Pacific ships

IJN · Captain

Araki, Tsutau

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The name

The characters are on the Navy's own paper. In the confidential personnel gazette of 28 November 1941, issue 758, the captain ordered from the light cruiser Kitakami to the heavy cruiser Furutaka is written 荒木傳. The second character is 傳, the prewar form, not the simplified 伝 that later books and web pages use. They are the same name. They are not 政臣.

A compiled roster of the forty-fifth class romanizes him Tsutau. A Chinese compilation of wartime postings glosses the same characters あらき つとう. No furigana was printed beside the name in the orders read for this essay, so the kana is not a thing the gazette settled. 傳 can be read other ways. Tsutau is the class roster's spelling, and it is the label used here because the orders identify the man by the characters, not by a reading. Another rear admiral of the same Etajima class, 荒木敬吉, stands beside him on that roll and is a different officer.

Where he came from, as far as the lists go

No birth register, no parents, no wife, and no children turned up. A compiled roster of Etajima class 45, the class that graduated on 24 November 1917, eighty-nine men, records 荒木傳 as from Nagasaki, final rank rear admiral, died 22 March 1963. Another compilation of the same class gives the school as Hirado Middle School, in Nagasaki prefecture, and the same final rank. Those are secondary lists, not the Academy's own register, and they were not checked against it. They are the only sources found for the prefecture and for the date of his death. A birth date of 19 March 1897 appears on one unsourced Chinese career page and nowhere that was opened here. It is not used.

The same class roll is enough to separate him from 荒木政臣. Class 45 is 1917. The destroyer captain is carried, where he is carried at all, on the roll of the class of 1928. They were not classmates.

What the Academy did with him after November 1917 — the cadet cruise, the first ships, gunnery or torpedo school, whether he passed through the Naval Staff College — is not in any document read for this piece. Compilations assert a string of schools and a staff-college class. None of that was opened in a list or a gazette, and it is left out.

The first appointment that a ship article ties to a gazette, and that was not itself opened here, is a destroyer in the China war. The Japanese Wikipedia article on Oboro cites the personnel gazette of 1 December 1937 for Commander 荒木伝 as her captain, in succession to a Commander Shirahama, and the gazette of 10 August 1938 for his move to command of the 21st Torpedo Division. Oboro had already been in the Shanghai fighting that summer, including the landing at Wusong on 23 August 1937. That was before this order. If the citations are right, he took a Special Type destroyer after that landing, held her for eight months, and went ashore to a torpedo command. What he did with her, and what the China coast did to him, is not in hand. The years between a lieutenant's watch and that destroyer are a blank.

A light cruiser, then a heavy one, in the week the war began

On 28 November 1941 the gazette is explicit about the move that put him into the Pacific war, and less tidy, until the columns are separated, about where he had been.

Issue 758 of that day is a page of captains trading ships. One column orders 補古鷹艦長 and names, as the man and the post he is leaving, 北上艦長海軍大佐 荒木傳. The next business on the same page includes 日本海丸艦長海軍大佐 中津成基. A first reading of the crowded columns attached Nihonkai Maru to Araki. It does not survive a narrower look. His small type is Kitakami. 中津's is the auxiliary. The Japanese Wikipedia captain list for Kitakami cites this same issue for the end of Araki's command, and dates the start 1 September 1941. That start is the list's date, from the usual captain compilations. The 1 September order was not the order read here. What the 28 November page does settle is the change: he left the light cruiser and was given Furutaka. Captain Nakagawa Hiroshi, who had had Furutaka, is on the same issue going to the Kure Naval District.

Kitakami was an old light cruiser, already marked for the torpedo conversion that would turn her into something else. Furutaka was a heavy cruiser of Cruiser Division 6, with Aoba, Kako, and Kinugasa, the division that would go south with the Fourth Fleet. He had been in the new job a week when the war opened. The gazettes do not say whether he asked for the ship or was simply the captain next in line. They say the Navy made the exchange nine days before Pearl Harbor.

From that date until 10 November 1942, no order read here puts anyone else in his place. The ship's war in those eleven months is in the cruiser's own logs and in the official war history, and it was not re-transcribed for this essay. He had her for the opening moves in the south — Guam, the second attempt at Wake, Rabaul — and he still had her on the night of 8–9 August 1942, when Cruiser Division 6 went in with Mikawa's cruisers off Savo Island. The division's war diary and Senshi Sōsho are the sources the ship article uses for that night. They were not opened. What a later memoir says the night did to him is below, and it is a memoir, not a report over his name.

The night off Savo, the second time

On 11 October 1942, Rear Admiral Gotō Aritomo took Cruiser Division 6 — Aoba, Furutaka, Kinugasa — and two destroyers up toward Guadalcanal to shell the airfield. A transport group was already in the area. After dark the flagship Aoba took an American force on her port bow for that transport group and signaled that she was Aoba. At 2143, under American starshell, the first hits went through Aoba's bridge. Gotō was killed. Aoba turned to starboard and made smoke. Furutaka, next astern, had begun a turn to port to open her starboard guns. She then followed Aoba around to starboard.

That sequence is the division diary and Senshi Sōsho volume 83, as the cruiser article cites them. The only sentence in that account which is about the captain, rather than about the ship, is a footnote to a memoir. Tachino Yoshirō, then Furutaka's paymaster, wrote afterward that Araki had kept worrying, since the Savo fight in August, about a night action in which the formation had split. Tachino guessed that this was why, off Savo again, the captain checked the turn to port and followed the flagship to starboard. The memoir is his speculation. It is not an order, and it is not Araki's own account. It is the nearest thing to a mind that the paper holds, and it is secondhand.

The turn did not save the ship. She did not get into the smoke. American gunfire set off the oxygen in her torpedoes, and the fire made her the thing everyone could see. The turret aft would not train. The tubes were wrecked. A shell went into an engine room. She flooded on the port side and lost the engines. The article, following Ugaki Matome's diary and the war history, says she fired fewer than forty main-battery shells, mostly answering with the high-angle guns, and claimed damage to the third ship in the American line with her later salvos. Aoba got clear while the fire stayed on Furutaka.

By about 2240 she could not steam. A ship taken for an American destroyer closed and then turned away. Hatsuyuki, sent back for her, found her west of the position she had reported. The list was already too bad to come alongside. The ensign was hauled down. She went under by the stern at 0028 on 12 October, twenty-two miles from Savo on a bearing of 310 degrees by the war history, or at 9°00′ S, 159°31.5′ E by another compilation. The same passage says Captain Araki and the other survivors were taken off by Hatsuyuki — Ugaki's diary, the article notes, names the destroyer Shirakumo here, and the article treats that as a mistake — and that the rescue was broken off at 0200 because aircraft would come with daylight. Hatsuyuki left two cutters and a spar in the water and went.

Ugaki's diary, as cited for the count current on 16 October, gives 33 dead, two of them officers, 225 missing, sixteen of them officers, and 518 saved, thirty-four of them officers. Some of the living later turn up in a New Zealand camp and in the American interrogation center at Tracy. Those figures are the diary and the war history as the article quotes them. The diary was not opened for this essay. Neither was the division's action report. The one fact that does not depend on them is that the captain was alive a month later, because the Navy gave him another order.

On 16 October, by the same diary as the Aoba article cites it, the two captains — Hisamune Yonejirō of Aoba and Araki of Furutaka — went aboard Yamato at Truk and made their report. Ugaki, the Combined Fleet chief of staff, was the one who heard it. What they said is in the diary, not in anything transcribed here.

Furutaka was struck from the register on 10 November. Cruiser Division 6 was abolished the same day. The article says her men went home in Aoba, which was going back to Kure broken. The captain did not go with them as their captain. He had already been given two other jobs.

The November order

The confidential gazette of 10 November 1942, issue 982, is the order, and the Aoba date alone is not the whole of it.

The page relieves him of Furutaka. It appoints him captain of Chikuma. It gives him, in the same breath, the concurrent captaincy of Aoba — 兼補, an additional duty, not the ship he was now to live in. Hisamune is relieved of Aoba on the same issue and sent to the Kure Naval District. Aoba was the wreck. She had been hit on the same night as Furutaka, her bridge gutted, an admiral dead on her, and she was headed for the yard. Chikuma was a working heavy cruiser of a different class. The Navy's way of writing the order makes Chikuma the real command and Aoba the ship whose name still needed a captain while she was no longer a ship to take to sea.

He held the concurrent title until 31 December 1942, when the captain lists give Aoba to Captain Tahara Yoshioki. That relief was not the order read here. The date 10 November is the day he was made caretaker of a damaged cruiser and, on the same paper, captain of another one. The concurrent title is on that paper. Furutaka had gone down under him four weeks earlier.

What he did with Chikuma is not in a report read here. The captain list that follows Toyama runs him from 10 November 1942 to 20 January 1943, and cites the gazette of 22 January 1943 for the relief. That January issue was not opened. Two months is all the secondary record allows him on a ship that was still fighting. Then the lists take him off cruiser bridges entirely, for a while.

A harbor desk, and two ships on paper

From here until the autumn of 1943 the record is the captain lists, not a gazette opened for this essay, and it should be read that way.

They make him head of the harbor master's office at Sasebo from 20 January 1943. They give him, concurrently, Chitose from 14 April to 1 July, and Hyūga from 1 July to 1 September, and then the harbor office alone again until November. Chitose was a seaplane carrier in the middle of being rebuilt as a carrier. Hyūga was a battleship in the middle of the same kind of rebuilding. A concurrent command of that sort, held by a man whose real post is a harbor office, is a signature on a ship that is not going to sea under him, unless a movement record says otherwise. No movement record was opened. The summer tour in Hyūga is real in the captain lists and unreal, so far, in any diary or action report with his name on it.

On 15 November 1943 the lists put him back on a heavy cruiser. Atago, flagship type of her class, captain until 6 November 1944. The November 1943 order and the November 1944 order were not the pages read here. The ship's wartime log for the months he is supposed to have had her sits at JACAR and was not transcribed. If the dates are right, he had her for a year, through the period when the heavy cruisers were still the striking force and then through the weeks when they were sent anyway.

Palawan Passage

On 22 October 1944 Vice Admiral Kurita Takeo sailed from Brunei for Leyte with the First Striking Force. His flag was in Atago. Before dawn on the 23rd, in Palawan Passage, the American submarines Darter and Dace were on the surface between them and the route. The Atago battle report, as the cruiser article cites it, says that at 0230 the ship picked up a submarine's radio and began to zigzag, and that at 0600 she was still passing the strait with the lookouts at submarine watch and the ordinary battle drills going on at the guns. Four torpedoes hit her. The article's account, drawn from that report, is that she sank about twenty minutes after she was hit, and that the longitudinal bulkhead the Japanese heavy cruisers carried for strength made the list come faster. Kurita and the other survivors were taken off by the destroyer Kishinami and put aboard Yamato. The battle report was not opened. It is the ship's paper, written because the ship had just been lost, and the captain under whom it was written is the captain the lists still name.

Those lists do not relieve him on the 23rd. They relieve him on 6 November, and send him to the Yokosuka Naval District. A man relieved thirteen days after his ship sinks was not lost with her. Which boat took him, and whether he went to Yamato with Kurita or to some other ship, is not in the sentences of the article that were read. A later magazine essay says he was picked up and lived. That essay was not checked against the report.

Compilations date his promotion to rear admiral on 15 October 1944, eight days before Palawan, a regular promotion that caught two cruiser captains who were about to sail and who both survived. The Nishida roll and the class roster agree that rear admiral is the rank he ended at. The 15 October date was not found in a gazette opened here. If it is right, he was a new rear admiral still standing on Atago's bridge when she went down, and the Navy's next order for him was a district attachment, not another ship. If the date is wrong, the rank is still the rank the class roll gives him, and the day he received it is unknown.

He had now lost two heavy cruisers, twenty-four months apart, both at night, both under American ships he did not see in time. Furutaka took a little over two hours to die, and the count of the missing ran into the hundreds, and the rescue stopped at 0200. Atago took about twenty minutes, with the fleet commander aboard. After Furutaka the gazette gave him another appointment on the day the ship was struck off. After Atago the captain lists do the same, thirteen days later, on a page that was not opened. Neither paper says what he thought of still being the man who stepped off.

After the second sinking

The same compilations that list the Atago dates send him, on 1 December 1944, to be vice-principal of the torpedo school and head of its research section, and on 15 July 1945 back to a Yokosuka attachment, and on 6 September 1945 into the reserve. None of those orders was opened. The torpedo school is a shore job for a man whose last two sea commands had ended underwater. Whether that was a use of him or a parking of him is not a thing the lists can say. There is no letter, no interview, and no memoir under his name in anything found here. Tachino's guess about the turn off Savo is as close as the record comes to him speaking, and Tachino was guessing.

The class roster says he died on 22 March 1963. It does not say where, or of what, or who was there. No obituary was found. The eighteen years between the reserve list and that date are blank. So is the family, if he had one.