Ships
- IJN Hosho Captain from 5 March 1945 · Relieved on 18 May 1945
Shuichi Osuga, a captain of the Imperial Japanese Navy and a graduate of the Naval Academy’s 51st class, took command of the aircraft carrier Hosho on 5 March 1945, relieving Captain Yujiro Murota. Hosho was the first carrier Japan had completed from the keel up, finished at Yokosuka in December 1922. By the spring of 1945 she was an old, small ship, kept in the Inland Sea to train air groups and to serve as a target for other units.
His opening days followed that routine. On 9 March Hosho carried out torpedo practice, and five of the torpedoes were live. On 11 March she left Oita with the destroyer Yukaze and the old target ship Settsu so that Air Group 252 could use them for training.
On the morning of 19 March 1945, aircraft from the United States Navy’s Task Force 58 struck Japanese warships in the Inland Sea and at Kure. Hosho was in the Hiroshima Bay area, apparently working near the battleship Yamato, when seven aircraft attacked her at about 5:32 a.m. She entered the navy yard at Kure on 21 March. While the repairs were still going on, she and the carrier Ryuho were assigned on 23 March to the Commander-in-Chief of the Second Fleet, and Hosho was ordered to act as radio guard for the damaged Ryuho. The yard finished the work on 27 March, and Osuga took Hosho back out to training duty in the Inland Sea.
On 20 April 1945 Hosho was designated a third-class warship and was to remain capable of operating aircraft. At the beginning of May Osuga’s duties widened. From 5 May his principal appointment was command of the escort carrier Kaiyo, and he continued as captain of Hosho alongside that post. Captain Keiji Furutani relieved him on 18 May 1945. Osuga had held Hosho for a little more than ten weeks, all of them in the last campaign in home waters.
He left the ship as the fleet was being pinned in the Inland Sea. Later in May Hosho was found camouflaged and moored in a cove off Nishinomi-shima, south of Kure, and on 1 June she was named a special guard ship under the Kure Naval District. She was still afloat at the surrender. Removed from the navy list on 5 October 1945, she made voyages carrying Japanese servicemen and civilians home, and she was broken up in 1946 and 1947.