Ships
- IJN Yubari Captain from 20 February 1944
Takeo Nara, a captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy, took command of the light cruiser Yubari on 20 February 1944. He came to her from duty as executive officer of the battleship Ise. The cruiser was then in dry dock at Yokosuka, in the last weeks of a refit that had begun after she returned from the South Pacific in December 1943.
Yubari was a small experimental cruiser, completed in 1923 and long used as a flagship for destroyer squadrons. In the Pacific war she had already served under Masami Ban, including the fighting at Wake Island, then under Yasuji Hirai and Morie Funaki. For the month before Nara’s appointment, Ranji Oe, who was already commanding the heavy cruiser Maya, looked after Yubari as an added duty. The Yokosuka work replaced her forward 140-millimeter gun with a 120-millimeter high-angle gun, raised her 25-millimeter anti-aircraft battery to twenty-five barrels, and fitted depth-charge rails at the stern. The refit ended on 4 March 1944.
On 22 March, in Tokyo Bay, Yubari became flagship of Destroyer Squadron 3 under Rear Admiral Ko Nakagawa. That day she left Kisarazu with the Higashi Matsu No. 3 convoy, a troop reinforcement for the Marianas, screened by destroyers, a torpedo boat, escorts, and subchasers. On 25 March the American submarine Pollack attacked the convoy and sank the subchaser CH-54. Yubari reached Saipan with the rest on 30 March.
In late April the cruiser shifted to the western Carolines. She sailed from Saipan on 23 April with the light cruiser Kinu and the destroyers Samidare and Yuzuki, carrying Army troops and supplies, and entered Palau on 25 April. There she embarked 365 soldiers and stores. The next day she left for Sonsorol, southwest of the main Palau islands, with the transport T.149 and the same two destroyers.
On the morning of 27 April, after the troops had been put ashore, Yubari came out from behind Sonsorol and was found by the submarine Bluegill, on her first war patrol under Lieutenant Commander Eric L. Barr. Barr fired six torpedoes. One struck the cruiser’s starboard side and wrecked the forward boiler room. Both forward boiler rooms flooded, the engines stopped, and an attempt to move on the center shaft failed. Samidare tried to take her in tow that afternoon and the tow failed. Water reached the upper deck during the night. Just before dawn on 28 April the squadron flag was moved to Yuzuki, and that destroyer took off the survivors, Nara and Rear Admiral Nakagawa among them. Yubari sank by the bow at about 10:15, near 5°38′N, 131°45′E, almost a full day after the hit. Nineteen of her crew were lost. The Navy removed her from the list on 10 June 1944.