Pacific ships

IJN · Commander

Arimoto, Terumichi

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The date is the day Akigumo was completed and the day the appointment sheet made him her captain. The rank on that sheet is commander. A heading of captain is not.

He is not Tokiyoshi Arima (有馬時吉): Etajima class 50 with him, captain of Oyashio from 12 September 1941 to 28 November 1942 and then of Kiyonami, killed with Kiyonami on 20 July 1943, posthumous captain. Different surname. He is not Masafumi Arima (有馬正文): class 43, Shōkaku, the 26th Air Flotilla, killed on 15 October 1944. He is not Stephen H. T. Arliss.

The name

The characters are 有本輝美智. They are the characters on the Etajima class 50 roll that Niehorster prints with Jeff Donahoo, the characters on the Japanese class list that gives his school as 鳥取中, and the characters on the appointment sheets and log covers that were opened. Both rolls romanize the surname and given name as Arimoto Terumichi. No list that was opened gave a second set of characters, and none gave a second reading. 輝美智 can be sounded more than one way in the abstract. It was not, in any source read for this essay.

Niehorster's row is short: Arimoto Terumichi, 有本輝美智, Commander, from Tottori, and a blank in the column where other men are marked killed. The Japanese roll of the same class, graduated 1 June 1922, 272 names, prints 有本輝美智 and 鳥取中, and leaves the rank cell empty. That site says it omits final rank for men who died after the war, men still alive in Shōwa 52 (1977), and cases it could not settle. An empty cell is therefore not a rank and not a death. "Commander" on the other roll is a final rank as that compiler understood it, not the rank of a particular day, and it matches the last appointment sheet that was read: he was still 海軍中佐, a commander, on 1 June 1943. No sheet was found that made him 大佐.

No birth date was found. No class standing. No wife, no child, no address finer than the middle school. Tottori Middle School is what the Japanese roll prints. Niehorster stops at the prefecture.

What the early paper will say

Class 50 left Etajima on 1 June 1922. The next dated piece of paper with his name on it is not an appointment. It is a page of the log of the destroyer Sawakaze for 1 January 1925, Taishō 14. The catalog transcription of that day's sheet lists the men on duty, 平井泰次 and 有本輝美智, while the ship lay to a buoy. It does not give his rank. It does not say how long he had been aboard. It is a watch bill, not a career. 平井泰次 later commanded the old destroyer Tade. Arimoto would command her too, and the log does not say that either of them knew it.

By the spring of 1929 he was a lieutenant, and he had a job that mattered on a destroyer. A draft of 24 May 1929, issued 1 June, takes 望月水雷長兼分隊長, the torpedo officer and division officer of Mochizuki, off the ship for illness and attaches him to Sasebo Naval District. The same column gives the billet to 林利作, who had been torpedo officer of Harukaze. The rank written beside Arimoto's name on that sheet is 海軍大尉. The illness is not named.

He was still ill in August. A draft of 1 August 1929, the sheet marked for the 10th, takes 佐世保鎮守府附海軍大尉有本輝美智, already on the district list, and orders him to 待命, the inactive waiting-orders status, again marked 病気. Two months from a destroyer's torpedo plot to the bench, and the paper gives no diagnosis and no date of return. The next log that names him is the light cruiser Tatsuta, second reserve at Sasebo, in 1931. The January–March cover calls him 航海長代理, acting navigator, under Captain 作間応雄. The July–September cover still calls him acting navigator, and by then it gives the rank, 海軍大尉. The October–December cover lists a navigator, 青山茂雄, and still lists Arimoto as acting. How the two overlapped on one cover was not opened past the catalog line. He was a lieutenant again, on a ship that was not going anywhere much, doing another man's navigation.

The small commands

On 1 November 1933 the Kanpō citation used by the Japanese Wikipedia list for Tade makes him captain of that ship. The Kanpō itself was not opened. What was opened is the run of her logs. From the quarter that begins 1 January 1934 through the quarter that begins 1 October 1935, the covers call him 艦長海軍大尉有本輝美智. She was a Momi-class destroyer of the early 1920s, Sasebo registry, on the 1934 cover a guard destroyer, 警備駆逐艦, with a navigator who was an ensign, later a lieutenant junior grade. A lieutenant in command of a second-class destroyer was the ordinary arrangement, not a slight. The Wikipedia list, citing Kanpō no. 2663 of 16 November 1935, ends him on 15 November 1935. The October–December 1935 cover still carries his name because the quarter began while he was still captain. It does not prove he was aboard on 31 December.

There is a gap of almost a year on the paper that was opened. On 24 December 1936 he signs a letter to the Navy Minister as 鵲艤装員長, fitting-out officer of the torpedo boat Kasasagi, building at Osaka Iron Works. The boat's people had been offered a gift: one framed painting, an oil of the hall of Sumiyoshi Shrine, which the letter calls the boat's tutelary deity, 本艇ノ祭神, and which the yard said had a particular connection with the boat. He asked permission to receive it as equipment outside the paymaster's allowance. The minister's office approved on 16 January 1937. The Japanese list of her captains, citing the Kanpō and not opened here, dates his appointment as fitting-out officer to 8 October 1936, already a lieutenant commander, and makes him boat captain on 15 January 1937, the day she was completed, until 28 September 1937. The letter is the part of that year that was read. It is a small, careful, slightly pious piece of administration. It is also the first time the opened record shows him responsible for a new hull of his own.

The Japanese lists then give him the old destroyer Akikaze, lieutenant commander, from 15 December 1938 to 15 November 1939, and on that second day the new destroyer Yūdachi, in place of a captain who had been holding her together with Harusame. Those two gazettes were not opened. The gazette that ends Yūdachi was. On 10 April 1941, in 海軍辞令公報（部内限）第614号, he is still 海軍少佐. The column exempts him as 夕立駆逐艦長 and attaches him to Yokosuka Naval District. 石井汞, captain of Harusame, is appointed to Yūdachi in the same block. Whatever Yūdachi had been through in the China war under earlier captains, and whatever she would do at Guadalcanal under 吉川潔 in 1942, is not his command. He left her in the spring of 1941, a lieutenant commander on the Yokosuka list, with no ship.

Akigumo

On 15 June 1941, 海軍辞令公報（部内限）第655号, the Yokosuka attachment is lifted and 海軍少佐有本輝美智 is appointed 秋雲艤装員長. The sheet says lieutenant commander. Later ship articles call him a commander already on this date. They are ahead of the column. She was the last of the Kagerō hulls, building at Uraga, not yet in the water as a commissioned ship. The office for her fitting-out crew was set up at the Uraga yard on 17 June. That notice does not name him. The ship articles say he had come from Yūdachi. The sheets agree, with the Yokosuka interval in between.

Between this sheet and the next one that names him, the rank changes, and the promotion order was not found. On 27 September 1941, the day she was completed and the day her fitting-out office was closed, 海軍辞令公報（部内限）第720号 exempts 秋雲艤装員長海軍中佐有本輝美智 and appoints him 秋雲駆逐艦長. Commander. First captain. That date is this date. Commander is this rank. "Captain" is not a translation of 中佐, and it is not 大佐.

He signed, later, the ship's China Incident merit sheet for the tenth period, 駆逐艦秋雲支那事変第十回功績概見表, as 秋雲駆逐艦長海軍中佐有本輝美智. The period on the form is 27 September to 30 November 1941. The grade entered is 勲労乙. The action line says that as soon as she was assigned she finished mobilization preparations at Yokosuka, sailed from Yokosuka on 9 October, joined the Fifth Carrier Squadron in Saeki Bay on 11 October, and stayed out. The result line says she did plane-guard duty for launch and recovery training in the Bungo Channel and the Terashima Channel. A note says that on 27 September she was assigned to the Fifth Carrier Squadron of the First Air Fleet. The block for the senior officer's finding names the commander-in-chief of the First Air Fleet, 南雲忠一. No sentence of his was on the form as read. The catalog's optical reading had called this the fourteenth merit period. The form itself says the tenth. The catalog was wrong.

That sheet stops on 30 November. It does not cover the attack. What the movement compilation says next is that between 18 and 22 November Akigumo went north with Destroyer Squadron 1 from Saeki to Etorofu, and that on 26 November she left Hitokappu Bay in the screen of Nagumo's striking force. A Japanese compilation of the Pearl Harbor sailing prints him in that force as 秋雲駆逐艦長, 有本輝美智, 中佐, class 50, in the block it heads as the 18th Destroyer Division. The merit sheet and the September orders put the ship in Carrier Division 5, not in a destroyer division. The sailing list and the merit sheet are not describing two different jobs. They are filing one new destroyer in two different places on the page. He was her captain either way. Classmates of his were in the same force on that list, including 有近六次 as senior staff officer of Destroyer Squadron 1. 有馬時吉 is not on it.

The same compilation brings the striking force back to Hashirajima on 22 December and to Kure on 24 December, and says that there Commander Arimoto, parenthetically "to C.O. Kagerō," was relieved by Commander 相馬正平, also of class 50. The order is a day or two earlier than that arrival. 海軍辞令公報（部内限）第780号, the issue dated 23 December 1941, exempts 秋雲駆逐艦長海軍中佐有本輝美智 and appoints him 陽炎駆逐艦長. In the same block 陽炎駆逐艦長海軍中佐横井稔 is sent to Kure Naval District, and 呉鎮守府附海軍中佐相馬正平 is appointed to Akigumo. The Japanese ship articles date the order itself to 22 December. A parenthetical 22 December was not isolated on his own column. Three dates are in play for one relief: the 22nd as the articles' effective date, the 23rd as the date on the issue, and the 24th as the day the compilation says Kagerō reached Kure and the captains changed in the flesh.

Everything famous that Akigumo did after that week — the Hornet, the Tokyo Express under 相馬, the end under 入戸野 off Zamboanga in April 1944 — was another man's ship. He had her for the fitting-out, the working-up, the passage to Hawaii, and the passage home. About three months in commission.

Kagerō

The sheet does not say why Yokoi left. It says he was exempted as captain and attached to Kure. The movement compilation says illness, and that he died in hospital on 7 April 1943. The Japanese article says a cerebral hemorrhage and cites a 2014 book of destroyer histories. That book was not opened. What is certain is that Arimoto took the name-ship of the class from a captain who was being put ashore, in the week the fleet came back from Hawaii, and that he was still her captain when she was mined seventeen months later.

The movement compilation is the spine of those months. It is not a war diary, and the squadron diaries and the Senshi Sōsho volumes the articles cite were not opened. Read that way, the command runs like this.

Through the first months of 1942 he was back in the screen: plane-guard for the First Air Fleet's landing-on in early January, then the carriers south, Rabaul, Lae and Salamaua, a return to Japan with Shōkaku, a dockyard period at Uraga in late February, a false start toward Wake in March when an American carrier force had already gone, then Staring Bay and the Indian Ocean. On 4, 5, and 9 April the compilation records Kagerō firing at large aircraft that fighters then shot down, off Colombo and off Trincomalee. She was home at Kure on 23 April. In late May and early June she was with Arare in the screen of the Midway transport group, not of the carriers. After the battle she helped bring the damaged Mogami into Truk, then came home.

In July the northern ships paid for a harbor. On 5 July, at Kiska, Growler torpedoed Arare, Shiranui, and Kasumi as they lay at anchor. Arare sank. The other two were wrecked. Kagerō was not there. The compilation has her late out of Yokosuka with the transport Kikukawa Maru, delayed by the transport's engines and by fog, arriving at Kiska at 1300 on 19 July. On the 20th she was moved, on paper, from the ruined 18th Destroyer Division into the 15th, with Oyashio, Hayashio, and Kuroshio. On the 25th and 27th she was with the wrecks, and she helped the tow that took Kasumi, towed by Ikazuchi, as far as Shimushu. She reached Yokosuka on 8 August.

Years later, in the class journal, he gave that week a title: the truth of how Shiranui, Arare, and Kasumi were torpedoed all at once at Kiska. The essay was not opened. The title is not a log. It does say what he thought was worth telling his classmates in 1961, and the movement record says he came into the harbor after the torpedoes, not on them. He spent the next days with the ships that had been hit.

From the middle of August he was on the Guadalcanal run. The compilation has him carrying part of the Ichiki Detachment from Truk to Taivu on 18 August, bombarding the airfield on the 23rd and again on the 24th, then in the transport escort at the Eastern Solomons. At 0002 on 25 August, in the position the compilation gives as 06-30 N, 159-52 E, she was strafed, light damage, and the flag of Destroyer Squadron 2 came aboard from the damaged Jintsū until the 28th, when it moved to Yūgiri. Through the end of August and into September the runs continue. On 21 September, on a troop run, strafing opened the bow above the waterline and flooded it, and the anchor gear was out. She went to Truk and Akashi. The Japanese article, citing the official history that was not opened here, says this was the night the Navy decided it would not do the drum-can and barge runs under a bright moon. Whether that decision was his report or someone else's is not on a page that was read.

He was back for Santa Cruz in the screen of Kurita's support force, then for the November convoy. On the night of 12–13 November the battleships went in and the convoy turned back. On the 15th, after the second night action, the 15th Destroyer Division was sent ahead. The Japanese article says Oyashio fired one torpedo at Washington, claimed a hit, missed, and that Kagerō, in the mix-up of the night, could not tell friend from foe and did not attack. A footnote in that article quotes her torpedo officer, 高田俊夫, that they had not been trained to use guns if the torpedoes were not fired, so the thought of firing did not arise. The book the quotation comes from was not opened. The sentence is the article's, not a page turned here. In January 1961 Arimoto titled a section of his own recollection 第三次ソロモン海戦に於ける痛恨, the regret, or the bitter failure, of that battle. He did not, in any text read for this essay, say what the regret was. The article's version and his title point at the same night. They are not the same evidence.

The drum-can runs of late November and December are the part he later called a failure in so many words. The compilation's account of Tassafaronga, 30 November 1942, puts Kagerō in Tanaka's column with half her torpedoes landed to make room for drums. Takanami was lost. Three American heavy cruisers were badly damaged and Northampton sank. Which ship put which torpedo into Northampton is argued in the secondary accounts and was not settled from an action report here. His later title does not claim the cruiser. It says ルンガ沖夜戦の失敗 and 高波の最後を見つつ, the failure of the night battle off Lunga, while watching Takanami's end. The transports, in the sense that mattered to the army on the island, failed. Of the later runs the compilation counts drums dropped and drums recovered: 1,500 down and 310 up on 3–4 December; a third run aborted; on 11–12 December, 1,200 down and 220 up, and Teruzuki sunk by a torpedo boat. On 16 December, on a Munda run, a near-miss. He titled another section ムンダ輸送の失敗談.

She was in Japan in the latter part of February 1943 for dockyard work, escorting Jun'yō home and then, in late March, taking Jun'yō and Hiyō back to Truk. In late April the 15th Destroyer Division — Oyashio, Kuroshio, Kagerō — went to Rabaul and into the Kolombangara shuttle. The 29 April and 3 May runs, on the compilation's times, landed their men and left. The Americans mined Blackett Strait on 6 May.

The strait

On 7 May the three destroyers left Buin again. The compilation says Oyashio and Kagerō between them had 220 men of an infantry regiment and 18 tons of ammunition, and that Kagerō also had men of a special landing force and the guard duty. They were off Vila about 0126 on the 8th, off-loaded, and sailed at 0312 with some 300 evacuees aboard, in the order Oyashio, Kuroshio, Kagerō, westbound through Blackett Strait instead of back the way they had come.

At 0359 Oyashio blew up aft and stopped. The other two, taking it for a submarine, dropped depth charges and circled. At 0406 Kagerō took a mine amidships, bearing from Faeauei Island as the compilation gives it. The bulkhead between the first and second boiler rooms went. Both rooms flooded. She was finished as a ship that could move, and she hoisted that fact to Oyashio. At 0506 Kuroshio hit two mines, or three, and broke apart. Oyashio drifted onto a reef. Air attacks came in the morning and again in the afternoon. Near-misses opened Kagerō further. The compilation says abandon ship was ordered at 1745, and that she sank at 1817, position 08-08 S, 156-55 E, about 1,200 meters from the island. It counts 18 killed and 36 wounded, 11 of them serious, and it puts Commander Arimoto among the survivors, with a parenthesis that has not survived contact with the appointment sheet: "to Instructor, Torpedo School."

His own later title for this morning is the last item in that 1961 chapter: コロンバンガラ輸送で乗艦遂に沈没. The ship he was riding finally sank, on the Kolombangara run. He does not, in the title, say how many of his men died. The 18 are the compilation's figure, not his, and not a count from a survivor list that was opened.

Oyashio, mined ahead of him that morning, was not 有馬時吉's ship. Arima had left her on 28 November 1942. The captain who took her into the strait was the man who had relieved him. Six weeks after this morning, Arima would be killed on Kiyonami. Different ship, different day, different man. The strait did not kill both of them. It killed Arimoto's ship and left him the one who had to write it up, much later, as a sinking rather than as a death.

What he was given instead of a ship

The order that ends the command is 海軍辞令公報（部内限）第1137号, the issue dated 4 June 1943. The column exempts 陽炎駆逐艦長海軍中佐有本輝美智 and appoints him 横須賀鎮守府附. Still a commander. A parenthetical 22 May on the same sheet belongs, as read, to another man's suspension, not to this column. The Japanese article dates his relief to 1 June, which is the order date that article attaches to this issue. He had been without a ship since the evening of 8 May. The paper caught up three weeks later and sent him to the Yokosuka district list, the same kind of list he had been on in the spring of 1941 between Yūdachi and Akigumo.

It does not send him to the Torpedo School. That destination is the compilation's parenthesis and nothing that was read on a sheet. If a later order made him an instructor, it was not found. Kagerō was struck on 20 June 1943. By then he was already, on paper, a commander attached to Yokosuka.

No later appointment sheet was identified. Niehorster, who is willing to mark a man killed and to raise him to captain when the rolls do, leaves this row at commander and leaves the fate blank. The Japanese class list leaves the rank blank for the reason already given. He was alive after the war. The class association of the fiftieth class printed a run of memoirs between December 1959 and August 1962. The contents list, as fetched from the Shōwakan catalog, gives him five pieces:

- In the issue of 1 March 1960, 回想, subtitled his time at the Naval Academy. - In the issue of 1 May 1960, a second recollection: something about his classmate 前田多智馬, and 懲罰を喰うこと, being hit with a punishment. - In the issue of 1 July 1960, a third: 勘察加警備と李ライン問題, a Kamchatka guard and the Rhee Line question. - In the issue of 1 November 1960, a fourth: his war service, and what moved him in the early part of the war. - In the issue of 1 January 1961, a fifth, the one whose subtitles are the Kiska torpedoing, the Guadalcanal shuttle, the Lunga night as a failure while Takanami went, the regret of the third Solomon battle, the Munda failure, and the ship sinking on the Kolombangara run.

The texts were not opened. They sit in a closed stack at the Shōwakan. The titles are still his choice of subject, made when he was past fifty and writing for the men who had sat in the same classroom. They are not heroic titles. Four of the six war subtitles are failure, regret, or a sinking. One is a claim to tell the truth of a disaster he had come in after. One, from 1960, is a punishment. The Kamchatka piece sets a northern guard beside the Rhee Line, which is a postwar Korean maritime boundary, proclaimed in 1952. That pairing is not a job description. It is a title. It is the nearest the opened record comes to a life after 1 June 1943, and it does not say what he did for a living, whom he lived with, or when he died.

The contents list that was fetched does not name him again in the later issues it prints, through the memorial numbers of late 1961. Issues 13 and 14 of the run may not have been on that page in full. Silence there is not proof he stopped writing, and it is not a death date.

What the sea took, and what it did not

The record will not support a childhood, a marriage, or a motive. It will support a shape.

He came out of a Tottori middle school into the class of 1922, one of 272. The first personal fact the paper is willing to state, other than that he stood a watch on Sawakaze, is that in 1929 illness took him off a destroyer's torpedo quarterdeck and then off the active list entirely for a while. He came back as a navigator on a cruiser in reserve, then as a lieutenant in command of an old destroyer, then as the man who stood up a new torpedo boat at Osaka and wrote a formal letter so her crew could hang a painting of their shrine. By 1939 he was a lieutenant commander on first-class destroyers, Akikaze and then Yūdachi. In April 1941 the Navy took Yūdachi away and parked him at Yokosuka. In June it gave him a ship that did not yet exist. In September it promoted him, on the evidence of the two sheets, sometime in that summer, and made him her captain on the day she joined the fleet. He took her to Hawaii and home. In the week of the homecoming he was given Kagerō because her captain was finished, and he kept her through the Indian Ocean, Midway's transports, the wreckage at Kiska, the Guadalcanal winter, and the Kolombangara shuttle, until a minefield laid the day before put all three of the 15th Destroyer Division on the bottom in one morning.

Eighteen of his men, on the compilation's count, did not come off Kagerō. He did. The order three weeks later did not promote him and did not give him another ship. It attached a commander to Yokosuka. What he did with the years after that is, on the paper that was opened, five essays for his class, the last of them an inventory of the nights he was willing to call failures. No decoration beyond the 勲労乙 on Akigumo's pre-war merit sheet was found. No captaincy was found. No grave was found.