Ships
- IJN Urakaze Captain from 15 May 1944
Yasuteru Yokota (横田保輝) was an officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy, a graduate of the fifty-ninth class of the Naval Academy at Etajima, from Hiroshima Prefecture, who spent his early career in small ships and in torpedo posts. He commanded two destroyers in the last two years of his life. The first was the old Tachikaze, which he took over on 27 February 1943 and kept through almost a year of convoy work between Rabaul, Truk and Palau, until American carrier aircraft sank her at Truk on 17–18 February 1944. The second was the modern Urakaze, which he commanded from 15 May 1944, through the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the Battle off Samar, until a torpedo fired at another ship struck her in the dark off Formosa on 21 November 1944. He was a lieutenant commander when he took Urakaze and went down with her; the Navy recorded him as a commander on the day of his death.
The Navy's roster gives his home as Hiroshima Prefecture and his middle school as the First Middle School at Kure, the naval port on the Inland Sea. His birth date, his parents and any family of his own are not recorded in any source that could be examined.
He entered the Naval Academy and graduated with the fifty-ninth class on 7 November 1931, standing 75th among 123 graduates. He was then a midshipman, the rank in which an Academy graduate served at sea before commissioning, and became an ensign on 1 April 1933 and a lieutenant (junior grade) on 15 November 1934.
The personnel summary places him next in the crew of the destroyer Kiku, an old ship of the Momi class, after his promotion in November 1934. On 1 December 1936 he became a member of the fitting-out crew of the torpedo boat Hayabusa, and on 7 December of the crew of the finished ship. He was promoted lieutenant on 1 December 1937. On 15 December 1938 he was appointed torpedo officer of the destroyer Oite, a post he held until 1 October 1941, when he was appointed torpedo officer of the Kure submarine base unit. He held the torpedo post in Oite for nearly three years. Neither his work in these posts nor any report by him has been found. He was promoted lieutenant commander on 1 November 1942, and the register shows no later post until the command of Tachikaze in February 1943.
His first command came on 27 February 1943. The destroyer was Tachikaze, a ship of the Minekaze class, completed in 1921. On 27 December 1942 an air attack at Rabaul had put a bomb into her port bow and killed her captain, Lieutenant Commander Yasumi Hirasata. She was repaired at Maizuru in the weeks that followed, and her next captain, Lieutenant Commander Isamu Miyazaki, held her only from 8 January to 27 February. Between 10 and 18 March, under Yokota, she steamed from Sasebo by way of Saipan and Truk to Rabaul, the Japanese base on New Britain. His first weeks in command were spent on short transport runs to Surumi and patrols between Rabaul and Wewak on the New Guinea coast. On 15 April, near Wewak, the ship suffered light damage in an air attack. Later that month she lay alongside the Yamabiko Maru for emergency repairs at Rabaul, and in May she returned to Maizuru for repairs. She did not come out again until September, when she went back to Rabaul.
The rest of 1943 was convoy work. From September she escorted convoys between Rabaul and Truk, made a transport run to Buka on 1 October, was lightly damaged in an air raid at Rabaul on 12 October, and escorted convoys from Rabaul through Ulithi to Palau. In the last ten days of December she made a solo troop run to Qavuvu, one of nine destroyers that between 22 and 31 December carried 635 men and 380 tons of supplies there. In January 1944 she was working out of Truk: to Palau and back, to Satawan with the transport Nagano Maru, and to Rabaul and back from 22 January. On 4 February, returning to Truk from the Rabaul convoys, she ran hard aground on an atoll in the Truk group, and efforts to tow her off or blow her free did not succeed. She was still there when the American fast carrier force struck Truk on 17 February.
Tachikaze, fast on the atoll, was strafed on the 17th and attacked again on the morning of the 18th. In Nevitt's account heavy strafing was followed by a torpedo hit in the engine room, and she went down by the stern with 67 of her crew killed. Nevitt names Yokota among the survivors. What he made of the loss is not recorded; no letter or recollection of his has been found.
On 21 April 1944 he was appointed provisional chief of the fitting-out crew of a new destroyer, Fuyutsuki, at the same time as he was attached to the staff of the 10th Squadron. The Japanese Wikipedia, citing the Navy's gazette, notes that on 5 May he was relieved of that duty, and that on 15 May he took command of Urakaze. She was a Kagero-class destroyer, and he took her over from Commander Shoichi Yoshida, who had had her for nine months. She had escorted the carrier force at Pearl Harbor, Midway and Santa Cruz and had made troop runs to Guadalcanal. On 19 May she reached Tawi-Tawi, in the southern Philippines, the base of the Japanese carrier force.
Her first rescues under him came before the great battle. On 7 June 1944 the destroyer Hayanami, torpedoed by the American submarine Harder near Tawi-Tawi, blew up and sank, and Urakaze rescued 45 of her men. On 9 June she went out again, from Tawi-Tawi, to pick up 126 survivors of Tanikaze, which Harder had sunk. Yokota had been in command for less than a month. On 19–20 June, at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, Urakaze escorted Ozawa's main force and the carrier Shokaku; when the American submarine Cavalla torpedoed Shokaku, she helped rescue the survivors. In July she escorted the cruiser Maya on a troop mission from Yokosuka to Okinawa and Manila and then went to Lingga, near Singapore, where the fleet was based. In September she went to Kure to bring the battleships Fuso and Yamashiro south. On 8 October she became flagship of the 17th Destroyer Division, with Captain Tamotsu Tanii, the division commander, embarked.
In the Leyte operations she sailed from Lingga to Brunei and with Admiral Kurita's First Diversion Attack Force on 23–25 October. On 24 and 25 October she suffered minor damage from near misses and strafing. In the Battle off Samar on 25 October she took part in the torpedo attack on the American escort carriers and helped sink the destroyer Johnston. After the battle she refuelled at Coron and returned to Brunei. From 9 to 12 November she was out in the Sulu Sea in support of the Leyte troop operations, and on 15 November, when the 10th Squadron was disbanded, her division was assigned to the 2nd Destroyer Squadron.
On 16 November she left Brunei with the cruiser Yahagi and the destroyers Hamakaze, Isokaze and Yukikaze as escort for the battleships Yamato, Nagato and Kongo, bound for Japan. Urakaze, flagship of the 17th Destroyer Division, steamed ahead of Yukikaze. At 3.06 a.m. on 21 November, in the Formosa Strait, seventy nautical miles north of Keelung, the American submarine Sealion attacked the formation. She fired six torpedoes at the leading battleship, Kongo, and three from her stern tubes at the second, Nagato. According to the Japanese Wikipedia, which cites Nimitz's account, a torpedo that missed Nagato hit Urakaze, which blew up and sank at once. Isokaze and Hamakaze were busy rescuing the men of Kongo, which sank some time later, and Yukikaze went on with Yamato and Nagato; by the time the others reached the place, they found only oil and small floating wreckage. All hands, 228 men including Tanii, Yokota, the engineering officer, the torpedo officer, the gunnery officer and the navigator, were lost.
The Navy's record gives him the rank of commander from 21 November 1944, the day he died. The ship was struck from the Navy List on 10 January 1945, and the Navy's gazette for 14 July 1945 recorded the promotion. Nothing is recorded of his wife or children, if he had any, his age at death, any decorations, or any memorial. His service to the end of his life can be followed ship by ship, but the man himself is nearly absent from the record: no letter, diary or recollection by him, and none by a shipmate that names him, has been found. What survives is the sequence from Kiku to Urakaze, a standing of 75 among 123 in his class, and a last year in which he commanded two destroyers: the first lost at Truk and the second in the Formosa Strait with every man aboard.