Ships
- IJN Kongo Captain from 17 July 1943 · In command when she was lost, 21 November 1944
Captain Toshio Shimazaki of the Imperial Japanese Navy took command of the fast battleship Kongo on 17 July 1943, relieving Tomiji Koyanagi. Kongo was the name ship of a class laid down before the First World War and later rebuilt with heavier protection and greater speed. In the summer of 1943 she served in Battleship Division 3 with the Combined Fleet, based at Truk in the Caroline Islands.
For the rest of that year Kongo remained with the battle line in the lagoon. When American carriers struck the Gilberts and Wake, the heavy ships left Truk and steamed toward Eniwetok. The raiders had already withdrawn, and the Japanese force returned without a surface action. Fuel was short, and the fleet waited at Truk for a battle it did not yet fight.
In February 1944 the Combined Fleet left Truk before the American carrier raid that devastated the anchorage. Kongo moved with the other big ships toward Palau and then to the southern bases nearer the oil of the Netherlands East Indies. By early summer she and Haruna, still paired in Battleship Division 3, were with the Mobile Fleet assembling for the defense of the Marianas.
Shimazaki took Kongo to sea for the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944 in the vanguard under Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, ahead of the carriers. The battle was decided in the air. Japanese naval aircraft were destroyed in large numbers, and submarines and carrier planes sank or crippled ships of the carrier force. Kongo returned with the surviving surface ships, still under Shimazaki.
Her last fleet action was the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. Kongo sailed from Brunei in Kurita's Center Force, crossed the Sibuyan Sea under carrier air attack on 24 October, and stayed with the formation after Musashi was lost. Kurita turned away and then reversed course. During the night Kongo passed through San Bernardino Strait. At dawn on 25 October, off Samar, she fired on an American escort-carrier group and its destroyer screen. Smoke, rain, and torpedo attacks by the screen broke up the gunnery. Ships of that American group were sunk by the Japanese force in the melee. Kongo was still in company when Kurita withdrew through the strait and retired toward Brunei.
In mid-November 1944 Kongo left Brunei for Japan with Yamato, Nagato, and a destroyer escort. Before dawn on 21 November, in the Formosa Strait, the American submarine Sealion attacked. Torpedoes struck Kongo and destroyed the destroyer Urakaze. Kongo continued for a time with flooding along one side. A heavy internal explosion then broke her up, and she sank. Shimazaki went down with the ship, and most of her crew were lost with him. Destroyers of the escort recovered the survivors. Kongo was the only Japanese battleship sunk by a submarine during the war. Shimazaki had been her captain from 17 July 1943 until that morning.