Ships
- IJN Uranami Captain from 15 April 1941
- IJN Maikaze Captain from 22 June 1943 · In command when she was lost, 17 February 1944
Commander Tsutomu Hagio was a destroyer officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy. He became captain of Uranami on 15 April 1941 and captain of Maikaze on 22 June 1943. He was still in command of Maikaze when she was lost on 17 February 1944.
Uranami was a Fubuki-class fleet destroyer, completed in the late 1920s with six 12.7-centimeter guns and a heavy torpedo battery. Ships of that class were built to screen heavier units and to attack at night. Hagio took command in the spring of 1941, as destroyer squadrons were being gathered for operations to the south.
At the opening of the Pacific War, Uranami sailed with the forces committed to the landings in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. She screened transports, patrolled off the coasts those landings had seized, and stayed on the routes that kept the advance supplied. The work was the ordinary lot of a fleet destroyer in that campaign: convoy stations, night passages, and a constant watch for submarines and aircraft.
On 22 June 1943 Hagio became captain of Maikaze, a Kagerō-class destroyer of a later and faster design, again built around a strong torpedo armament. Through the latter half of 1943 and the first weeks of 1944 she served with the destroyers of the central Pacific. By February 1944 she was at Truk, the lagoon the Combined Fleet had used as its main forward base, in the weeks when American carrier forces were at last able to strike it.
On 17 February 1944 those carriers opened the attack on Truk known as Operation Hailstone. Maikaze left the lagoon with the training cruiser Katori and the destroyer Nowaki. Northwest of the atoll the ships were intercepted by an American surface group formed around the battleships New Jersey and Iowa and the heavy cruisers Minneapolis and New Orleans. Maikaze fought that force at gun range, was overwhelmed, and sank the same day with Hagio still in command. Katori was sunk in the same action. Nowaki got away.
Hagio was lost with Maikaze. His commands fall on either side of the war’s turn: Uranami with the southern offensive at the start, and Maikaze at Truk when that anchorage ceased to be a safe fleet base. The destroyer went down under the fire of the American battleship and cruiser group that caught the ships trying to clear the lagoon.