Ships
- IJN Uranami Captain from 15 May 1943
- IJN Michishio Captain from 1 June 1944 · In command when she was lost, 25 October 1944
Tomoo Tanaka was a lieutenant commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy and a graduate of the fifty-seventh class of the Naval Academy. He commanded the destroyer Uranami in the Southwest Area for eleven months and then the destroyer Michishio, which he took through the Battle of the Philippine Sea and into Surigao Strait. On the night of 24–25 October 1944 he was one of four men from Michishio to be picked up alive by the Americans. The navy, believing him dead, gazetted a promotion for him, and the record was corrected after the war when it was learned that he had lived.
Nothing is known of his birth, family, or schooling.
He belonged to the fifty-seventh class at Etajima. According to the movement record of Uranami he came to that ship from command of the destroyer Hokaze. No earlier posting has been found.
On 15 May 1943 he relieved Commander Tsutomu Hagio in Uranami, at Surabaya. She had struck a reef near Makassar on 2 April and was in dock at Surabaya for repairs that lasted until August. After the repairs she did Southwest Area patrol and escort work through the autumn. In late November and early December she escorted convoys between Singapore and Manila. She was refitted at Singapore at the end of the year, and on 3 January 1944 she left with the light cruiser Kuma on a troop run to Mergui and Penang. On 11 January Kuma was torpedoed and sunk, and Uranami rescued survivors. At the end of January she went out from Singapore to help the cruiser Kinu tow the damaged Kitakami. From 27 February to 25 March she escorted the heavy cruisers Aoba, Tone, and Chikuma into the Indian Ocean on a raiding sortie, waited for them at Bangka and escorted them back from Batavia to Singapore. In April she escorted Kinu from Singapore to Davao and then a troop convoy from Davao to Saipan and back to Palau. On 15 April 1944 Lieutenant Commander Masuhide Sako relieved him.
Michishio was in the 4th Destroyer Division. On 1 June 1944, at Tawitawi, he relieved Captain Kameshirō Takahashi, who had held the command in addition to his other duties, and the division was patrolling the anchorage there and sweeping for submarines. On 13 June the Mobile Fleet sailed from Tawitawi, and Michishio was one of its screening destroyers. On 15 June she left Guimaras with the carriers Jun'yō, Hiyō, and Ryūhō. On 20 June, in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the 4th Destroyer Division was part of Vice Admiral Jōshima's Force B. In the late afternoon Michishio helped defend the carriers against air attack, claiming six dive-bombers, two uncertain, and picked up a downed aviator. At 7:32 p.m. the carrier Hiyō sank. Michishio took off both her captain and her executive officer, with 14 other officers and 204 men.
On 23 June she arrived at Nakagusuku Bay, Okinawa, where the Hiyō survivors were transferred to the cruiser Maya. The 4th Destroyer Division then went south again to bring in the Mobile Fleet's tankers at Guimaras. In July she escorted the battleship Fusō from Davao by way of Tarakan to Japan, and was in drydock at Yokosuka from 17 to 22 July. In August she escorted the battleship Haruna from Sasebo to Singapore. On 17 and 18 October she left Lingga for Singapore and then escorted two tankers from Singapore to Brunei, where the big ships were refueling. On 22 October she sailed from Brunei with Vice Admiral Nishimura's Southern Force toward Surigao Strait. On 24 October she came under air attack and was not damaged.
At about 3:25 a.m. on 25 October, in the night destroyer attack in Surigao Strait, a torpedo from the American destroyer McDermut hit Michishio in the port engine room, under the second torpedo mount. Both engine rooms flooded and she lay dead in the water, listing to port and down by the stern. According to Tanaka she sank within about fifteen minutes. Her boilers had been secured and did not explode. Four men, he among them, were rescued by the Americans. The division commander, Captain Takahashi, is recorded as having survived the sinking and been killed ashore.
Tanaka was interrogated after the battle. The movement record preserves one thing he told his interrogators: that the ship had had trouble with the port engine, from lubrication, which limited her speed to about twenty knots on the way home from the Battle of the Philippine Sea.
The navy believed that he had been lost with the ship, and a promotion was gazetted. When it became known after the war that he was alive, the end of his command of Michishio was changed to 10 January 1945, the day she was struck from the navy list. The record of his life after that has not been found. In November 2017 a survey team on the research ship Petrel found the wreck of Michishio in Surigao Strait.