Ships
- IJN Akishimo Captain from 11 March 1944
- IJN Suzutsuki Captain from 10 March 1945
Toshio Hirayama was a destroyer captain of the Imperial Japanese Navy who commanded six destroyers before the war ended and was wounded in the retreat from Leyte Gulf in October 1944. In March 1945 he took command of the destroyer Suzutsuki, and a month later he brought her back to Sasebo, stern first and half drowned, from the sortie of the battleship Yamato toward Okinawa. He lived until 1971.
He was born on 1 April 1906 on Kakeroma Island, in the Ōshima district of Kagoshima Prefecture, the eldest son of a father named Jinshirō and a mother named Utatsu. His family name at birth, according to the Japanese account of his life, was Taira. He went first to the middle school at Shibushi in Kagoshima, and in 1921 he transferred to the middle school at Azabu in Tokyo. While he was at the naval academy his surname was changed from Taira to Hirayama. The sources give no reason.
He entered the Naval Academy at Etajima in April 1924, at the age of eighteen, and graduated in March 1927 as a member of the fifty-fifth class. He was twenty years old at graduation, and would turn twenty-one within days.
The career that followed was the ordinary progress of a destroyer officer. After the training cruise in the armored cruiser Iwate he served in a submarine tender, the cruiser Furutaka, the battleships Ise and Hyūga, the cruiser Hirado on the China station, and the carrier Kaga. In December 1932 he joined the submarine Ro-27. From 1935 he served as torpedo officer in a succession of destroyers, among them Hatsushimo, Tsuga, Yūnagi, Oboro, Sazanami, Hatakaze, and the new Kasumi, which he joined during fitting out in June 1939. He was promoted lieutenant commander on 15 November 1939, at the age of thirty-three, and went to China for a year in the Hankow base force and on the gunboat Atako, with a collateral post at the Shanghai port office.
On 15 October 1940 he received his first command, the destroyer Namikaze. On 20 September 1941 he took over Minazuki. On 15 November 1942 he was given Shirakumo, and he held her until January 1944, on northern-area duty out of Ōminato, which included escorting a tanker to Paramushiro and back. Shirakumo was sunk by the American submarine Tautog off Hokkaido in March 1944, less than two months after he left her. He was by then fitting out Akishimo at Osaka, as her first captain from 22 January, and he commanded her from her completion on 11 March 1944. On 2 April 1944 he was shifted to Hayashimo, and on 1 May he was promoted commander.
Hayashimo took him to Leyte Gulf. In October 1944 she sailed with Kurita's force. On 23 October she attacked a submarine contact with depth charges in the Palawan Passage on the day the heavy cruisers Atago and Maya went down. On 24 October she claimed three aircraft in the Sibuyan Sea. On 25 October, during the action off Samar, near-misses punctured her fuel tanks, and later air attack knocked out her communications and gyrocompass. She was helped through San Bernardino Strait by Akishimo, the ship he had fitted out, which had to lead her by sight, and the next morning she was down to a few tons of usable fuel and falling behind.
At about ten forty-five on 26 October she was hit by an aerial torpedo in the bow. The forecastle collapsed, the men in the first turret were killed, and the bent bow acted as a bulkhead that kept her afloat. Hirayama was wounded. His commodore, Captain Shiraishi, took direct command. The Japanese chronology of his career describes the wound as a machine-gun bullet in the right lower leg, which put him in the naval hospital at Beppu from mid-November to late December.
What he decided in the hours after the hit is the one piece of his character the record preserves from that ship. The destroyer Okinami came alongside to pass fuel and, when air attack stopped the transfer, her captain recommended that Hayashimo be abandoned. Hirayama refused. With the agreement of Captain Shiraishi he planned to steam her stern first to Coron, and the ship was parked for the night off Semirara Island in water shallow enough that she could not sink. On 27 October the destroyers Fujinami and Shiranuhi came to help and were both sunk, with all hands, by aircraft. Hayashimo went firmly aground, was gutted by a fire in the engine room, and on 28 October Hirayama had the ensign lowered and most of the crew moved to the islet. About 120 survivors, Hirayama among them, were taken off on 12 November and reached Manila.
After the hospital, he was declared fit for duty on 5 February 1945 and on 10 March he took over Suzutsuki at Kure, relieving Captain Nagahide Sugitani. She had been torpedoed twice in 1944, in January by the submarine Sturgeon and in October by Besugo, and repaired both times. He was thirty-eight, a few weeks short of his thirty-ninth birthday. The 41st Destroyer Division, Suzutsuki and Fuyuzuki, was the closest escort of Yamato on her last sortie.
On 6 April 1945 the force left the Inland Sea for Okinawa. On 7 April, at 1:08 in the afternoon, a bomb from a Helldiver struck Suzutsuki on the starboard side between the bridge and the second turret. It tore a hole several meters across, set off ready-service ammunition, started a serious fire, and left her badly down by the bow. The forward guns were out, and the bow was flooded. Fifty-seven men were killed and thirty-four wounded. Her radio was almost entirely destroyed, so the order that ended the operation, sent at about half past four, never reached her.
The Japanese account of the next hours, which draws on the memoir of her gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Kurahashi, describes an argument on the bridge between the captain and the senior officer over whether to try to reach Okinawa stern first or go back to Sasebo and fight again. In that account Hirayama took the gunnery officer's view and decided to return. He started back alone after Yamato sank, at about half past two. With her bow ten degrees down and her midships deck only a few tens of centimeters above the water, Suzutsuki could make about nine knots only going astern, and the chief engineer pasted notes in the engine and boiler rooms ordering revolutions for slow astern. She reached Sasebo at half past two on the afternoon of 8 April, after the navy had officially presumed her lost. Three captains of the fifty-fifth class sailed on that operation: Hirayama of Suzutsuki, Yamana of Fuyuzuki, and Masamichi Terauchi of Yukikaze. All three brought their ships back to Sasebo.
Suzutsuki was docked and her repairs were suspended on 5 May in favor of work on suicide weapons. Hirayama left her in mid-May, and on 18 May was posted to the Kawatana special attack unit. At the end of the war he was commander of its Amakusa detachment. From December 1945 he was captain of special transport vessels, Kishin Maru, Miyake, and Iō, and held a post in the Kure demobilization bureau. On 26 May 1946 he was appointed captain of the destroyer Fuyuzuki, and on 10 December 1946, at his own request, he was relieved of his official post.
He was purged from public office after the war, and for a time worked for the Fukada Salvage Company, through contacts from his navy years. He died on 17 August 1971, at the age of sixty-five.