Ships
- IJN Inazuma Captain from 20 November 1943 · In command when she was lost, 14 May 1944
Teizo Tokiwa (常盤貞蔵) was an officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy, a graduate of the fifty-eighth class of the Naval Academy at Etajima, who commanded two destroyers in the middle years of the Pacific War. As a lieutenant commander he took the old destroyer Nokaze on 15 April 1942 and kept her through the Aleutians campaign and the long patrol and escort work of the northern waters. On 20 November 1943 he took the destroyer Inazuma, then on convoy duty between Japan, Truk and the Philippines. He was killed on 14 May 1944, when the American submarine Bonefish torpedoed Inazuma in the Sibutu Passage, in the Celebes Sea, while she was escorting oilers bound for Borneo. The class register lists him as a commander at his death.
The register of the Naval Academy's fifty-eighth class gives his home as Odawara, the castle town on Sagami Bay in Kanagawa Prefecture. His birth date, his parents and his schooling before Etajima do not appear in the sources examined.
He entered the Naval Academy at Etajima, on its island in the Inland Sea, and graduated with the fifty-eighth class on 18 November 1930. There were 113 graduates. The register shows how the war treated them: classmates were lost in the carriers Shokaku and Hiyo, in the cruiser Kinugasa, in the battleship Yamashiro, in submarines, and in the air; one of them, Takashige Egusa, was killed in June 1944 with the 521st Air Group.
Of Tokiwa's service in the more than eleven years between graduation and the spring of 1942 the sources examined say only one thing: that before he was given a command of his own he had been torpedo officer of the heavy cruiser Kinugasa. She was sunk in the fighting off Guadalcanal on 13 November 1942, after he had left her.
On 15 April 1942 Tokiwa took over Nokaze, one of the older destroyers of the Minekaze class. She belonged to the 1st Destroyer Division, with Kamikaze, Namikaze and Numakaze, under the Ominato Guard District at the northern tip of Honshu, and the station she and her sisters worked was the sea between Hokkaido, the Kuriles and the Aleutians. In late May 1942 Nokaze took part in the Aleutians operations. Then came the work for which she was kept in the north: patrol and escort duties out of Ominato. On 10 December 1942 she began convoy escort between Hokkaido and Yokosuka. In 1943 she carried on, and in July she supported the evacuation of the Japanese garrison of Kiska. By August she was escorting convoys in the Hokkaido-Kuriles area again. Tokiwa held Nokaze for nearly nineteen months, and he handed her over on 10 November 1943 to Lieutenant Commander Taro Ebihara of the fifty-ninth class.
His next ship was Inazuma, one of the four destroyers of the Akatsuki class, the 6th Destroyer Division. Ten days after he left Nokaze, on 20 November 1943, he relieved Lieutenant Commander Masamichi Terauchi in command of her. She was a ship with a history. In the Java campaign of early 1942 she had fired torpedoes into the crippled British cruiser Exeter and had taken some hundreds of her survivors from the water; in March 1943 she had been with the convoy escort at the Aleutian action off the Komandorski Islands, though she took no part in the fighting. In the winter of 1943 her work was the escort of shipping.
Tokiwa's first weeks in her were taken up with convoys between Truk and Yokosuka. On 4 December she rescued survivors of the torpedoed transport Hiyoshi Maru. Between 14 and 19 December she carried out a troop run from Truk to Kusaie and back, and on 21 December she put out from Truk to help the torpedoed tanker Terukawa Maru and rescue her people. On 27 December she left Truk with Hibiki, escorting the carriers Hiyo and Ryuho to Kure, where they arrived on 2 January 1944.
The new year was a procession of such passages, always with Hibiki. On 6 January 1944 the two destroyers left Saeki to escort the carriers Kaiyo and Shinyo, which were carrying aircraft to Manila; engine trouble in Shinyo stopped the operation, and on 12 January it set out again with Kaiyo. They reached Manila on 16 January and went on to Singapore, Tarakan and Palau, arriving at Truk on 11 February and returning to Kure on 19 February. On 1 March they sailed from Yokosuka with the carrier Chiyoda and the oiler Kokuyo Maru by way of Saipan, Guam and Palau to Balikpapan. Near Tawi-Tawi, on 18 March, the American submarine Gunnel sighted them; she could not close to within 9,000 yards, and Inazuma and Hibiki drove her off with sixteen depth charges. The submarine found them again on 22 March, when a convoy running at fifteen knots was out of her reach. The ships returned to Kure on 10 April and were docked until the end of the month, when it is estimated that the second main-gun turret was taken out of Inazuma and light anti-aircraft guns added. During the refit, on 13 April, her sister Ikazuchi was sunk by an American submarine, and the 6th Destroyer Division was reduced to Inazuma and Hibiki.
On 3 May the two ships sailed from off Mutsure Island, by the Kanmon Strait, with convoy Hi-61, and reached Manila on 9 May. There three fleet oilers, Nichiei Maru, Tatekawa Maru and Azusa Maru, were detached from the convoy to supply Vice Admiral Ozawa's First Mobile Fleet, with Hibiki and Inazuma as their escort. They left Manila on 11 May for Balikpapan.
Before dawn on 14 May the three tankers were in the Sibutu Passage, between the Sulu and the Celebes Sea, when the submarine Bonefish, on patrol there, saw them at 7,000 yards. Her commander took the two escorts for destroyers of the Hibiki class and chose the third tanker as his target. He fired five torpedoes; a sixth could not be fired because of a fault in the tube. At that moment Inazuma had just changed stations with Hibiki. One torpedo struck her amidships and one aft. She heeled forty-five degrees to starboard, her stern broke off, and she went down within minutes. Nevitt's record has the torpedoing at 4.20 a.m. and the ship fully submerged by 4.38. Tokiwa was killed; by the Japanese count 169 men of her company died, and Hibiki picked up the survivors.
The Navy struck Inazuma and her sister Ikazuchi from the Navy List on 10 June 1944, and with them the 6th Destroyer Division was dissolved, Hibiki being the only one of its four ships still afloat. Among those Hibiki pulled from the water was the division's surgeon, Mototsune Fujiwara, who in 1952 discovered the vitamin B1 derivative alithiamine. Bonefish, which had reported sinking a tanker of the Gen'yo Maru class, was not credited with Inazuma until 1946, after the war.
The record of Tokiwa's service is brief: a class, a hometown, two destroyers and the date and place of his death. His rank is carried in the class register as commander, as it is in the closing passage of Nevitt's table for Inazuma; whether he was promoted before he died or after is not stated. Nothing is known in the sources examined of his family, his marriage, if any, or his age, and none of them records where he is commemorated.