Ships
- IJN Haguro Captain from 25 July 1941
Captain Tomokazu Mori took command of the Imperial Japanese Navy heavy cruiser Haguro on 25 July 1941. She was a Myōkō-class ship, armed with ten eight-inch guns and a heavy battery of oxygen-driven torpedoes, and she served in Cruiser Division 5. Mori joined her in the last months of peace, as the fleet finished preparations for a drive into Southeast Asia, and the work of that summer and autumn was to make ship and crew ready for a long campaign far from home waters.
When the Pacific War began in December 1941, Haguro went south with the forces assigned to the Philippines and then to the Netherlands East Indies. Through December, January, and February she covered the succession of landings that carried Japanese troops from Philippine anchorages into the Celebes and the Banda Sea, toward Menado, Kendari, Ambon, Makassar, and Timor. Her task was to keep the transports safe while airfields and harbors were taken and the offensive stepped closer to Java.
The cruise came to a fleet action on 27 February 1942 in the Battle of the Java Sea. Haguro fought in the line with Nachi against a mixed Allied squadron of Dutch, British, American, and Australian ships under Rear Admiral Karel Doorman. In the daylight phase a torpedo from Haguro sank the Dutch destroyer Kortenaer, and gunfire from the Japanese heavy cruisers disabled a boiler room in the British cruiser Exeter, dropping her speed and forcing her out of the line. After dark Doorman turned back toward the Japanese transports. A torpedo from Haguro hit his flagship, the Dutch light cruiser De Ruyter, and she sank with heavy loss of life, Doorman among those killed. The Dutch cruiser Java was lost in the same night action.
On 1 March the damaged Exeter, steaming for safety with the destroyers Encounter and Pope, was caught in the Java Sea by a Japanese force that included Haguro. Cruiser and destroyer gunfire and torpedoes, together with aircraft, sank all three ships. With the Allied squadron gone, the landings on Java went forward, and organized resistance in the Netherlands East Indies ended within days. For the ship under Mori, the Java Sea was the decisive use of a heavy cruiser’s guns and torpedoes in a single campaign.
In May 1942 Mori took Haguro to sea again with Myōkō, screening the carriers Shōkaku and Zuikaku in the operation against Port Moresby. The Battle of the Coral Sea was fought by aircraft, and Haguro came through it undamaged. The light carrier Shōhō was lost, Shōkaku was badly damaged, and the seaborne invasion was called off, the first clear check to the southern advance Haguro had been covering since December. Mori’s command had begun on the eve of the war and carried the cruiser through that opening year. Haguro survived it. In May 1945 she was sunk in the Strait of Malacca by British destroyers while commanded by Kaju Sugiura.