Ships
- IJN Nagato Captain from 25 December 1943
Yuji Kobe was a captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy whose wartime commands carried him from a heavy cruiser in the carrier battles of 1942 to the battleship Nagato in the fleet actions of 1944. He took command of Nagato at Truk on 25 December 1943, relieving Mikio Hayakawa, who had been promoted to rear admiral that autumn.
Before Nagato, Kobe had the heavy cruiser Tone. He joined her in the summer of 1942, after she came back from the Battle of Midway, and he still had her for the Battle of the Eastern Solomons in August and the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in October. Through about a year and a half in a ship that stayed with the carrier force, no one in Tone's company was killed.
Nagato was already among the best-known ships in the navy. Isoroku Yamamoto had flown his flag in her at the opening of the Pacific War and had sent the order for the Pearl Harbor strike from her anchorage at Hashirajima, before the Combined Fleet flag moved to Yamato in February 1942. When Kobe assumed command she was lying at Truk with the main body, serving as flagship of the First Fleet under Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, so the new captain shared the ship with an admiral and his staff. American landings in the Gilberts that November had made the lagoon less secure, and Truk's time as the fleet's forward base was running out.
In early February 1944 Nagato left Truk ahead of an American carrier raid, called at Palau, and reached Lingga Roads, south of Singapore, on 21 February. From 25 February she wore the flag of Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, commander of Battleship Division 1, until Ugaki moved that flag to Yamato on 5 May. The months at Lingga were mostly waiting, with fuel short and the battleships held for a decisive battle. On 11 May she sailed for Tawi-Tawi and joined the First Mobile Fleet under Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa. In the Battle of the Philippine Sea that June she screened carriers of Ozawa's force. She was only lightly engaged, and she came through with the ship undamaged and her crew intact.
Kobe was promoted to rear admiral on 15 October 1944. On 18 October Nagato sailed for Brunei Bay in Borneo to join the fleet assembled for Operation Sho-1, the counterstroke against the American landing on Leyte. She put to sea in Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita's Center Force with Yamato and Musashi. On 24 October, in the Sibuyan Sea, American carrier aircraft struck the force and sank Musashi. Nagato remained with Kurita, passed San Bernardino Strait that night, and on 25 October met the escort carriers and destroyers of an American task group off Samar. The Center Force then turned back. Kobe was still her captain through the battle.
Kiyomi Shibuya succeeded him before the year was out. In February 1945 Kobe went ashore as head of the general-affairs department of the Second Naval Technical Arsenal and, at the same time, head of its school for technicians. He was still in those posts when the war ended.