Ships
- IJN Samidare Captain from 15 November 1939
Commander Takisaburo Matsubara took command of the Imperial Japanese Navy destroyer Samidare on 15 November 1939. Her name means early summer rain. She was a Shiratsuyu-class destroyer built at the Uraga Dock Company, laid down on 19 December 1934, launched on 6 July 1935, and commissioned on 19 January 1937. Matsubara was her fourth captain, after Rokuji Arichika, Yasumasa Watanabe, and Tokuma Abe.
He kept her in Destroyer Division 2 with Murasame, Harusame, and Yudachi, inside Destroyer Squadron 4 of the Second Fleet, through the last two years of peace. On 26 November 1941 the division passed the Terashima channel of the Tsushima Strait and reached Mako, in the Pescadores, on the 29th. There it joined Vice Admiral Ibo Takahashi’s Third Fleet for the invasion of the Philippines.
Samidare left Mako on 7 December 1941 with the force bound for northern Luzon. She covered the landing at Vigan on 10 December and remained until the next day, then supported the landings in Lingayen Gulf on 22 December. In January 1942 she escorted the Tarakan invasion force. On 20 January, inside Tarakan harbor, Rear Admiral Shoji Nishimura, the squadron commander in the light cruiser Naka, signaled that Samidare should refuel after the patrol boats. Captain Masao Tachibana, commanding Destroyer Division 2, ordered her to fuel ahead of them. Matsubara followed the division commander. When a patrol boat objected, he answered that a command is carried out according to the chain of command, and the protest stopped.
She screened the Balikpapan landings in late January, took part in the Battle of the Java Sea in late February, and in March helped blockade Manila Bay and cover the move against Cebu. Early in May she was back at Yokosuka for repairs. During the Christmas Island operation an American submarine torpedoed the squadron flagship Naka, and on 20 May the flag shifted to the light cruiser Yura. At Midway, from 4 to 6 June 1942, Samidare sailed with Admiral Nobutake Kondo’s occupation force and stayed clear of the carrier battle. After the fleet returned to Japan, Rear Admiral Tamotsu Takama relieved Shoji Nishimura at the head of Destroyer Squadron 4.
From the second half of August 1942 Matsubara worked Samidare in the Solomon Islands, running troops and supplies to Guadalcanal and screening other ships for the Second Fleet. On 13 October 1942 he turned the ship over to Noboru Nakamura. The change came after those first weeks of night runs and before the November surface fighting off Guadalcanal.
The destroyer remained in the war under later captains. Tokuta Nishimura took command on 1 March 1944, and Yasunosuke Okuma on 2 July 1944. In August 1944 the American submarine Batfish torpedoed her. She broke in two, the stern sank, and the bow, which could not be hauled off the reef, was destroyed afterward. Two men were killed and twenty-eight were missing. Okuma was among the survivors and afterward commanded the destroyer Hatsuharu. Matsubara’s own time in Samidare had run from November 1939 to October 1942, from a peacetime destroyer division through the opening landings in the Philippines and the Indies and into the first months off Guadalcanal.