Ships
- IJN Ashigara Captain from 5 July 1941 · Relieved on 25 September 1942
Captain Yoshiyuki Ichimiya of the Imperial Japanese Navy commanded the heavy cruiser Ashigara from 5 July 1941 until 25 September 1942. Ashigara was a Myoko-class ship, one of four large cruisers completed in the late 1920s, with ten 20-centimeter guns and the range to scout ahead of a fleet or stand in a gunnery fight. He took command while Japan was still at peace and left the ship after the first campaigns in Southeast Asia had run their course.
In the months after he assumed command, Ashigara fitted out for the move south. She became the flagship of Vice Admiral Ibō Takahashi and the Third Fleet, the command charged with the seizure of the Philippines. The fleet gathered at Mako in the Pescadores, the forward anchorage for that opening stroke. Ichimiya’s charge was the ship itself: hull, guns, machinery, and crew, while the admiral and his staff directed the wider operation from her decks.
In December 1941 Ashigara went south with the expedition against Luzon. She covered the army landings in Lingayen Gulf, the operation that put Japanese troops ashore and started the drive on Manila. Through that week her work was the heavy cover and escort of the transports, in waters where no Allied squadron of equal strength was on hand to meet her.
The same flagship then moved on into the Netherlands East Indies as Japanese forces took the oil ports and islands along the way to Java. On 1 March 1942, in the Java Sea, Ashigara was in company with the heavy cruiser Myoko and the destroyers Akebono and Inazuma when they met the British heavy cruiser Exeter and the destroyers Encounter and Pope, ships trying to break out after the fighting of the previous days. Exeter and Encounter were sunk by the gunfire and torpedoes of that Japanese group. Pope drew clear of the surface action and was lost later the same day to air attack.
For the rest of his time in command, Ichimiya kept Ashigara in the occupied Indies. After Java fell she worked from the captured harbors, a flagship and heavy guard ship while convoy work and local patrol filled the summer of 1942 and the main fleets shifted toward the central and south Pacific. On 25 September 1942 he was relieved. His fourteen months in Ashigara had spanned the assembly before the war, the landings in the Philippines, and the surface fighting that finished the Allied ships still at large in the Java Sea.