Ships
- IJN Kuroshio Captain from 10 September 1941
Tamaki Ugaki was a commander in the Imperial Japanese Navy. On 10 September 1941 he became captain of the destroyer Kuroshio, and he remained in that ship through the first year of the Pacific War.
He came to the appointment after years in destroyers and in cruiser torpedo duty. He had commanded the destroyer Minazuki, served as torpedo officer of the heavy cruiser Kako, and commanded the destroyer Hokaze. On 1 November 1939 he left Hokaze for the destroyer Asagiri. He was still captain of Asagiri when he was ordered to Kuroshio.
Kuroshio was a Kagerō-class destroyer of the 15th Destroyer Division, in the 2nd Torpedo Squadron. Ugaki relieved Shinchiro Maekawa, who left the same day to become adjutant at the Naval Academy. The ship had spent much of the summer at Kure repairing a damaged bow after a collision in the Hyuga Nada on 23 June 1941, and she had rejoined the fleet only in late July. At the start of his command the other ships of the division were Oyashio, Hayashio, and Natsushio.
In December 1941 Kuroshio went south with the invasion forces. The division operated in the Dutch East Indies, and in February 1942 Natsushio was sunk by an American submarine in the Makassar Strait. Ugaki kept Kuroshio on escort and patrol work through the spring. Early in the summer she patrolled against submarines off Penang. In June she was one of the destroyers screening the troop transports of the Midway occupation force, which withdrew after the Japanese carriers were lost. On 15 July 1942 Kagerō joined the 15th Destroyer Division.
In August 1942 the struggle for Guadalcanal brought the division and the 2nd Torpedo Squadron into the Solomons. They carried troops and supplies to the island at night, ten runs in the months that followed. Through October, with Ugaki still in command, the squadron took part in the operations around Guadalcanal that included the bombardment of Henderson Field and the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. He left Kuroshio on 10 November 1942, and Commander Hajime Takeuchi succeeded him. Nagahide Sugitani commanded the destroyer later. On 8 May 1943 she struck mines in Blackett Strait and sank.