Ships
- IJN Fubuki Captain from 15 October 1940 · Killed with her, 11 October 1942
Commander Shizuo Yamashita was captain of the Imperial Japanese Navy destroyer Fubuki from 15 October 1940. The ship, whose name means blizzard, was the lead unit of a class of large fleet destroyers completed in the late 1920s, with 127-millimeter guns and a heavy torpedo battery. He held that command for two years, from peacetime duty into the opening campaigns of the Pacific War and the fighting around Guadalcanal.
In December 1941 Fubuki was in Destroyer Division 11 with Shirayuki and Hatsuyuki, under Destroyer Squadron 3 of the Southern Expeditionary Fleet. From Samah on Hainan she sailed with the covering force for the landings at Miri and Kuching, screening cruisers and transports in the first weeks of the advance into Borneo.
In January 1942 Fubuki helped take men off the army transport Akita Maru after a Dutch submarine torpedoed her. Later that month, off Endau on the east coast of Malaya, the Japanese escort met the British destroyer Thanet and the Australian destroyer Vampire. Thanet was sunk in the short night action, and Vampire withdrew. In February Yamashita’s ship covered the landings on Bangka and at Palembang in Sumatra, and at the end of the month she was with the force that put troops ashore on Java.
The destroyer was then drawn into the contest for Guadalcanal. Through September and the first week of October 1942 she made repeated night runs with reinforcements for the island, and in mid-September she fired in support of a Japanese attack on the American perimeter. She came through those trips still fit to fight.
On 11 October 1942 Fubuki left Shortland with Hatsuyuki and the heavy cruisers Aoba, Furutaka, and Kinugasa. Rear Admiral Aritomo Gotō was taking Cruiser Division 6 north to shell the airfield on Guadalcanal. Off Cape Esperance the column met an American force of cruisers and destroyers. Searchlights and gunfire caught Fubuki while she was still in company with Aoba. She burst into flame, explosions followed, and she sank in the sound between Guadalcanal and Savo Island. Commander Yamashita was killed with her that night. Survivors were later taken up by the American ships McCalla, Hovey, and Trever, and a few were recovered by Japanese forces. Fubuki was struck from the Navy list on 15 November 1942.