Ships
- IJN Shikinami Captain from 20 June 1943
Shozo Michiki, a lieutenant commander in the Imperial Japanese Navy, took command of the destroyer Shikinami on 20 June 1943. The appointment gave him a fleet destroyer at a time when ships of her kind were being used hard on escort work across the southern seas.
Shikinami was one of the Fubuki class, the large special-type destroyers that had set a new pattern for the Japanese fleet at the end of the 1920s. She was built at Maizuru and completed in December 1929. On a modest hull she carried six 5-inch guns in three twin mounts and nine 24-inch torpedo tubes, and she was drawn for very high speed. Her name is translated as spreading waves. Later refits added anti-aircraft guns, as aircraft became as serious a threat to a destroyer as enemy ships.
By the day Michiki assumed command, Shikinami was already a veteran of the southern advance. She had gone south with Destroyer Division 19 at the opening of the war and served with the forces covering the landings in Malaya. On the night of 28 February and 1 March 1942 she was with the Japanese cruisers and destroyers that met the American heavy cruiser Houston and the Australian light cruiser Perth in Sunda Strait. Houston and Perth were sunk that night by gunfire and torpedoes from the Japanese force. Shikinami remained on southern duty through the hard year that followed, as the navy's work shifted from landing armies to holding open a lengthening chain of sea routes.
From the summer of 1943 her value lay in escort and transport protection. Convoys moving among the southern resource area, the Philippines, Formosa, and Japan needed fast ships that could screen against submarines and aircraft. A captain in Michiki's place spent long nights on passage, altering course and watching the state of boilers and guns on a hull that had been at war since 1941. Fellow officers of Shikinami during the war included Juichi Iwagami, Akifumi Kawahashi, and Tatsuhiko Takahashi.
The risk of that duty was plain in the loss of the ship. On 12 September 1944, while Shikinami was screening a convoy in the South China Sea, the American submarine Growler torpedoed her and she sank, taking many of her crew with her. Michiki's captaincy had begun on 20 June 1943, in the stretch of the war when special-type destroyers were spent keeping those convoys at sea.