Ships
- IJN Satsuki Captain from 1 September 1943
Tadao Iino was a lieutenant commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy who commanded the destroyer Satsuki from 1 September 1943 until he died of wounds in January 1944. He was mortally wounded off Kavieng on 4 January 1944, when American carrier aircraft attacked Satsuki and her sister ship Fumizuki as they withdrew toward Rabaul. His left leg was crushed. According to the diary of the Southeast Area Fleet's commander, he was on the bridge, seated in a chair and in command, while the leg was amputated.
A Japanese account of his life gives his prefecture as Fukuoka. Beyond that, nothing is known about his birth, family, or schooling.
He was a graduate of the sixtieth class of the Naval Academy. As a young lieutenant he served as torpedo officer in a succession of ships. He was torpedo officer of the destroyer Yūgiri and, on 15 November 1940, was appointed torpedo officer of the destroyer Murasame. On 10 September 1941, three months before the outbreak of war, he moved to the light cruiser Sendai in the same post. He took command of Satsuki on 1 September 1943.
Satsuki was a Mutsuki-class destroyer. When Iino took her over she had just been refitted at Kure, where her number four main gun had been removed and replaced by two triple 25-millimeter mounts. He took her out to Rabaul, via Truk. In his first weeks she made troop evacuation runs to Kolombangara on 28 September and 2 October, and then to the Surumi and Gasmata area of New Britain, to Buka, and to Cape Dampier. On 24 October, on a run to Garove Island and Iboki, she clipped an uncharted reef and could make only sixteen knots afterward.
She went back to Japan in November, escorting a convoy from Palau to Sasebo. On 9 November, on that passage, she rescued survivors of the torpedoed transport Taga Maru. She was in the dockyard at Sasebo for three weeks and in mid-December returned by way of Palau to Rabaul. In the last ten days of December she ran supplies to Iboki and to Qavuvu with Minazuki, Fumizuki, and Matsukaze. She was one of nine destroyers that delivered a total of 635 men and 380 tons of supplies to Qavuvu between 22 and 31 December.
On 3 January 1944 she left Rabaul with Fumizuki to cover a transport unit arriving at Kavieng. They reached it at one in the morning on 4 January and left shortly before seven for Rabaul, while a transport group of heavy cruisers and destroyers unloaded its troops and left for Truk. Later that day, about eighty American carrier aircraft of Task Force 37.2, from Bunker Hill and Monterey, attacked the two destroyers. They had no friendly fighters overhead. For about twenty minutes they fought the attack with their guns. They avoided every bomb and torpedo, but near-misses and strafing killed or wounded more than forty men between them. The two ships were credited with fifteen aircraft, six of them uncertain.
In that action Iino was hit in the left leg, and the leg was crushed. Vice Admiral Jin'ichi Kusaka, the Southeast Area Fleet commander, visited the wounded of both destroyers in the hospital at Rabaul at seven on the morning of 5 January. He wrote that Iino had been operated on and had directed the ship from the bridge, and he gave him a sword. The diary records that Iino was in danger for a time from loss of blood and recovered toward evening. The next entry, for 6 January, records that Iino, the captain of Satsuki, had died that morning.
The Eighth Fleet's commander, Vice Admiral Tomoshige Samejima, issued a notice to the whole fleet citing the two destroyers and their crews for having indirectly protected the transport unit. Iino was promoted commander after his death. On 8 January Lieutenant Commander Tadayoshi Sugiyama took over Satsuki.
Satsuki went on without him. She was sunk by American aircraft in Manila Bay on 21 September 1944. No record has been found of a family.