Ships
- IJN Michishio Acting captain from 28 January 1943 · Relieved on 30 January 1943
Lieutenant Tadashi Aizawa was acting captain of the destroyer Michishio from 28 January 1943. The characters of his name, and the other end of those two days, are in a personnel order. Nothing else has turned up. No birth, no home, no academy class, no wife, no child, no later posting, no death, no photograph, no sentence of his own. The essay is as long as the paper is. Where a life would go, the record is blank, and the blank is part of the story.
The gazette prints 相澤正, the older form 澤, not 沢. It gives no furigana. Tadashi is a common reading of the character 正. It is not fixed by the order itself. An army major general of the same characters, listed elsewhere as Aizawa Tadasu of the logistic branch, class of the military preparatory schools' seventh class, born in 1874 in Ibaraki, is a different man and is not used here.
Origins
Unknown. The Yokosuka Naval District gazette that names him does not give a birthplace, a school, or a Naval Academy class number. Searches of the open record under 相澤正 and under the romanized name produced the Michishio captain list and, separately, the army general. They did not produce a navy service table for this lieutenant.
Formation
Unknown. A destroyer captain in the Imperial Navy was ordinarily a commander, a 中佐, often an Etajima graduate with a class number printed beside his name in the movement records. Aizawa appears as 海軍大尉, lieutenant. Officers of that rank held acting command of a ship when the appointed captain had not yet come aboard, usually because they were already the senior man left on her. The order does not say that he was Michishio's executive officer, gunnery officer, or navigator. It does not say how long he had been in her, or whether he had been to sea in her at all. Those are the usual inferences. They are not in the document.
The two days
What the paper does say is precise.
On 1 March 1943 the Yokosuka Naval District published its internal gazette, number 48. On page 320, under the miscellaneous appointments, two orders stand side by side. Both name the same officer.
The first, dated the twenty-eighth day of the first month, and marked for the 8th Destroyer Division:
滿潮驅逐艦長海軍中佐鈴木保厚著任迄同職代理ヲ命ス
海軍大尉 相澤正
Lieutenant Aizawa Tadashi was ordered to act in the post of captain of the destroyer Michishio until Commander Suzuki Yasuatsu should arrive and take it up.
The second, dated the thirtieth:
滿潮驅逐艦長海軍中佐鈴木保厚著任迄同職代理ヲ命シ置タル處差免ス
He was relieved of the acting appointment that had been given him until Suzuki's arrival. The entry closes with 同, "the same," and his name again: 海軍大尉 相澤正.
That is the whole of his recorded command. Ordered to act on 28 January 1943. Relieved on 30 January 1943. The orders were not printed until 1 March, which is ordinary; district gazettes lagged the fleet. The wording matters more than the lag. He was not appointed captain. He was told to hold the billet until the captain who had already been named could join. Two days later the hold was cancelled, which is what a relief of that kind means: Suzuki had come, or at any rate the acting duty was over.
Suzuki's own appointment is the frame of the sentence. The standard movement record of the ship, compiled by Allyn Nevitt and Anthony Tully, dates it to 25 January 1943: Commander Tomura Kiyoshi left Michishio for Tanikaze, and Commander Suzuki Yasuatsu, previously captain of Minegumo, took her. The Japanese captain lists that cite the Navy Ministry personnel gazette give the same day, the order published in the ministry gazette of 27 January, item issued as of the 25th. That ministry page was not re-read image by image for this essay. The district order of 28 January does not depend on it. It already calls Suzuki 滿潮駆逐艦長, captain of Michishio, and it already says he had not yet 着任, assumed the post. A lieutenant was put in the gap between the appointment and the man.
The ship he was told to hold was not a ship that could fight. Michishio, third of the Asashio class, had been completed at Fujinagata on 31 October 1937. By January 1943 she had been broken twice in the engineering spaces. In the Battle of Badung Strait, on the night of 19–20 February 1942, shellfire wrecked the engine room. She went dead in the water, was towed to Makassar, and spent until autumn under repair. On 14 November 1942, off Guadalcanal with Admiral Mikawa's support force, near-misses aft flooded the engineering spaces again. She was towed into the Shortlands. From then until 17 March 1943, Nevitt and Tully write, a succession of repair attempts at the Shortlands, Rabaul, and Truk failed to make the engines run. She may have been towed from Rabaul to Truk by Asashio between 24 and 29 December 1942. On 6 March 1943 she left Truk under tow by Hamakaze, with Urakaze escorting, and on 17 March she was finally brought into Yokosuka, still not under her own power, for a dockyard repair that lasted until November.
The two days of the acting order fall inside that long immobilization. The gazette does not say where Michishio was anchored on 28 January, and no daily position for those dates was opened for this essay. The movement record puts the ship in the Truk repair period, not yet started for home. She was a Yokosuka ship in the administrative sense — the order is a Yokosuka order, and the division named in it is the 8th Destroyer Division — but the hull, if the movement record is right, was a cripple in the central Pacific, waiting for a commander who had been appointed three days before and had not yet joined.
There is no action report with Aizawa's name on it. There was nothing for an acting captain to steam, and nothing in the surviving order that suggests anyone expected him to. The job, as written, was custody: keep the title warm until Suzuki arrived. On 30 January the custody ended.
He does not appear in the ordinary run of Michishio's captains. The movement record jumps from Tomura to Suzuki on 25 January, then notes that from 1 May, when Suzuki left her for the new Wakatsuki, until 15 October, when Commander Haraguchi Noboru was appointed, "command then rotated among various officers while under repair." It does not name Aizawa. A Japanese ship-history compilation that otherwise lists every formal captain records Suzuki from 25 January and the post vacant from 1 May. A two-day acting duty, published in a district gazette rather than the Navy Ministry's personnel gazette, is exactly the sort of line those lists drop. The May-to-October rotation is a different episode, months later, and attaching Aizawa to it would be a guess.
The cost
Not knowable from his record, because the record never shows him under fire, or in a choice that cost him anything a clerk would write down.
The cost that can be described is the ship's, and it is not his to claim. Michishio had already buried an engine-room watch in the Badung Strait. She would leave the dock in November 1943, serve through the Philippine Sea, and on 25 October 1944 go into Surigao Strait under Lieutenant Commander Tanaka Tomoo, with Captain Takahashi Kameshiro of the 4th Destroyer Division aboard. She was hit in the port engine room by a torpedo from USS McDermut, flooded, and sank. Tanaka was among a handful pulled out of the water by American boats. Takahashi survived the sinking and was killed ashore. None of that is Aizawa's cruise. By the time she was fit to sail again he had been nine months out of the only order that names him, and no source found for this essay puts him back aboard.
What the two days cost him personally — sleep, reputation, a recommendation, a friend's regard — is not written down.
After
Unknown. The relief of 30 January 1943 is the last line. There is no subsequent order in the issue of the gazette that printed these two, none that the pages of that issue examined for this essay turned up, and no ministry gazette entry, academy register, or postwar list that has been found under his name. Whether he stayed in Michishio as a lieutenant after Suzuki took command, went to another ship, survived the war, or died in it, is not established. The absence of a name from the summaries consulted is not evidence that he vanished. It is evidence that the summaries were not keeping lieutenants.
He is, on the present showing, a man who exists because a clerk at Yokosuka needed to record that someone had the destroyer for the two days before her captain arrived, and then needed to record that the someone was done. The ship was a wreck with a famous future and a famous past. The lieutenant in the gap between them left a rank, a name, a division, and the two days between 28 and 30 January.