Ships
- IJN Satsuki Captain from 8 January 1944
Tadayoshi Sugiyama (杉山忠嘉) was a torpedo officer who became a captain. A graduate of the sixty-first class of the Imperial Japanese Navy's Naval Academy and a native of Shizuoka, he spent the first years of the Pacific war as the officer in charge of torpedoes in a destroyer, a destroyer again and a heavy cruiser, then commanded an escort ship, Oki, and the old destroyer Satsuki. On 21 September 1944 Satsuki was bombed and sunk in Manila Bay by aircraft of the American fast carrier force. He was one of the survivors.
The roster of his Academy class gives his home prefecture as Shizuoka, on the Pacific coast southwest of Tokyo. His birth date, his family and his schooling before the Academy do not appear in the sources examined.
He entered the Naval Academy at Etajima and graduated with the sixty-first class on 18 November 1933. There were 116 graduates. The roster of his class records no rank or fate for him.
Between graduation and 1941 the sources give only one fact: he became a torpedo officer, and he was torpedo officer of the destroyer Asagumo before September 1941. On 1 September 1941, by then a lieutenant, he was appointed an equipping officer of the new destroyer Yugumo, then still fitting out at the Maizuru Navy Yard, and became her first torpedo officer. Yugumo was completed on 5 December 1941, three days before the Pacific war began. Sugiyama stayed with her only another fifteen days. On 20 December 1941 he was appointed torpedo officer of the destroyer Hayashio.
The best account of how the war looked from his station is his own. In the early 1980s the writer Kazumasa Sato interviewed thirty-four former captains for a book published in Japan. Sugiyama's testimony, titled Shishi funjin ("Furious as a lion"), is among them, and it is the main source for everything in this section that cannot be read in the logs.
He told Sato that he served in Hayashio during the opening southern operations and that from April to October 1942 he was a student in the advanced course of the Navy's Torpedo School. He then went to the heavy cruiser Nachi as her torpedo officer. Nachi was the flagship of the Fifth Fleet, based in the northern islands. On 26 March 1943, off the Komandorski Islands in the North Pacific, a Japanese squadron escorting transports toward Attu met an American cruiser-destroyer force at dawn. It became a four-hour running gun battle, at the end of which the Japanese abandoned the resupply mission. Nachi launched eight Type 93 torpedoes between 0544 and 0546; none hit. Around 0550 five American shells struck her, and fourteen men were killed.
Sugiyama later described his part with a candour that is rare in such recollections. He said that he fired the torpedoes at a range of about twenty thousand metres, expecting the American ships to turn toward the east, and that they turned to the west instead. He remembered a shell striking the bridge soon after, with a fragment that glanced from it into the sole of his foot, so that he was wounded in the first exchange. He also described a mistake in the confusion of the action, a switch thrown in the engine spaces that cut power to a gun turret and forced it into hand training. The ship's record gives the salvo, which missed, and the five hits; it says nothing of his foot.
On 2 August 1943, as a lieutenant, he took command of the escort ship Oki, of the Etorofu class, a small vessel built for convoy defence. She belonged to the Second Escort Force of the Fourth Fleet and ran convoys between Yokosuka, the main base near Tokyo, and Truk, in the central Pacific. On 3 September, southeast of Miyake Island, an American submarine sank the merchant ship Tago no Ura Maru, which Oki was escorting, and her crew rescued the survivors. On 19 November, in a convoy that included the destroyer Yukikaze, the USS Dace made contact, and the convoy commander ordered Oki to destroy her. Sugiyama's recollection is of a morning spent circling the point where the submarine had dived, a decision to make one more sweep before giving up, a sonar contact forty degrees to port at a thousand metres, and then a torpedo track running at his ship. He said that he called for full speed and full port helm, and that the torpedo passed close alongside. A periscope rose ahead, he said, and he dropped depth charges across the spot, after which a heavy metallic explosion and a broad boil of bubbles followed. The Japanese records credit Oki with dropping 22 depth charges, and with avoiding three torpedoes. Dace was not sunk.
On 21 December the transport Terukawa Maru was torpedoed near Truk, and Oki sailed with two destroyers to hunt the submarine, which they did not find; she gave up the search on the 23rd. She left Truk with another convoy on 27 December, and reached Yokosuka on 5 January 1944. By then, the destroyer Satsuki had lost her captain, Lieutenant Commander Tadao Iino, who died of wounds on 6 January after an air raid at Kavieng. Sugiyama, now a lieutenant commander, was appointed to succeed him on 8 January, and reported aboard on the 15th.
Satsuki was an old ship, completed in 1925, and had served in the Solomons campaign. She was by then a convoy escort. Under Sugiyama she took convoys from Rabaul to Truk in January, was refitted at Sasebo from mid-February to the end of March, and received the Type 13 air-search radar, the first of her class to get one. In April she took troop convoys from Tateyama, near Tokyo, to Palau, and in May to Saipan and Guam. In Sugiyama's account, a convoy of small vessels loaded with supplies that she brought toward Guam in May was attacked by a submarine just before arrival; he had every ship in the convoy drop depth charges, and no ship was lost. From the middle of July she escorted convoys from Japan by way of Manila to the Singapore area, and in September between Singapore, Borneo and Manila.
One of the first things he had done on taking command, he told Sato, was to have three rafts of squared timber built and set at the bow, midships and stern. In September they were put to use. Satsuki arrived at Manila on 20–21 September with the convoy she had brought from Singapore. At 0500 on the 21st she sailed with another convoy, then put back to fuel, and she was trying to overtake that convoy when carrier aircraft of Task Force 38 struck the Manila area. In the first attack a near miss on the port side wrecked her condenser, leaving her to run on one side's machinery, unable to make more than twenty knots. Wounded men were taken ashore in the boats, and her doctor, torpedo officer and navigator went with them, so that the bridge was left, as he remembered it, to himself, the gunnery officer and a helmsman. In the afternoon a bomb hit the forward boiler room; another struck forward; more followed. Satsuki sank at 1545. Fifty-two men were killed. The captain ordered the ship abandoned. Survivors were picked up by landing craft from shore and by the supply ship Irako; in his account, some went ashore on the rafts, pushed by swimmers. The crew returned to Japan and so were not caught in the later ground fighting at Manila.
He was assigned afterward as an instructor at the Torpedo School, in the posting recorded for him in the English-language fleet histories. The book of recollections was published in the early 1980s, so he was alive to give the interview. Nothing in the sources examined gives his later life, his rank at the end of the war, the year of his death or his family.