Ships
- IJN Amatsukaze Captain from 10 February 1945 · In command when she was lost, 6 April 1945
Tomoyuki Morita was a lieutenant of the Imperial Japanese Navy, a graduate of the sixty-eighth class of the Naval Academy, and the last captain of the destroyer Amatsukaze. He took command of her at Singapore on 10 February 1945, and on 6 April she was crippled by American B-25 bombers off Amoy on the China coast. He survived the loss of the ship. After it he commanded a naval garrison on an island off the Chinese coast until the end of the war. Years later he wrote a book about the ship, whose Japanese title is Twenty-five-Year-Old Captain's Sea Battle Record.
Nothing is known of his birth, family, or schooling.
He was a graduate of the sixty-eighth class at Etajima. The class is recorded in the movement record of Amatsukaze, which names him as a lieutenant. The title of his book puts his age at twenty-five when he held the command. The sources give no date of birth, so the age is not checked here.
Amatsukaze had gone to war in December 1941 under Tameichi Hara, who later wrote a well-known memoir that covers her part in the Battle of the Java Sea. On 16 January 1944, escorting a tanker convoy toward Singapore, she was hit by a torpedo from the submarine Redfin. The torpedo set off the forward torpedo mount and the explosion tore off the bow and killed eighty men, among them the division commander. She was left adrift for six days before a patrol plane found her, and was towed to Cape St. Jacques. At Singapore she was fitted, from November 1944, with a temporary bow. She was then used for local escort duties, under Captain Yoshizō Hasebe, who was relieved by Morita on 10 February 1945.
The operation recorded for his command is the convoy known as HI-88J, the last convoy to leave Singapore for Japan. Between 19 and 30 March 1945 she escorted it from Singapore to Yulin on Hainan Island. American B-25s raided Yulin; Amatsukaze shot one down. Of the seven merchant ships and seven escorts that began the convoy, four of the merchant ships and three of the escorts had been crippled or sunk when it reached Hainan on 30 March, and the convoy was dissolved there.
On 31 March she left Yulin for the homeland with four smaller escorts. She reached Hong Kong on 2 April. The next day about fifty B-24s raided the harbor, and one of the escorts was damaged. On 4 April at 5:30 p.m. she left Hong Kong with five other escorts and a convoy of two merchant ships. On 5 April land-based bombers attacked the convoy from early morning through the day and sank both merchant ships.
On 6 April, south of Amoy, twenty-four B-25s from the Army's 345th Bomb Group attacked the convoy. Two of the escorts, coast-defense ships, were sunk quickly. At about 12:30 p.m. three bombs hit Amatsukaze, one in the auxiliary machinery room, one in the radio room, and one in the wardroom. Rockets damaged the barrels of the two after turrets, the rear bridge collapsed, and all power was lost. She drifted, with fires burning aft. She claimed five aircraft. At eight in the evening she was off Amoy harbor, still drifting. At nine her rudder failed, she could not anchor, and she ran aground on the shoals south of the harbor, possibly on purpose to keep from sinking. Fires burned through the night. Six officers, Morita among them, and 150 men survived. Three officers, one passenger, and 41 crewmen were lost.
On 8 April a message asked for a tow. Bad weather and rising seas flooded her further. She was lightened, and that evening a storm floated her clear. Army boats helped her drift across the bay and she grounded again. By 10 April she was a wreck, and she was blown up and designated as a target for Japanese bombers in training.
Morita was appointed to command the garrison on Sijiao Island (in Japanese, Shishozan) and he remained there until after the war. His book was published in March 2000 by Kōjinsha, in 201 pages. Its first part treats the HI-88J convoy and Amatsukaze, and its second part the Shishozan unit, its preparations, the end of the war, and disarmament.