Pacific ships

IJN · Commander

Arima, Tokiyoshi

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Ships

The headings that call him captain and the sentences that call him commander cannot both be the rank he held on those days, and commander is the rank the appointment sheets support. On 12 September 1941 he was ordered from one destroyer to another as 海軍中佐, a commander. On 25 January 1943 he was ordered captain of a destroyer that had just been completed, still a commander. The rank 海軍大佐, captain, was given to him after he was dead, in an order dated the day the ship went down and printed ten months later.

The two ships and those two days are right. The Oyashio command ended on 28 November 1942, two days before the battle that made the division's name. He spent the month between the ships attached to the Kure Naval District. He came to Kiyonami on 28 December 1942 as chief equipping officer of a hull that was not yet in commission. He was killed with her on 20 July 1943.

He is not Masafumi Arima (有馬正文): Etajima class 43, captain of Shōkaku from 25 May 1942 to 16 February 1943, rear admiral commanding the 26th Air Flotilla, killed on 15 October 1944 after taking off from Clark Field in a Type 1 land-attack plane. Different given name, different class, different death. He is not Arimoto, Terumichi.

The name

The characters are on the appointment sheets.

The confidential Navy appointments gazette, issue 710, is dated 12 September 1941. On the sheet numbered 782 in that bound file, in the lower register, one column reads 補親潮駆逐艦長 and the column under it reads 綾波駆逐艦長海軍中佐 有馬時吉. Commander 有馬時吉, captain of the destroyer Ayanami, appointed captain of the destroyer Oyashio. The same sheet sends the man he replaced, 親潮駆逐艦長海軍中佐 金岡國三, to command the 30th Minesweeper Division, and sends 菊月駆逐艦長海軍少佐 作間英邇 to Ayanami. The characters 有馬時吉 are the ones in that column. They are the same characters on the later sheets that take him off Oyashio, put him in Kiyonami, take him off her books, and promote him after his death.

Tokiyoshi is the reading printed beside those characters in the English class roll and in the English movement compilations. No gazette opened here prints kana. The reading is the ordinary one of 時吉, and it is the one the rolls use. It was not checked against a ruby.

The class rolls agree with the sheets on the characters and disagree with each other on how much of his origin they bother to print. Niehorster's Etajima class 50, compiled with Jeff Donahoo, has the row Arima Tokiyoshi, 有馬時吉, Captain, from Kagoshima, killed in action 20 July 1943 (Kiyonami). The Japanese class list headed 第50期, graduated 1 June 1922, 272 names, has 有馬時吉, 大佐, 鹿児島川辺中, and in the death column コロンバンガラ（清波艦長）. One roll gives the prefecture. The other gives a middle school in that prefecture, Kawanabe. Neither gives a birth date. Both give the final rank as captain, which is the posthumous rank, not the rank he held when he took either ship.

There is one place the characters slip. The Asia-historical-records catalog titles a May 1944 cabinet file 故海軍大佐有島時吉, with 島 where the gazettes have 馬. The catalog's own transcription of the body writes 有馬時吉, dates the death 20 July 1943, and proposes 正五位. The image of that file was not opened. The viewer address returned nothing. The title and the body do not spell the surname the same way, and the body also pushes the rank 陸軍中佐 into a sentence that goes on to say he was appointed a navy ensign. That is a bad transcription, or a bad original, or both. It is recorded below with the court rank. It is not a second officer. The appointment sheets, which were opened, do not use 有島.

No second 有馬時吉 turned up in the class rolls or on the sheets that were read.

Where he came from

A birth date is not in any document read here. Parents are not. A wife is not. A child is not. Nothing was found that says what he left in a house.

What the rolls give is a class and a school. He is carried on the 50th class of the Naval Academy at Etajima, the class the rolls date 1 June 1922, 272 graduates. The Japanese roll's school column says 鹿児島川辺中, Kawanabe Middle School in Kagoshima. Niehorster stops at the prefecture. The school is one compiler's column. It was not checked against an admission book. Attending a middle school in Kawanabe is not, by itself, a birthplace.

The same class roll carries 有近六次. They were classmates on that paper. Nothing opened here says they served together, wrote to each other, or were friends. The earlier essay on Arichika named 有馬時吉 only as the classmate killed as captain of Kiyonami. That identification is the one the sheets support.

The cabinet catalog, in the same muddled paragraph that cannot decide between 島 and 馬, says 大正十二年九月二十日任海軍少尉: appointed ensign on 20 September 1923. The image was not opened, and the paragraph is already corrupt on the service and the surname. The date is used here only as that transcription. It fits the ordinary interval after a class that left the Academy as midshipmen on 1 June 1922. His own name was not found, because it was not looked for, on the Academy's graduation list or in the Kanpō of 2 June 1922. Class place, out of the 272, is in neither roll.

Between an ensign's commission in 1923, if that date holds, and a destroyer command in 1939, there are sixteen years. They are blank here. No gazette was opened for a lieutenant's warrant, a staff college, a China cruise, or a marriage. The first post the records assembled for this essay actually name is the one he was holding when he was ordered out of it.

The ship he gave up

The compiled captain list for Ayanami dates him from 15 November 1939 to 12 September 1941, and calls him 少佐, lieutenant commander, at the start. The list's authority, as the article states it, is Toyama Misao's Kanchō-tachi no kankanshi. The book was not opened. The end of the command does not depend on the book. It is the column already quoted: on 12 September 1941 the gazette still styles him 綾波駆逐艦長 when it gives him Oyashio.

The start is weaker. The article points the preceding officer's relief, 原為一, at gazette issue 402 of 15 November 1939. That file was downloaded and not read page by page. His name was not confirmed in it. So the day he became captain of Ayanami is the compiled list, not a line read here. The day he ceased to be is a line that was.

What he did with her in the twenty-two months is not in a diary opened here. The ship's famous night, 14–15 November 1942 off Savo, was fought under 作間英邇, the man who took her on the same 12 September order. The gazettes make that separation mechanical. Ayanami went into the war, and into the battle that made her name, with another captain. He had been off her for two months when the war began, and for fourteen when she was sunk.

On 12 September 1941 he was already a commander. Whenever the promotion from lieutenant commander fell, it fell while he still had Ayanami, or on the day he left her. The promotion sheet was not found. The September sheet is the first time this essay sees the rank 中佐 on his name.

The same morning's orders, if a single sheet can be called a morning, moved three destroyer captains at once. Kanaoka left Oyashio for minesweepers. Arima left Ayanami for Oyashio. Sakuma left Kikuzuki for Ayanami. Nobody on the sheet explains the shuffle. It is the ordinary machinery of the appointments gazette, two and a half months before the southern offensive.

One English copying of the Oyashio article dates his command from 12 August 1941. The Japanese article's prose says Kanaoka left on 10 September and that Arima was appointed in his place. The Japanese article's own captain table says 12 September, and cites issue 710. The sheet that was opened is issue 710, dated 12 September 1941, and his column carries no separate earlier day. August is a wrong month. The tenth and the twelfth are the prose and the table of the same article. The sheet agrees with the table.

Fifteen months in Oyashio

Oyashio was a Kagerō-class destroyer, completed at Maizuru on 20 August 1940, and by the autumn of 1941 she was in Destroyer Division 15 with Natsushio, Hayashio, and Kuroshio, under Destroyer Squadron 2 of the Second Fleet. The day-by-day English record of where she went while he was her captain is Allyn Nevitt's tabular movement, revised with Anthony Tully in December 2018. It is a compilation. The war diaries and the Senshi Sōsho volumes it rests on were not opened for this essay. What follows is that compilation, for the months the gazette gives him the ship, and it is not a diary of what he thought.

The division left the Terashima Strait for Palau between 26 November and 1 December 1941. From 6 December it went south with the attack on the southern Philippines, first in company with the carrier Ryūjō toward Davao. The division was sent after the American seaplane tender William B. Preston, last reported in Malalag Bay, and did not find her. Oyashio and Kuroshio covered Itsukushima laying mines in San Bernardino Strait. The division was with the Legaspi landing, back at Palau, then with the Davao landing. On 19 December Kuroshio, not Oyashio, was sent after a submarine Jintsu had reported, and dropped depth charges with no known result. On 22 December aircraft attacked the anchorage and did not hit Oyashio. On 23 December, off Jolo, aircraft hit Kuroshio with machine-gun fire. She was not touched. Through the end of the year the compilation has her on patrol in Davao Gulf and at anchor in Malalag Bay.

January and February are the same kind of work, one landing after another: Menado, Kendari, Ambon, Makassar. On 11 January she fired thirteen main-gun rounds and ninety-six machine-gun rounds at aircraft and was not hit. On 24 January the ships chased a reported American warship, the seaplane tender Childs, which got away. The one loss inside the division came on the night of 8 February, approaching Makassar. Natsushio, the flagship, was torpedoed by the submarine S-37 under her No. 2 torpedo mount. Eight men were killed and two wounded. The flag of the division commander, Captain Satō Torajirō, class 43, was shifted to Oyashio. Kuroshio took Natsushio in tow. The wind changed, the sea rose, and at 0843 on the 9th Natsushio foundered about twenty-two miles southwest of Makassar. Her captain had already been taken off. The compilation does not say what Arima did in those hours beyond the fact that the division flag was then in his ship. It does not quote him.

He stayed with the occupation convoys: Kupang, then the supply group south of Java. On 5 March Oyashio and Kuroshio sank a vessel they identified as a British minelayer. Oyashio fired eighty-four main-gun rounds. The compilation gives the identification as theirs. It was not checked against a British loss list here.

From the middle of March the work changes, and it is worth saying how, because it is the part of his war that is not a landing. On 15 March Oyashio, Kuroshio, and Hayashio left Staring Bay escorting the carrier Kaga, which had scraped her hull on a reef, and brought her to Sasebo on 22 March. He was in Kure for upkeep and a short docking. On 18 April, the day of the Doolittle raid, the division was engaged by a bomber and then ordered to join the hunt for the American task force. The hunt was called off. They went to Takao, then to the Philippines. On 10 May the division left Manila to meet the damaged Shōkaku, coming back from the Coral Sea, and on 17 May brought her into Kure with Yūgure.

At Midway, 3–6 June 1942, the compilation has Destroyer Division 15 escorting the troop convoy, not the carriers. There is no action entered against his name. He is not the Arima who had Shōkaku.

In the second half of July the division escorted Kumano and Suzuya from Kure toward Mergui for the Indian Ocean raid that was then called off, because the Americans had landed on Guadalcanal. The cruisers were recalled. The destroyers fueled at Truk on 21 August and joined the fleet. On 24 August, at the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the compilation has the division escorting Admiral Kondō's Advance Force. It does not give him a decision.

From the end of September he is in the Guadalcanal reinforcement runs. The compilation's entries are the nights themselves: troops and stores to Kamimbo on 3 October, Oyashio the flagship of Satō's division, each destroyer carrying something like 150 to 190 men; another run on 6 October; on 9 October a larger run to Tassafaronga with Tatsuta, Nowaki, and Maikaze, lifting the headquarters of the 17th Army, in which air attack damaged Nowaki and killed eleven, and his own ship is not listed among the hit. He was with Kongō and Haruna for the bombardment of Henderson Field on 13–14 October. He escorted Kurita's Support Force at Santa Cruz on 26 October. On 7 November he led a ten-destroyer run that put about 1,300 men ashore at Tassafaronga and Cape Esperance and took off 497 sick and wounded. Air attack damaged Naganami and Takanami. Not, on this list, Oyashio.

On 13–15 November the division escorted the large transport convoy toward Guadalcanal. On the 15th, after Kondō's bombardment force met the American battleships, the division was sent ahead. The compilation's action line is that Oyashio and Kagerō made a torpedo attack on Washington. It does not say the torpedoes hit. The night battle in which Ayanami was lost, under Sakuma, is the same calendar night. He was in a different destroyer, in a different part of the same operation. The sheets had separated the two men fourteen months earlier.

He came back to Rabaul, ran troops to Buna, loaded supply drums, and on 27 November arrived at Buin with 240 drums embarked for the next run. The next day the Navy took him off the ship.

The appointments gazette, issue 998, dated 30 November 1942, carries the orders of 28 November. One column reads 補呉鎮守府附 over 親潮駆逐艦長海軍中佐 有馬時吉. Commander Arima, captain of Oyashio, appointed to the Kure Naval District, attached. The following sheet appoints his relief: 初霜駆逐艦長海軍少佐 東日出夫 to Oyashio. The compilation says the same day, and then adds, in parentheses, that Arima was going to Kiyonami. That parenthesis is early. Kiyonami was still fitting out. The order that puts him in her is a month later. What the 28 November sheet gives him is a shore attachment at Kure, which in this navy is often the waiting billet between commands. No letter says whether he experienced it as rest or as being pulled out.

He was not aboard for anything Oyashio did after that morning. The compilation's later lines are Higashi's: the Battle of Tassafaronga on 30 November, the drum runs of December and January, the mining in Blackett Strait before dawn on 8 May 1943, the bombs, the capsize at 1755. Ninety-one of her officers and men were killed. Higashi lived. The three destroyers of the division were gone in an hour. None of that is his command, and it is not told here as if he had ordered it. It is the ship he had held for fourteen months and two weeks, sunk under the next captain, six months after he left her.

The Japanese captain table agrees with the sheet: 有馬時吉, commander, 12 September 1941 to 28 November 1942. An English mirror of the article that dates the start in August is the one already set aside.

The month, and then a new hull

From 28 November to 28 December 1942 the only post on paper is the Kure attachment. Where he slept, and whether he went to Kure at all, is not in a document read here.

Kiyonami was the eighth Yūgumo, built at Uraga. She had been launched on 17 August 1942. She was not finished. On 1 December the concurrent equipping officer was Lieutenant Commander Hatano Kenji, who was already captain of Hagikaze. Issue 1022 of the appointments gazette, 第千二十二號, is the issue the ship's article cites for 28 December. On the sheet read here, the right-hand column of the lower register is 補清波艤装員長 over 海軍中佐 有馬時吉. Commander Arima, appointed chief equipping officer of Kiyonami. A first reading of that page took 艤装員長 for 駆逐艦長. A closer crop does not. The characters are 艤装, equipping, not 駆逐艦, destroyer-captain. He was put in charge of a ship that could not yet sail as a ship.

The same class of order, on 25 January 1943, finishes the job. Issue 1042, 第千四十二號, is the issue the article cites for that day, and the sheet is dated 27 January on its face. The column is 補清波駆逐艦長 over 海軍中佐 有馬時吉, in a block that also appoints her torpedo officer, her gunnery officer, and the rest of a commissioning crew. A parenthetical 25 September 1942 on the same sheet belongs to another man's suspension, 青木群造, and is not his date. The ship's article dates the completion 25 January 1943, the closing of the equipping office that day, enrollment at Maizuru, and designation as a guard destroyer, then assignment to the Yokosuka district force. Those administrative lines were not re-read in the port-admiral's diary. The captaincy was.

This order is commander of Kiyonami, 25 January 1943. "Captain" is still ahead of the rank.

The half year

The movement compilation for Kiyonami is the same hand, Nevitt with Tully's later notes. Again it is not a diary, and the squadron war diaries cited all over the Japanese article were not opened.

She was assigned on 25 February to Destroyer Division 31, Naganami, Makinami, Ōnami, Destroyer Squadron 2. From 28 February to 8 March she and Umikaze escorted the auxiliary cruisers Bangkok Maru and Saigon Maru, carrying part of the Sasebo special landing force, from Yokosuka to Truk. She took them on to Tarawa, came back by way of Kwajalein, and through April and May ran convoys among Truk, Kavieng, and Rabaul. From 5 to 21 June she escorted the escort carriers Unyō and Chūyō from Truk to Yokosuka and back. On 8–10 July she escorted the light cruiser Jintsu from Truk to Rabaul.

The Japanese article, drawing on the squadron diaries and on Senshi Sōsho volume 96, puts her in the South Seas from the spring and then, in the middle of July, in the night battle off Kolombangara. On the night of 12 July the reinforcement force ran into an Allied cruiser-destroyer group. Jintsu was sunk with Rear Admiral Izaki and his staff. The remaining Japanese destroyers, Yukikaze, Hamakaze, Kiyonami, and Yūgure among them, fired torpedoes. The compiled accounts credit the spreads with sinking the destroyer Gwin and with damaging Honolulu, St. Louis, and the New Zealand cruiser Leander. They do not credit a hit to his ship by name, and this essay will not. His ship came out of the night undamaged, on those accounts. The troops got ashore. The flagship of the squadron did not.

What he made of that night is not written down anywhere that was opened. A week later he was at sea again.

The morning of 20 July

On 19 July a night force left Rabaul for another run to Kolombangara. The compilation's order of battle is Rear Admiral Nishimura Shōji, class 39, in Kumano, with Suzuya and Chōkai; a torpedo force under Rear Admiral Ijūin Matsuji in Sendai, with Yukikaze, Hamakaze, Kiyonami, and Yūgure; and a transport unit of Mikazuki, Minazuki, and Matsukaze. The surface fight they were ready for did not happen. The transport unit landed its men. The cover force lost two destroyers to aircraft.

The position the compilation gives for the sinking is 07°13′ S, 156°45′ E, forty-two miles north-northwest of Kolombangara. It says United States Army B-25s, and that she was sunk while rescuing the crew of Yūgure. Tully's note on the page says an Eighth Fleet report of 1300 on 6 August recorded one survivor, picked up on 5 August. The man said Kiyonami had taken about twenty men off Yūgure; that about an hour later bombers hit her aft and stopped her; that at dawn a second attack put three or more bombs into her and she sank at once; that about sixty men were left in the water; that he alone lasted to be found. The Japanese article quotes the same story from the published diary of Prince Takamatsu, volume 6, page 529, and names the man as Petty Officer Nishikawa, a Maizuru enlistment, rescued 5 August. The diary was not opened. The Eighth Fleet original was not opened. The two secondary accounts agree on the shape of it and were not collated word for word.

The counts of the dead do not agree, and they are not settled here. The English article says one survivor from Kiyonami's crew of 241 and none from Yūgure's 228. The compilation says one survivor from the combined crews, which it numbers 468. The survivor's own numbers, as those accounts relay them, are about twenty taken off Yūgure, about sixty in the water after Kiyonami sank, and one man alive on the fourth day. None of these is a muster.

His own last hour is inside that story only as the captain of the ship. No document read here quotes an order to stop for Yūgure, or a decision to stay stopped, or a word on the bridge. The ship stopped. The bombs came. The Navy later dated his death that day.

Itō Masanori's popular account of the turn that put Kiyonami and Yūgure under the aircraft, rather than Yukikaze and Hamakaze, is cited by the Japanese article and rejected by it on the facts: the cruiser line he names is the wrong one, and the attack he describes does not match the action report. It was not used.

What the paperwork did with him

He was still, on every sheet up to his death, a commander.

On 15 October 1943 the ship was removed from the register. The appointments gazette, issue 1241, is the issue the article cites for that day. The column read on the sheet is 免清波乗組 over 海軍中佐 有馬時吉. Removed from Kiyonami's complement. The rank in the column is still commander. The article's captain list compresses the next promotion into this same date, "appointed captain the same day." The sheet that was opened does not say that.

The promotion is a different sheet, ten months later. Issue 1472 is dated 15 May 1944. Under a circled 昭和十八年七月二十日, 20 July 1943, the column is 任海軍大佐 over 海軍中佐 有馬時吉. Appointed captain. The rank he is being promoted from is written beside the name: commander. The order is printed on 15 May 1944 and dated the day the ship was lost. The column does not, on the reading made here, use the word 戦死. It is a promotion of a dead officer, backdated. The class rolls, which call him captain and killed in action, are recording the rank this sheet created.

The cabinet file of the same month is the court rank. The catalog text, which is all that could be read, is a draft the Prime Minister, Tōjō, submitted on 13 May 1944. For this man the heading is 叙正五位, Senior Fifth Rank, death dated 20 July 1943, and the service formula begins 大正十二年九月二十日任海軍少尉以来在職十年以上, appointed ensign on 20 September 1923 and in service ten years and more. The extract breaks off there. The file's title spells him 有島 and calls him 海軍大佐. The body spells him 有馬 and, in the same breath, 陸軍中佐. The image was not opened, so the conflict stands. What can be said without choosing the corrupt words is that a court-rank draft of May 1944 treats a navy officer of this name as having died on 20 July 1943, and proposes the Senior Fifth Rank. No grave, no hometown notice, and no family's receipt of that rank was found.

The October sheet and the May sheet together are the whole of his afterlife in the personnel system, as far as it was opened. Removed from a ship that no longer existed, still a commander. Made a captain on the anniversary of nothing except the day he drowned. Given a court rank in a file that cannot spell him once.

The cost

There is no letter. There is no interrogation, because he did not come back to be interrogated. There is no child in a later obituary, of the kind that exists for the other Arima, because no such obituary was found and it may be that there was no child to write one.

The choices that can be documented are the Navy's, not his. He was moved off Ayanami before she became a story. He was moved off Oyashio two days before Tassafaronga, and the ship was sunk without him. He was given a new destroyer at the yard, took her through one night battle, and was killed on the next operation, in a ship that had stopped for another ship's people. Whether stopping was his order is exactly the sort of thing the record does not say. The one man who came out of the water talked about the bombs and the number of swimmers. He did not, in the accounts that relay him, talk about the captain.

What survived is the paper: four appointment sheets, a class line, a court-rank draft with a spoiled name, and the movement compilations of two destroyers for the months the sheets overlap them. The man those sheets describe was a Kagoshima-connected officer of the class of 1922, a commander at forty or thereabouts if the ensign's date is a true guide to his age and not a proof of it, captain of two fleet destroyers in the south, killed on 20 July 1943 north of Kolombangara, and made a captain after the fact.