with the Second Fleet, Admiral Kondo Nobutake's occupation force. The Japanese history of Shiranui has the squadron as escort of the landing convoy, at Saipan on 24 May, and during the battle in the first week of June as escort of the heavy ships of that force. After the battle, the same history says, Division 18 escorted the crippled heavy cruiser Mogami as far as Truk. The Combined Fleet record does not mention Mogami. It has the division, on 17–23 June, escorting Kumano, Suzuya, and Nichiei Maru from Truk to Kure. The two accounts can sit one after the other. They were not reconciled against the squadron diary for this essay.

Then the Aleutians. On 28 June Shiranui sailed from Yokosuka with Kasumi and Arare, escorting the seaplane carrier Chiyoda toward Kiska. On the evening of 5 July Chiyoda and the transport Argentina Maru entered Kiska Bay. The division, in fog, anchored outside, not where the plan had put it. USS Growler found them. The Japanese account, drawn from the squadron's records and from the official war history, says Growler fired one torpedo at Shiranui, one at Kasumi, and two at Arare, and hit all three. Shiranui was hit in the forward boiler room. The first and second boiler rooms flooded, the after deck bent, and the keel was severed. She could not steam, and she could not be towed. Kasumi was immobilized. Arare answered with her guns and was hit by a second torpedo and sank. The Combined Fleet record says three men on Shiranui were killed. The Japanese ship history, as read here, does not give that number.

Miyasaka, the division commander, later named the causes as he saw them: the shift of anchorage had been delayed because the crews were tired; the fog had left them farther out than intended; he had not thought an American submarine would reach that temporary berth. Captain Nakazawa Tasuku, chief of staff of the Fifth Fleet, suggested that a division just up from the south may have misjudged the hour of sunrise in the north. Those are the commander's and the staff officer's explanations. No explanation from the captain of Shiranui is in the sources. He remained her captain.

Shiranui and Kasumi lay against the wreck of the transport Nissan Maru, sunk in an air raid in June, and did what emergency work could be done. Miyasaka was relieved on 14 July. On 20 July the division, less Kagero, was assigned to the Fifth Fleet. Naganami brought materials and workmen on 27 July. That day Kasumi was towed out by Ikazuchi. Shiranui still could not be towed. On 2 August her hull was cut between the bridge and the forward funnel. Repair had been planned for Yokosuka; on 11 August it was changed to Maizuru. On 15 August Destroyer Division 18 was disbanded, and Shiranui and Kasumi became attachments of the Fifth Fleet. The same day Inazuma arrived and took Shiranui in tow, with Subchaser No. 26 as escort. They made Shimushu, on Paramushir, on 20 August. On 21 August the merchantman Kozu Maru took the tow. On 31 August Shiranui was struck from the wartime organization and designated a special-duty destroyer. She entered Maizuru on 3 September. The repair would last until November 1943. By then she had another captain, and another after that, and on 27 October 1944 she was sunk with all hands south of Semirara Island, under Commander Ara Teisaburo. That sinking is not Akazawa's.

He left her on 10 September 1942, a week after she reached the yard. The personnel bulletin for that day (JACAR C13072086800) is the order the ship history cites. He had been her captain from before the war through Pearl Harbor, the southern raids, Midway, and two months with a ship that could not move, in a bay and then on a towline. The sources do not say whether he asked to stay or was simply kept until she was home.

Suzutsuki

The same order made him chief of the equipping crew of Suzutsuki, the third Akizuki-class destroyer, building at Mitsubishi in Nagasaki. The fitting-out office opened on 13 September. She was launched already, on 4 March 1942; she had been laid down on 15 March 1941. On 29 December 1942 she was completed, and the equipping officer became her first captain. The personnel bulletin of that day is JACAR C13072088700. The ship history names the first heads of department: Lieutenant Yoshizawa Masamoto, gunnery; Lieutenant (junior grade) Furukawa Hiroshi, torpedo; Reserve Lieutenant (junior grade) Takahashi Masaharu, navigation; Lieutenant Kimura Masao, engineering. They are the only wardroom the sources give him. He was still a commander at commissioning. By the day he left her the same history calls him a captain, 大佐. The date of that promotion was not found.

Suzutsuki was an anti-aircraft destroyer, long, with four twin 10 cm high-angle mounts, built to stay with carriers. She was registered at Sasebo, sent to the Yokosuka Naval District, and on 15 January 1943 joined Destroyer Division 61, Destroyer Squadron 10, Third Fleet, with Hatsuzuki. The division commander was Captain Norimitsu Saiji. The work of 1943, as the ship history tells it from the squadron diaries and the official war history, was escort and ferry, not a surface action of her own.

In the middle of January she went from Yokosuka to Kure, and before dawn on 16 January, off Shiono Misaki, the division sighted USS Haddock on the surface and lost her. February was a dockyard period at Kure for more machine guns. Captain Oe Ranji relieved Norimitsu as division commander on 3 February. On 19 February Suzutsuki and Hatsuzuki met the battleships Kongo and Haruna and the cruiser Tone coming home from Truk. On 22 March she was one of four destroyers that took Junyo, Hiyo, Tone, and Chikuma out of the Inland Sea; they were at Truk on 27–28 March. In the first week of April, for the air offensive called I-Go, she and Hatsuzuki carried air personnel to Rabaul and were back at Truk on the 6th. Through the middle of May she escorted ships in and out of the lagoon.

The American landing on Attu on 12 May pulled the fleet home. On 17 May Suzutsuki was among the destroyers that brought Musashi down from Truk, Admiral Koga Mineichi embarked, and with him the remains of Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, killed on 18 April. Kongo, Haruna, Hiyo, Tone, and Chikuma were in the same passage. Yokosuka on 22 May. In June she docked at Kure for five days. On 30 June Akizuki, her hull fractured on a homeward run, was dropped from the division. Division 61 was Suzutsuki and Hatsuzuki.

On 19 July they sailed again with Tone, Chikuma, Agano, Mogami, and Oyodo, carrying part of a garrison from Truk toward the Solomons. Suzutsuki and Hatsuzuki put their troops into Buka on 22 July and were back at Truk on the 26th. The seaplane carrier Nisshin, on the other half of the same movement, was sunk off Buin. That was not Akazawa's ship. Through late July, August, and early September the division ran between Truk, Rabaul, and Kwajalein, and escorted the training cruiser Kashima. Wakatsuki joined on 15 August. In September and October the four ships of the division, once Akizuki returned at the end of October, went out with the mobile force toward the Marshalls against American carrier raids and did not meet them.

On 10 November USS Scamp hit the transport Tokyo Maru on the way from Rabaul toward Truk. Suzutsuki and Hatsuzuki came out. They could not save the ship; she sank on 12 November. The same morning the light cruiser Agano, flagship of Destroyer Squadron 10, was torpedoed and stopped. Suzutsuki joined the ships that brought Agano into Truk on 15 November. The squadron commander, Rear Admiral Osugi Morikazu, had been wounded. On 7 December Suzutsuki and Hatsuzuki left Truk with Zuikaku and Chikuma and entered Kure on the 12th.

The last operation of his command was a transport to Wake, which the navy called Otorishima. From 23 December 1943 Suzutsuki and Hatsuzuki escorted the auxiliary cruiser Akagi Maru, carrying an independent mixed regiment and the main body of a tank regiment. They were at Wake on 1 January 1944 and at Kure on 9 January. On 10 January the personnel bulletin (JACAR C13072095200) relieved him. Commander Seo Noboru took the ship. The Japanese article on Kazagumo later calls Akazawa, at his appointment in March, "then captain of Suzutsuki." The January order says he was not. This essay follows the January order.

He had been off the ship six days when she was destroyed as a fighting unit. On the night of 15 January Division 61 sailed again with Akagi Maru for a second Wake run. On the morning of 16 January, west of Okinoshima, USS Sturgeon hit Suzutsuki twice. She lost everything forward of the second mount and everything aft of the fourth. The explosion wrecked the bridge. Captain Tomari Mitsuyoshi, who had just become division commander, and Captain Seo, and about 130 others, were killed. The senior survivor was a warrant machinist. Hatsuzuki towed what was left into the Bungo Strait and on to Kure. A constructor who surveyed her said a boiler-room bulkhead had held as designed, and that was why she did not sink. Fukui Shizuo, then in the design section, wrote that it was strange she had not gone down. The repair lasted until August. Suzutsuki survived the war. Her later captains, her second and third woundings, and the men who died in her in April 1945 off Kyushu belong to other commands.

Nothing in the sources says Akazawa knew the second Wake sailing was about to kill her bridge, or that his relief was anything but the ordinary rotation of a captain who had brought a new ship through her first year. The dates are the whole of the point. He commissioned her, he took her through a year in which the ship was not hit, and he was ashore, or at any rate no longer her captain, when she was cut in two.

Destroyer Division 10

Where he went on 10 January 1944 is not in the gazettes cited by the ship histories. An unsourced list gives him to the Yokosuka Naval District that day, to the staff of the Third Squadron in February, and to the staff of Destroyer Squadron 10 in March. Those billets were not confirmed. The next order that was cited is 20 March 1944. The personnel bulletin published on 22 March, orders of the 20th (JACAR C13072096800), is the document the Kazagumo history uses for the change of command of Destroyer Division 10. Captain Amano Shigetaka went to Destroyer Division 61. Captain Akazawa Shizuo succeeded him.

The division was Akigumo, Kazagumo, and Asagumo, in Destroyer Squadron 10 with the carrier force, then training at Lingga Roads after a passage out from the Inland Sea in the first half of March. A Navy bulletin of 24 April (JACAR C12070462300) is cited for the statement that on 25 March he shifted the division flag from Akigumo to Kazagumo. He was a division commander now, not a captain. Kazagumo's captain was Commander Hashimoto Kanematsu.

On 11 April, off Zamboanga, USS Redfin sank Akigumo. The division was two ships. Akazawa's flag, on the bulletin's dating, was already in Kazagumo. He lost a ship of the division without being in her. On 12 May the two destroyers left Lingga for Tawi-Tawi, on tanker escort and anti-submarine patrol, as the fleet gathered for the Marianas.

At the end of May the navy opened Operation Kon, the attempt to reinforce Biak. On 30 May Destroyer Division 10 was put into the Kon force. Kazagumo and Asagumo went with the battleship Fuso from Tawi-Tawi to Davao, as an indirect escort, while Cruiser Division 5, Myoko and Haguro, made the direct screen. On 2 June that force sailed from Davao with the transports and was found by B-24s. On the night of 3 June Admiral Toyoda Soemu called the operation off. It was restarted, then the heavy ships, Fuso included, were sent back. They were at Davao again on 5 June. A second Kon attempt, by destroyers only, lost Harusame and was turned back by American cruisers. Akazawa's division was not in that fight. It was at Davao.

On the evening of 7 June a Combined Fleet order put Cruiser Division 5 and Destroyer Division 10 back into the Kon force and sent them toward Bacan, off Halmahera. That night Kazagumo and Asagumo sailed from Davao escorting Myoko and Haguro. USS Hake was across the mouth of the gulf.

Before dawn on 8 June Hake had four fast radar contacts in the middle of the bay and fired six torpedoes. The Japanese history, citing the patrol report, puts the firing at 0212 at 6°03′ N, 125°57′ E, and says two torpedoes hit Kazagumo on the port side, one amidships and one aft, that her own torpedoes exploded, and that she sank in four minutes. The Japanese operational summary, cited in the same history, puts the first hit at 0313, the ship stopped, and a second hit at 0335. The hour's difference is the sort of difference two clocks make; it was not reconciled here by reading Hake's report itself. The Combined Fleet movement record prints the place as 6°03′ N, 124°57′ E. That is a degree of longitude west of the figure tied to the patrol report, and it is the worse fit for the mouth of Davao Gulf. The patrol-report figure is the one used here, with that caveat.

Hibiki and Akishimo, on patrol in the gulf, came out after a call passed through Hamakaze. Asagumo picked up survivors with them. The log cited by the ship history says 136 men transferred to Akishimo and went back to Davao, and that the rest were killed. The Combined Fleet record says 133 were saved, among them Commander Hashimoto, and that the division commander was not. The counts differ by three. Both say Akazawa died. He was not her captain. The ship was Hashimoto's. The flag was his, and the flag went down.

Kazagumo was removed from the navy list on 10 July 1944. Hashimoto lived to command Hatsuzuki, and died in her off Cape Engaño on 25 October. That is later, and it is another man's death. It is recorded only so the distinction on 8 June is plain: the captain of the destroyer was saved; the commander embarked in her was not.

After

There was no after for him, in the sense of a surviving officer. The paper after him is a promotion and a court rank.

On 11 August 1944 Navy Minister Yonai Mitsumasa sent the cabinet a recommendation that Rear Admiral Akazawa Shizuo, then holding the junior fifth rank, be advanced to the senior fifth rank, 正五位, as of 8 June. The recommendation asked that the court rank be dated the same day as the promotion. Prime Minister Koiso Kuniaki submitted it, and the throne approved it on 14 August. The file is the National Archives document catalogued by JACAR as A12090516900. Its title is 海軍少将赤沢次寿雄叙位の件. The characters are 赤沢次寿雄. The reading Shizuo is the one the English compilations use; this file does not gloss it in kana. The catalog text calls him 海軍少将 and 高等官二等, records the previous rank as 従五位, and dates the new rank 8 June 1944. It does not, in the text extracted for this essay, use the word for killed in action. The date is the date of the sinking, and the ship history cites this file for the statement that he was promoted to rear admiral. One grade, not two. Posthumous promotion of a captain killed in command was ordinary. The file shows the ordinary thing being done, two months late, by the minister and the prime minister, for a man who was already dead.

No decoration other than this step in court rank was found. No grave, no survivors' association note in his name, no family, no book. The Chinese compilations say his honors, his postwar life, and his writings are unknown. He had no postwar life. The rest of that sentence means the compilers found nothing, which is not proof that a family did not exist.

The ships mark the cost that can be counted in his presence. On Shiranui, three dead by the Combined Fleet figure, a keel cut, a hull sawn through so she could be towed, and a captain who stayed until the dockyard. On Suzutsuki, a year without a hit, and then, under the next captain, a bridge wiped off and something like 130 dead, six days after he had been relieved. On Kazagumo, most of the company, and himself. The sources do not say whether he was on the bridge or in a sea cabin, or whether anyone heard an order. They do not say what he thought of the fog at Kiska, or of being sent from a broken ship to a new one, or of leaving Suzutsuki when he did. The character under pressure is not in a letter. It is in the only form the paper allows. He commanded one destroyer from October 1940 until she had to be cut in half to come home. He commanded another through the year the carrier fleet stopped finding the enemy and started ferrying troops. He commanded a division for eighty days, shifted his flag once, lost Akigumo while he was in the other ship, and was killed at the entrance to Davao Gulf on the night the division sailed for Biak.