Ships
- IJN Ushio Captain from 1 October 1941
- IJN Minegumo Captain from 25 January 1943 · In command when she was lost, 6 March 1943
Yoshio Uesugi (上杉義男) was an officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy, a graduate of the fiftieth class of the Naval Academy at Etajima, who commanded destroyers in the first half of the Pacific War. He is recorded as captain of the old destroyer Matsukaze in 1940–41, of the fleet destroyer Ushio from 1 October 1941 until January 1943, and finally of Minegumo. He took Ushio through the bombardment of Midway on the night of Pearl Harbor, the Java Sea, the Coral Sea, the Aleutians and the Guadalcanal supply runs. On the night of 5–6 March 1943 he died when Minegumo, carrying drums of supplies to Kolombangara, was destroyed by an American cruiser and destroyer force in Kula Gulf. He was a lieutenant commander when he took Ushio and a commander when he was killed; Japanese records list him as promoted captain on the day of his death.
The register of the Naval Academy's fiftieth class lists Yoshio Uesugi as coming from Hiroshima Prefecture. His birth date, his parents, and his family are not recorded in any source that could be examined.
He entered the Naval Academy at Etajima, the island school on the Inland Sea where the Navy trained its officers, and graduated with the fiftieth class on 1 June 1922. The class had 272 graduates. The register's entry for him reads: Hiroshima; Captain; killed in action 5 March 1943, Minegumo.
The war would take many of the 272. The register marks classmates lost in the Solomons, at Leyte Gulf and off Okinawa, among them destroyer and submarine commanders, ships' executive officers and staff officers. A Japanese listing of destroyer captains records him in command of the destroyer Okikaze from 18 March 1939, and the Navy's gazette entries make him, on 15 October 1940, captain of the destroyer Matsukaze, an older ship of the Kamikaze class, with the rank of lieutenant commander. He held that post for just under a year.
On 1 October 1941 Uesugi took command of Ushio, one of the big "special type" destroyers built to the Fubuki design, completed in 1931. She belonged to the 7th Destroyer Division, which since July 1941 had been attached to the First Air Fleet, the carrier force under Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. Ushio was the division's flagship, carrying its commander, Captain Kaname Konishi.
When the war began, Ushio was not with the carriers. She and her sister Sazanami had left Tateyama Bay on 28 November with the tanker Shiriya, on a separate mission against Midway Atoll. At 6.40 p.m. on 8 December, Japanese date, hours after the strike on Pearl Harbor, they opened fire on the island's installations. Ushio fired 108 rounds from her 12.7-centimetre guns in about twenty minutes and withdrew. At that moment the American carrier Lexington was a day's steaming from the island. The two destroyers refuelled from Shiriya and were back in Japan on 21 December.
The division was then sent south. In the last days of February 1942 it was attached temporarily to Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka's 2nd Destroyer Squadron and took part in the Battle of the Java Sea, when the convoy it was escorting met an Allied cruiser and destroyer force north-east of Surabaya. The squadron's records show no particular result for the division. On 2 March Ushio and Sazanami found the American submarine Perch on the surface and attacked her with depth charges. The next morning they found her again, damaged and still on the surface. The submarine sank, and the destroyers picked up her crew, 59 men by Allyn Nevitt's count, and took them as prisoners. According to the Japanese account they were soon transferred to the Dutch hospital ship Op ten Noort.
After a convoy run back to Japan the 7th Destroyer Division went to Truk. In the Battle of the Coral Sea, 7–8 May, Ushio and Akebono escorted Rear Admiral Takagi's striking force, and when the carrier Shokaku was hit and had to retire, Ushio went with her for some four hours before turning back to the main body. In June, when the Midway operation began, the division went north instead, with the carriers Ryujo and Junyo, and was among the ships that struck the American base at Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians. No battle with American carriers took place. In July the division was transferred to Admiral Yamamoto's Combined Fleet command, and in August it escorted the battleship Yamato to Truk. When the Battle of the Eastern Solomons was fought on 24 August, Ushio was with Yamato and the escort carrier Taiyo to the north-east of the Solomons. On 28 August, almost within sight of Truk, an American submarine attacked Yamato, and Ushio and Sazanami, with the battleship's own floatplane, counterattacked with depth charges. The battleship's chief of staff, Rear Admiral Matome Ugaki, wrote in his diary that the 7th Division's destroyers, which came to Yamato for fuel at sea every fourth day, were like babies that go hungry every four days, and a trial.
In September 1942 Ushio was sent to the Shortland Islands to take part in the supply of Guadalcanal. On 12 September she and Sazanami towed barges loaded with food and ammunition to the Japanese landing point at Kamimbo, and over the next days she took part in the runs that the Americans called the Tokyo Express. On the night of the 14th she was in the force that entered the anchorage off Lunga Point, found no American ships there, landed supplies and withdrew. On the 16th she towed a barge to Guadalcanal in company with Fubuki and Suzukaze and, though attacked from the air, landed her cargo. On 19–20 September she took part in a landing of food and ammunition that had been transferred from the seaplane carrier Nisshin. After 23 September the division was released from the Outer South Seas Force and returned to its own command. On the 28th, as Taiyo and the 7th Division neared Truk, an American submarine torpedoed Taiyo in the stern. For the rest of 1942 Ushio and Akebono spent their time shuttling between Truk, Yokosuka, Palau, Davao and Surabaya, escorting the converted carrier Unyo.
In January 1943 Ushio docked at Yokosuka for repairs, where two twin 13-millimetre machine guns were fitted in front of the bridge. On 20 January Uesugi was relieved. He had commanded her for more than fifteen months, through the opening of the war and every campaign described above. His successor, Commander Takeo Kanda of the fifty-second class, took her back to Truk. Ushio survived the war, surrendered unrepaired at Yokosuka in August 1945, and was broken up in 1948.
Uesugi's next ship was Minegumo, an Asashio-class destroyer that had been in dockyard hands in Japan since the autumn. Japanese records give his appointment as 1 February 1943; her repairs were finished on 12 February, and she left Yokosuka with the cargo ship Muko Maru and reached Truk on 22 February. The Japanese had by then withdrawn from Guadalcanal and were trying to hold the central Solomons, on New Georgia and Kolombangara. American air power had cut the large transports off, and the garrisons were short of food and ammunition. They depended on destroyers carrying drums and boxes in high-speed night runs. Minegumo and Murasame, the latter commanded by Lieutenant Commander Youji Tanegashima, were placed under the Southeast Area Force on 27 February, with Captain Masao Tachibana, commander of the 2nd Destroyer Division, aboard Murasame. They left Truk on the 28th, arrived at Rabaul on 2 March, and on the evening of 4 March sailed with their upper decks piled with drums and ammunition.
On 5 March they were off Buin at half past eight in the morning and left at four in the afternoon. They passed east of Vella Lavella and through Blackett Strait, thirty minutes behind schedule, and reached the landing place on Kolombangara at half past nine at night. Six or seven landing barges came out. The destroyers threw their drums over the side for the barges to collect, and within an hour the work was done. Then the two ships turned north along the east coast of the island, for the passage back to Buin, Murasame ahead and Minegumo astern.
An American force, Task Force 68 under Rear Admiral Aaron Merrill, had entered Kula Gulf that night: three light cruisers, Montpelier, Cleveland and Denver, and three destroyers, Waller, Conway and Cony. It had come to bombard the Japanese positions, and it had been warned of the destroyers by reconnaissance aircraft. At 10.57 p.m. the radar on Waller picked up the two ships, and at 11.01 she fired torpedoes; the cruisers opened fire by radar.
Minegumo and Murasame had no radar. Aboard Murasame the first flashes toward New Georgia were taken for lightning, or for Japanese shore guns, and then, when shells fell, for an air attack. Minegumo was hit first and burst into flames. Her gunnery officer, Lieutenant Hiroshi Tokuno, who survived, recalled that he too took the attack for an air raid, that the ship could do little more than give the order to open fire, and that she began to sink within three minutes of the first salvo. A torpedo hit amidships, American records say from Waller, and she went down stern first. Japanese records put her sinking at 11.15 p.m. Murasame, shattered by gunfire, followed fifteen minutes later.
Uesugi died with his ship. Some of her men and many of Murasame's swam toward Kolombangara through the night; Tokuno was among those picked up by Murasame's cutter and landed. Landing barges came out from the island, and the last survivors were recovered on 8 March.
The Navy recorded Uesugi's death on 5 March 1943 and, on the same date, his promotion to captain. Minegumo was struck from the Navy List on 1 April 1943. Her survivors and those of Murasame were taken off Kolombangara by destroyers sent in on the next supply run, among them Asagumo, Yukikaze and Urananami, and returned by way of Rabaul to Yokosuka. The report of the division commander, Captain Tachibana, who had himself been rescued on 7 March, attributed the loss to the gunfire of three enemy cruisers and an air raid by a dozen B-17s, and warned that the Americans' radar must be treated with great caution.
Nothing is recorded of Uesugi's family, his age at his death, or where, if anywhere, his remains lie. What the records preserve is his place in a class of 272 graduates and the ships he commanded between October 1940 and March 1943.