Ships
- IJN Samidare Captain from 2 July 1944
- IJN Hatsuharu Captain from 1 October 1944 · In command when she was lost, 13 November 1944. He survived
Yasunosuke Okuma was an officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy, a destroyer man from Tokyo and a member of the naval academy class that graduated on 19 November 1932. In the last year of the war he commanded three destroyers in succession; two of them were lost under him and the third was heavily damaged. He took over the Samidare on 2 July 1944, was aboard when she was wrecked near Palau that August, took command of the Hatsuharu on 1 October 1944, and was in command when she was sunk in the air raid on Manila Bay on 13 November 1944. He survived both, and was then appointed to fit out the new destroyer Yanagi, which he commanded from her completion in January 1945. The record of his life is a record of postings, and very little of it describes the man himself.
The roll of the naval academy's class 60 lists him as Yasunosuke Okuma, from Tokyo, with no rank or later fate recorded beside his name. Nothing consulted gives his birth date, his parents, his school before the naval academy, or his family. The roll is the only source for his home.
The academy at Etajima graduated its class 60 on 19 November 1932, a class of 127 men. Okuma was one of them. Among his classmates on the same roll was Yoshiharu Nagakura, the officer he would relieve in the Hatsuharu nearly twelve years later.
Of his career in the years between graduation and the war, little is known. A Japanese account of the destroyer Yanagi, citing published memoirs and reference works, says that at the outbreak of the Pacific War he was torpedo officer of the light cruiser Naka, and that he then served as torpedo officer of the heavy cruiser Myoko. The same account says he was later captain of the old destroyer Fuyo. A list of her commanders, drawn from the Navy's printed personnel announcements, shows Lieutenant Yasunosuke Okuma taking command of the Fuyo on 30 October 1942 and a successor taking over on 20 October 1943. The Fuyo was a destroyer built in the early 1920s. She was torpedoed and sunk by the American submarine Puffer at the mouth of Manila Bay on 20 December 1943, two months after Okuma had left her.
The sources do not show where Okuma served between October 1943 and the summer of 1944. The next fixed date is 2 July 1944, when, according to the movement record of the Samidare, Lieutenant Commander Tokuta Nishimura was hospitalized because of illness and Okuma, of class 60 and until then captain of the Fuyo, relieved him. The Samidare had been in the war since its first weeks, as part of Destroyer Division 2. She had just come through the Battle of the Philippine Sea, in which she escorted Admiral Joshima's force of Admiral Ozawa's fleet.
Under Okuma she went from Kure to Okinawa and on to Lingga between 8 and 16 July, and in August she accompanied the cruiser Kinu on a transport mission from Singapore by way of Brunei and Manila to Palau. At Palau she ran aground on a reef. While she lay stuck she was torpedoed by the American submarine Batfish, broke in two, and the stern section sank; the bow section was later destroyed by the Japanese themselves. Two men were killed and twenty-eight were listed as missing. Okuma was among the survivors. A Japanese history of the destroyer force says that the survivors, Okuma among them, were taken off by the destroyer Take.
His next ship was the Hatsuharu, which he took over on 1 October 1944 from Lieutenant Commander Yoshiharu Nagakura. She was a pre-war destroyer that had spent much of the war on patrol and escort duty in the Northern Area. After a short refit at Kure she escorted the cruisers Nachi and Ashigara as far as Mako in the Pescadores, then went on to Takeo in Formosa. On 21 to 23 October she carried air crews from Takeo to Manila and then sailed to join Admiral Shima's 2nd Diversion Attack Force. On 24 October she assisted the destroyer Hatsushimo in rescuing survivors of the destroyer Wakaba, among them the commander of Destroyer Division 21, Captain Ishii, and returned with her to Manila.
In November she took part in the reinforcement convoys to Ormoc on Leyte, the so-called TA operations. She escorted the troop convoy TA No. 2 from Manila to Ormoc on 1 and 2 November, and on 3 to 5 November she and Hatsushimo were detached to escort the transport T.9, which was towing the damaged T.131 back to Manila. She sailed again on 9 November with TA No. 3, but on 10 November she and the destroyer Take were replaced in the escort by three ships from the next convoy, and she returned to Manila with that convoy.
On 13 November 1944 American carrier aircraft struck shipping in Manila Bay. According to the movement record, near-misses flooded the Hatsuharu and started fires, and she sank upright in shallow water. Twelve men died and sixty were wounded; 218 survived, including Okuma and Captain Ishii. Two ships had been lost under him within about eleven weeks.
Immediately after the loss of the Hatsuharu he was named to fit out the new destroyer Yanagi, and he reached the Fujinagata yard in the middle of December 1944. She was completed on 18 January 1945. According to the Japanese account, every officer aboard, Okuma included, had come from a ship that had been sunk; the torpedo officer had come from the battleship Musashi and the navigator from the battleship Kongo. The ship joined a training flotilla, and in March became part of Destroyer Division 53. The account relates Okuma's recollection that when the Yanagi was left out of the Second Fleet's sortie toward Okinawa with the battleship Yamato, Yamato's captain, Kosaku Ariga, told him to be patient.
She was later sent north to Ominato. On 14 May she was strafed by eight American fighters off Himeshima; one man was killed and four or more were wounded. On 14 July American carrier aircraft attacked her off Fukushima in Hokkaido, and a rocket hit severed her stern. The account gives 22 dead and 60 wounded. She was towed to Ominato and was damaged again in the raid of 9 August. Okuma is the only commander the list of her captains gives. It does not record a successor, and no source consulted says whether he was aboard on each of these days, though the account treats him as the captain throughout.
Okuma wrote a first-person chapter on the Yanagi for a collection of articles on destroyers published in 2015, which the Japanese account cites for much of her story. Whether he wrote anything else, what he did after the surrender, when he died, and whether he had a family are not established by anything consulted.