Ships
- IJN Satsuki Captain from 10 June 1942
- IJN Asashimo Captain from 27 January 1944 · In command when she was lost, 7 April 1945
Yoshirō Sugihara was a destroyer captain of the Imperial Japanese Navy and a graduate of the fifty-seventh class of the Naval Academy. After an earlier command in the destroyer Asagao, he commanded four destroyers in succession from 1942 to 1945: Satsuki, Hatsuyuki, Samidare, and Asashimo. He survived the sinking of Hatsuyuki at a pier in the Shortlands in July 1943. He died in command of Asashimo on 7 April 1945, when she fell behind the force escorting the battleship Yamato on its sortie toward Okinawa and was sunk by American carrier aircraft with no survivors. He was declared dead that day and promoted captain.
Nothing is known of his birth, family, or schooling.
He was in the fifty-seventh class at Etajima. The movement records say only that he commanded Asagao before he was appointed to Satsuki. No earlier posting, birth date, or hometown has turned up in the sources checked.
On 10 June 1942, as a lieutenant commander, he relieved Lieutenant Commander Ikeda in the destroyer Satsuki, which had just arrived at Sasebo. She belonged to the 22nd Destroyer Division. For the rest of the year she was on convoy escort duty in the Southwest Area, with a refit at Sasebo from October to November in which her underwater sound gear was improved and 25-millimeter machine guns were probably added. In January 1943 she escorted a seaplane carrier to the Shortlands in company with Fumizuki and Nagatsuki, and on 1, 4, and 7 February she took part in the destroyer runs that evacuated the army from Guadalcanal. In the spring she escorted troop convoys to Wewak and Hansa Bay and made troop runs to Finschhafen (aborted), Iboki, and, in April and May, repeatedly to Surumi and Gasmata on New Britain. On 20 May he was relieved.
On 30 May he took command of the destroyer Hatsuyuki, which had just returned to Sasebo. She went south by way of Truk to Rabaul, and by the end of June she was running troops to Rekata and Buka from the Shortlands. On 5–6 July she was in the Battle of Kula Gulf and was hit by three dud shells, which put her on manual steering and killed six men. After repairs at Rabaul she made a troop run on 16–17 July to the Shortlands. On the 17th, while she was unloading passengers alongside the pier at Kahili, American aircraft raided the anchorage. A bomb exploded after her magazine, and she sank in shallow water with 120 dead, among them 38 passengers, and 36 wounded. Sugihara was among the survivors.
On 13 August 1943 he took command of the destroyer Samidare, relieving Commander Nakamura. She had taken part that July in the evacuation of Kiska. He took her to Truk and Rabaul in September. On 6–7 October, in the Battle of Vella Lavella, she covered the evacuation and is credited with a torpedo hit on the destroyer Selfridge. On 2 November, at Empress Augusta Bay, she is credited with a hit on the destroyer Foote, and in the same action she collided with Shiratsuyu and had her bow stove in. She went to Truk and then Yokosuka for repairs in November and December.
On 27 January 1944 he was appointed to Asashimo, a destroyer of the Yūgumo class that had been completed at Osaka on 27 November 1943, and he held her for the rest of her service. In late February she sailed from Ujina as one of three escorts for an army convoy bound for Saipan and Guam. At dawn on 29 February her radar picked up a submarine about 5,800 meters off her port quarter. She lit it with her searchlight and fired fifteen 12.7-centimeter rounds, and she dropped depth charges until 6:45 a.m. The submarine was the American Rock, and a shell had damaged her periscope standard. That evening the submarine Trout put torpedoes into the convoy and sank the transport Sakito Maru, with about 2,200 of the roughly 3,900 men aboard killed, and crippled another. Asashimo sighted a periscope at 5:55 p.m., dropped depth charges, and at 6:16 heard an explosion under the water. The Japanese article on the ship gives that as the end of Trout.
In June she was with the Mobile Fleet's van force in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. On 23 October she rescued survivors of the cruiser Atago, 29 officers and 463 men according to the Japanese account, and then escorted the damaged Takao back to Brunei. On 11 November, escorting a convoy to Ormoc, she was caught in a carrier air raid, went alongside the stricken destroyer Hamanami and took off her wounded captain and secret papers, and was then bombed herself, with 75 casualties in all, among them her gunnery officer. In late December she was with the San Jose bombardment force and rescued 167 survivors of Kiyoshimo. From January 1945 she was at Singapore and Lingga. She escorted Ise and Hyūga to Kure in February and went into dock there at the end of the month.
On 29 March 1945 she was assigned to tow the mined destroyer Hibiki back to Kure and was then ordered to rejoin the fleet. The movement record says her engines may have been strained by the tow. A Japanese account reports that at the conference before the sortie Sugihara objected to the plan. As that account has it, he said he did not mind dying but was against a suicide operation that offered no hope of results, and that even a single destroyer was valuable. On 6 April Asashimo left Tokuyama with Yamato.
At about seven on the morning of 7 April her port turbine failed and she fell behind, able to make only about twelve knots on one shaft. She signaled that repairs were under way and that she meant to rejoin. The escort vessel Yashiro, passing nearby, offered help, and the offer was refused. At 11:59 she reported that repairs would be finished within the hour. At 12:10 she reported air attack and at 12:21 thirty aircraft, and she drove off the first attacks and came back within sight of the force. At 12:45 ten dive-bombers from Bunker Hill hit her amidships and stopped her. At 1:05 p.m. torpedo planes from San Jacinto hit her twice on the starboard side by the bridge and once aft, and she went down stern first in about five minutes. A destroyer searched the area that night and found nothing, and floatplanes searched the next morning. Sugihara, the division commander, Captain Hisao Kotaki, and the rest of the crew were lost with her.
Asashimo was removed from the navy list on 10 May 1945. The Japanese article on her notes that with her loss all nineteen ships of the Yūgumo class had been lost.