Ships
- IJN Isokaze Captain from 10 September 1941
Commander Shunichi Toyoshima took command of the destroyer Isokaze on 10 September 1941. She was a Kagero-class fleet destroyer, completed at Sasebo in November 1940, fast enough to run with the carriers and armed with six 5-inch guns and eight tubes for oxygen torpedoes. In his time aboard she served in Destroyer Division 17 with Hamakaze, Urakaze, and Tanikaze, in the screen of Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo's First Air Fleet.
Late in November 1941 Isokaze assembled with that force at Hitokappu Bay in the Kuril Islands and then crossed the North Pacific. On the morning of 7 December she held a station in the outer screen while aircraft from the six carriers attacked Pearl Harbor. Toyoshima's ship kept the submarine watch and stood ready to cover the carriers. The striking force then withdrew and was back in Japanese home waters before the end of the year.
Toyoshima took Isokaze south with the same carriers in January 1942 for the strikes on Rabaul and the harbors of the Bismarck Archipelago. She screened them again for the raid on Darwin on 19 February and during the operations off Java in early March. In April the force entered the Indian Ocean. Carrier aircraft hit Colombo and Trincomalee and sank several British warships at sea, among them the carrier Hermes, while Isokaze remained with the escort. The ships were back in home waters late that month.
At the end of May 1942 Isokaze sailed with Nagumo once more, this time for Midway, with Toyoshima still her commanding officer. On 4 June American dive bombers set three of the Japanese carriers ablaze in a few minutes, and the fourth was lost before the day ended. Through the hours that followed, the destroyers of the screen took men from the water and stood by ships that could no longer steam. Isokaze shared that work as what remained of the striking force turned back toward Japan.
She continued as a carrier escort when the fighting moved into the Solomon Islands in the latter half of 1942. Command of the destroyer later passed to other officers. In April 1945 Isokaze left the Inland Sea under Saneho Maeda with the surface force built around the battleship Yamato and sent toward Okinawa. On 7 April, southwest of Kyushu, American carrier aircraft shattered the formation and left Isokaze dead in the water. A Japanese destroyer still with the force scuttled her, and Maeda was lost with the ship. Toyoshima's command was the earlier chapter of her war, from the weeks before Pearl Harbor through the Battle of Midway.