Ships
- IJN Nagara Captain from 10 September 1941
Captain Toshio Naoi of the Imperial Japanese Navy commanded the light cruiser Nagara from 10 September 1941. She was the name ship of her class, laid down at Sasebo in September 1920, launched in April 1921, and commissioned in April 1922, and she took her name from the Nagara River in central Japan. Cruisers of her type were built to lead destroyer flotillas: fast enough to run with the destroyers, with a bridge planned for an admiral and his staff, and with torpedoes meant for a night action. On the day Naoi assumed command, Nagara entered the Sixteenth Cruiser Division of Vice Admiral Ibō Takahashi's Third Fleet, in company with the light cruisers Kuma and Natori, as that fleet was fitted into the plans for landings in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies.
He came to that command after long stretches outside Japan. In 1919, the year after the First World War ended, he sailed on a midshipman's training cruise through the Mediterranean and called at Italy and the south of France. From 1932 to 1935, while a lieutenant commander, he was stationed in France. The cruise and the posting put him in European harbors for years at a stretch, among dockyards and fleets on a scale Japan did not match. He was a captain who had seen that comparison for himself before he took Nagara to war.
In the first days of December 1941, Nagara lay at Palau, in the western Carolines, ready to cover a surprise landing at Legaspi on southeastern Luzon. Army transports were loaded, and on the morning of 8 December, by Tokyo time, the cruiser had finished preparations to sail. That was the morning word came that the war with the United States and Britain had opened. Naoi came up onto the bridge and said, in a voice the people there could not miss, that a damned foolish war had been started. Lieutenant Hajime Sonoda, the navigator, who later finished the war as the last captain of the destroyer Hibiki, remembered the moment clearly. Rear Admiral Kubo, commander of the First Base Force, was on the bridge with his staff, and nobody called the captain to account. Sonoda was shaken, and then struck that the senior men let the words stand. The force sailed from Palau that day, and troops went ashore at Legaspi on 12 December with Nagara in the covering group.
Through the winter and into the spring of 1942, Naoi kept Nagara on the invasion routes. She screened transports and worked with the cruisers and destroyers covering successive landings in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, the duty her design as a flotilla flagship had prepared her to do. The days were convoy escort, patrol, and the short runs of a covering force, repeated as the southern advance moved from Luzon down through the islands of the Indies. By the time those landings were finished, the same captain had taken her through half a year of war, most of it the hard routine of an escort cruiser rather than one decisive fleet battle.
In early June 1942, Nagara was at sea with Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo's carrier striking force for the attack on Midway. On the day American dive bombers set the four Japanese carriers on fire, Nagumo left the burning Akagi and shifted his flag to Nagara. The light cruiser, still under Naoi, became the flagship of a striking force whose flight decks were gone. Sonoda, still the navigator, later said that three expressions on the admiral's face stayed with him: the look when Nagumo came aboard after the carriers were lost, the look when Combined Fleet ordered a night battle, and the look when that order was cancelled. Naoi left Nagara on 10 July 1942. His ten months in command had run from the last weeks of peace through the battle that cost Japan four fleet carriers.
Shore duty followed, and it grew darker as the war turned. From 1944 into 1945 he commanded the Usa Naval Air Group in Oita Prefecture, on the channel coast of northeastern Kyushu. He was remembered there as a commander who held the trust of the men under him. In April 1945, with the fighting for Okinawa underway, special-attack aircraft began leaving Usa for ships off Okinawa and Kyushu. That month 102 of those aircraft sortied, and 154 young aircrew were killed. The field was struck from the air as well. On 21 April a raid by B-29s killed 320 men attached to the air group. The captain who had spoken against the war on a cruiser's bridge in 1941 spent that spring seeing pilots off on flights from which they were not expected to return, and standing on a base under heavy bombardment.
Naoi died in February 1950. In the years after the war he had said little about it. Nagara had gone on without him. Masayuki Kitamura commanded her from 16 August 1943 to 7 April 1944. Shinichi Kondo relieved Kitamura on 7 April 1944 and kept the ship until 8 May. Giichiro Nakahara took command that day. On 7 August 1944 the American submarine Croaker torpedoed Nagara off the Amakusa Islands, in the East China Sea, and the cruiser sank by the stern near 32 degrees 9 minutes north, 129 degrees 53 minutes east. Nakahara and 348 crewmen were lost. Rescue ships saved 235 men. The Navy struck Nagara from the list on 10 October 1944.