Ships
- IJN Hayashimo Captain from 20 February 1944 · Relieved on 2 April 1944
The characters 荒井靖夫 were read off three appointment sheets from 1944, each time next to Hayashimo and each time at the rank of commander, 海軍中佐. That is the kanji used here. A secondary torpedo-boat list, and the Japanese Wikipedia captain list for the torpedo boat Hayabusa, use the same characters for a class-53 officer. Those earlier commands were not found by reading the gazettes cited for them. The characters for the Hayashimo officer do not depend on that identification, but the class and the pre-1944 career do. Ara Teisaburo is a different surname. The appointment sheets for Ara write 荒 悌三郎, Naval Academy class 56, captain of the destroyer Shiranui, lost with her on 27 October 1944. The sheets read here write 荒井靖夫. 荒井 is not 荒. The class numbers, where they can be checked, do not match, and the ships do not match.
Origins
A birth date, a father’s name, a wife, a hometown finer than a label, and a photograph were not found.
Two compilations put a man of these characters in the 53rd class of the Naval Academy at Etajima, graduated 14 July 1925, a class of 62. Niehorster’s class table, built with Jeff Donahoo, gives 荒井靖夫, origin “Kanagawa,” and leaves rank and fate blank. The “海軍兵学校出身者” roster associated with the Naval Academy alumni association gives the same characters, school 神奈川工, and leaves both the final-rank column and the death column blank. That roster’s own note says final ranks are omitted for men still living in 1977 and for men whose rank was unknown. A blank here is not a death, and it is not proof that he was alive in 1977. It is an absence. Nishida’s rank-by-class pages were not found to add a rank or a death for him. None of this is a birth register or the 官報 that announced the class. The school abbreviation and the prefecture should be treated as compilation evidence. 神奈川工 was not expanded from a school roll.
How old he was on graduation day is unknown. The class date will not support a birth year.
Formation
The years between Etajima and the winter of 1944 are mostly other people’s lists. No letters, no fitness reports, and no photograph were found. The one shore billet read off a document is the one he was holding in January 1944, and it belongs with the ship, below.
What the lists agree on, and what was not confirmed by opening the sheets, is a run of small-ship commands before the Pacific war.
The Japanese Wikipedia captain list for the torpedo boat Hayabusa (隼, Ōtori class) has 荒井靖夫, then a lieutenant commander, from 15 December 1938 to 15 November 1939, and it cites the internal appointment gazettes C13072074800 and C13072076800. Niehorster’s torpedo-boat table has the same man, class 53, from 15 December 1938, and then a gap: the next dated captain on that table is Lieutenant Commander Hirasata in April 1940, with the intervening captain, Lieutenant Magoshi, missing. Niehorster also gives a different predecessor. Those two gazette PDFs were downloaded. A search of the page images for the characters as printed in 1944 did not land on his name. Until the lines are read, Hayabusa is a cited claim, not a fact established here. The Hayabusa command is not treated as fact on the strength of a secondary list.
The same Wikipedia practice, and Niehorster’s destroyer table, put him in command of the destroyer Fumizuki from 15 October 1940 to 10 September 1941. Wikipedia calls him a lieutenant commander and cites only the ending gazette, C13072082000, for the relief. It names the next captain as Lieutenant Tomioka Tadao from 10 September 1941. Niehorster skips Tomioka and runs Lieutenant Commander Ebihara Tarō from that September straight through to November 1943. Both cannot be the succession. The September 1941 gazette was downloaded and the 1944 printing of his name was not found in it by image search. The command is unrecovered here.
Asagiri is the command the later ship history remembers. Combined Fleet’s tabular record opens the war with “Ship’s captain: Commander Arai Yasuo [53] (prev. C.O. FUMIZUKI),” and relieves him on 20 April 1942 by Lieutenant Commander Maekawa Nisaburō, class 53, his classmate on the alumni roster. Niehorster dates the Asagiri command 10 September 1941 to 20 April 1942 and calls him a commander at the start. The Japanese Wikipedia captain list for Asagiri starts him on 10 September 1941 as a lieutenant commander and does not cite the appointment; it starts Maekawa on 25 July 1942, also without a citation. April and July cannot both be the day he left the ship. Commander and lieutenant commander cannot both be the rank he held in September 1941. A hobby compilation that is not a source says he was promoted to commander in June 1943. That date fits Wikipedia’s ranks and does not fit Niehorster’s “commander” in 1941. The September 1941 and April 1942 sheets were not read. The rank he held when the war began is not settled.
If the April date is the true one, he left Asagiri at Kure after the Malaya convoys, the fight off Endau, the Banka Strait shipping attack, and the Indian Ocean raid, and he was not her captain when American dive-bombers sank her north of Savo on 28 August 1942. That sinking, and the 122 dead, belong to Maekawa’s crew if the relief date is right. They are not narrated as his until the relief is read off a sheet. The track is in Combined Fleet. It was not retold here as his war.
What can be said without that argument is narrower. By the first week of 1944 the personnel office had a commander named 荒井靖夫 on the Torpedo School’s rolls, and it sent him to a destroyer that did not yet exist as a ship.
The war years, as lived
The order is in the internal Navy appointment gazette, 海軍辞令公報（部内限）, issue 1297. The file is JACAR C13072095300. On the sheet that carries the viewer stamp 2079, under a heading 一月十日発令（海軍省） that begins on the previous sheet in the same file, Commander Arai Yasuo is appointed chief equipping officer of the destroyer Hayashimo (補早霜艤装員長). The smaller type in the column gives the post he was leaving: 海軍水雷學校教官兼研究部部員, instructor at the Torpedo School and, concurrently, a member of its research section. His rank in the name column is 海軍中佐. The issue is dated 13 January 1944, a Thursday, over the name of the Navy Minister’s secretariat. The next dated heading on the following sheet is 一月十一日. The Hayashimo line sits between those headings. A parenthetical number is printed beside the name. It was not read securely, and it is not his class.
Equipping officer is not captain. The hull was still the yard’s. Secondary accounts, which were not re-checked against the Maizuru Guard District diary, put the ship at the Maizuru Navy Yard, laid down in January 1943, launched in October 1943, and not yet handed over. For six weeks his name is on a ship that has a pennant in prospect and no commission. Nothing in the appointment says why a Torpedo School instructor was chosen to stand her up. There is no known comment from him on it.
The next order is in the February 1944 appointment file, JACAR C13072095900, on the sheet stamped 2385. Under the heading 二月二十日発令, the same commander is appointed captain of Hayashimo (補早霜駆逐艦長). The rank is again 海軍中佐. The characters are again 荒井靖夫. The printed issue number on that sheet was not read. The file’s own catalog dates are 22–25 February 1944, so the order of 20 February was published in that span. 20 February is the date over the order. It is not a sentence about the moment he hoisted a pennant. The same sheet appoints a lieutenant as Hayashimo’s gunnery officer and division officer. The ship was being crewed as a destroyer, not as a hull with one officer.
That is the day the secondary records give for completion at Maizuru and for assignment to Destroyer Squadron 11, the training squadron. A secret Navy bulletin is cited by the Japanese Wikipedia for the removal of the Hayashimo equipping office on 20 February (JACAR C12070458900). That bulletin was not opened. The gazette that was read makes him captain on the 20th. It does not, by itself, prove the yard handed the ship over that morning.
Niehorster’s destroyer table ends Arai on 20 February 1944 and starts Hirayama Toshio that same day. The table’s own rule is that a man shown before commissioning was the equipping officer and became captain on commissioning day. Applied here, that rule makes Hirayama the first captain and drops Arai at the yard gate. The February sheet does not say that. It appoints Arai captain on the 20th. The April sheet, below, relieves him as captain on 2 April. Niehorster’s end date is the day the captaincy began.
The six weeks that follow are the ship’s track, not a diary in his hand. No signal signed with his name, and no recollection, were found. Combined Fleet’s tabular record, revised by Anthony Tully and Allyn Nevitt, has the ship completed on 20 February and assigned that day to Squadron 11, at Kure on the 22nd, and then in the western Inland Sea: with the carrier Ryūhō to Kagoshima and Ise Bay in the last week of March, back at Kure on the 26th, and on the 28th out with the new carrier Taihō as far as Hashirajima. The Japanese Wikipedia narrative, drawn from the Squadron 11 diary and the Kure Defense Squadron diary, is the same shape: training, a short escort of Ryūhō, a short escort of Taihō, then the Inland Sea again. Those diaries were not opened. The movements should be read as the track the compilations give while he was the captain the gazette names, not as a record of his decisions.
On 2 April the personnel office took the ship away from him.
The order is in the April 1944 appointment file, JACAR C13072097100, issue 1406, on a sheet whose margin reads 第千四百六號. The heading over the block is 四月二日発令（海軍省）. He is ordered attached to the Yokosuka Naval District (横須賀鎮守府附被仰付). The smaller type gives the post he was leaving: 早霜駆逐艦長, and the rank 海軍中佐. The name is 荒井靖夫. The same page appoints a new Hayashimo captain. The surname read in the neighboring column is 平山, a lieutenant commander whose previous post, in the small type, is captain of the destroyer Akishimo. The given name was not read cleanly enough to assert. Secondary lists call that officer Hirayama Toshio, class 55. The sheet that was read is enough to show a relief and a successor on 2 April. It is not a clean transcription of the successor’s full name.
Attached to a naval district, 附被仰付, is a holding order. It is not a command, and it is not a condemnation printed in the gazette. The paper does not say whether he had asked to come ashore, whether the squadron wanted a different captain before the ship joined the fleet, or whether this was the ordinary churn of new-construction commands. He had been her only captain, and he had been her captain for forty-two days.
The cost
Hayashimo’s war was not his. Under the captain who relieved him, the ship left the training squadron at the end of April, went south with the Mobile Fleet, was in the Philippine Sea in June, and in October was with Kurita’s force off Samar. On 26 October 1944 she was bombed, lost her bow, and was run aground off Semirara Island. Most of the crew got off in November. A caretaker party was still there into December. She was struck from the Navy list on 10 January 1945. That story is Combined Fleet’s and the Japanese Wikipedia’s, from action reports and from the squadron diaries. It is summarized here only to fix the date. He had been off the ship for six months. The men who watched Shiranui burn from her deck were Hirayama’s, not his. Ara Teisaburō died in that smoke. Arai Yasuo, if the April order was carried out, was on the books at Yokosuka.
Nothing in the three sheets is a report of how he handled the new destroyer, whom he recommended, or what he thought of being sent ashore before she fought. The cost that can be documented is the shape of the job: a shore instructor, six weeks of fitting out, six weeks of a commissioned command in home waters, and then a district attachment, while the ship he had commissioned went out and did not come back. Whether he experienced that as loss, or as luck, is not in the paper.
No decoration, no citation, and no imperial rescript naming him were found.
After
The April order is the last document read. No later appointment, no promotion, no reserve-list entry, and no obituary were found. The class roster’s blank rank and blank death column, with its note about men living in 1977 or of unknown rank, is compatible with a man who survived and with a man the compilers could not finish. It decides neither.
There is no USSBS interrogation under this name in the material searched, and no postwar memoir was found. If he lived, he did not leave a public account of the forty-two days. If he died, the death was not in the alumni column that records his classmates’ deaths at sea.
The public life that can be tied to sheets is a commander of the Torpedo School staff, sent in January 1944 to stand up a Yūgumo-class destroyer, made her captain on 20 February, and sent to Yokosuka on 2 April. Everything before the Torpedo School line, and everything after Yokosuka, is either a list that was not confirmed or a silence.