Pacific ships

IJN · Captain

Tawara, Yoshioki

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YT

Ships

On 25 December 1943, Captain Yoshioki Tawara took command of the Imperial Japanese Navy battleship Yamashiro. She was a Fuso-class ship, completed during the First World War and rebuilt in the 1930s with new machinery, added armor, and the tall tower bridge that marked the Japanese battle line. Tawara joined her when carrier aircraft decided the great fleet fights and when scarce oil held the older battleships in home waters for long periods.

In the months after he assumed command, Yamashiro trained in home waters while fuel went first to the ships that could still operate at long range. The carrier force that fought in the Marianas in June 1944 sailed without her. Later in the year she moved south with the battleship Fuso to Lingga Roads, the fleet anchorage near Singapore, and waited there as the navy prepared a counterstroke against the next American landing. Her speed after the 1930s rebuild was about twenty-five knots, enough to keep station with Fuso and the cruisers assigned to the same force.

In October 1944 Yamashiro became the flagship of the southern prong of that counterstroke, aimed at the American landing on Leyte. Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimura flew his flag in her. With Fuso, the heavy cruiser Mogami, and four destroyers, the force finished fueling at Brunei and sailed on 22 October, crossed the Sulu Sea, and headed for Surigao Strait, the narrow southern entrance to Leyte Gulf. The plan sent Nishimura through the strait in darkness so that his ships could meet the Center Force inside the gulf.

American scouts had the column under watch well before it arrived. After dark on 24 October, as the ships entered the strait, motor torpedo boats attacked along the flanks, and United States destroyer squadrons followed with torpedoes at close range. Fuso was hit, fell out of the line, and sank later in the strait. Yamashiro took torpedo hits and continued up the channel. Near four in the morning the American battleships, cruisers, and destroyers lying across the northern end of the strait opened a radar-controlled fire. Shells tore up Yamashiro’s upper works and started heavy fires. Her own return fire was brief and did little to disturb the line ahead.

She turned away and sank in the early hours of 25 October 1944. Captain Tawara was lost with Yamashiro, and Nishimura died aboard his flagship. Only a small number of the battleship’s men were picked up afterward. The attack ended in the strait, and no ship of the column reached the transports in Leyte Gulf. Tawara’s command had run ten months, from the day he took Yamashiro to the morning she went down under the torpedoes and gunfire of the American force waiting in Surigao Strait.