Ships
- IJN Amatsukaze Captain from 13 March 1944
Captain Takanobu Sasaki assumed command of the Imperial Japanese Navy destroyer Amatsukaze on 13 March 1944. The appointment was additional duty. His principal post was a staff assignment with the 11th Special Base Force, the naval command ashore at Saigon, and the ship that now carried his name was already in that port, laid up for a long repair.
She was a Kagero-class destroyer whose earlier war had been fought under other captains. Tameichi Hara had her from completion in 1940 until January 1943, through the advance into the Netherlands East Indies and the Solomons campaign, including the night action in which she torpedoed the American destroyer Barton. Masao Tanaka succeeded Hara and spent 1943 largely on escort work. On 16 January 1944, north of the Spratly Islands, Tanaka's Amatsukaze was screening the high-speed tanker convoy HI-31 when the American submarine Redfin torpedoed her. The hit set off a forward magazine, the bow tore away, and eighty men were killed, among them the commander of Destroyer Division 16. Tanaka kept the after half afloat. After days adrift the stern was found and towed to Cape St. Jacques, then on to Saigon. She entered dry dock on 2 February. Seawater mixed with fuel oil had fouled compartment after compartment, spare parts were scarce, and the surviving crew lived in a rented wing of the naval hospital while the dockyard and the base force worked on what was left of the hull.
Sasaki relieved Tanaka in the midst of that work. On 31 March Amatsukaze was removed from Destroyer Division 16 and placed, for administration, under the First Southern Expeditionary Fleet. She came out of the Saigon dock on 1 April and on 14 April was towed back in so that more lasting repairs could be made to the remaining structure and the machinery. She stayed at Saigon through the rest of his tenure. Skilled men were drawn away to ships still able to fight, and the cadre left behind could push the work only as fast as scarce material allowed. For those months his command was a damaged hull, a reduced crew, and a repair that never reached the point of sending her to sea.
The additional duty ended late in the summer of 1944, when Captain Yoshizo Hasebe was given the same sort of extra appointment. Hasebe's regular command was the old fleet tanker Hayatomo, then lying as a hulk at Singapore. A short temporary bow was fitted at Singapore in November, after Sasaki had left the ship, and Amatsukaze returned to local escort duty in that later period. On 10 February 1945 Lieutenant Tomoyuki Morita relieved Hasebe. In March, Morita took her from Singapore with convoy HI-88J. Early in April American aircraft wrecked her in the South China Sea. She was beached near Amoy, abandoned on 8 April, and scuttled on 10 April 1945. Her name was removed from the Navy list on 10 August 1945.
Sasaki's half year on the books of Amatsukaze sits between two very different chapters of the same ship. He inherited the after half of a famous destroyer, held it through a Saigon lay-up while his real daily duty remained with the base force, and turned the appointment over while she was still a repair job. The temporary bow, the last convoy, and the loss off the China coast came under the captains who followed him.