Ships
- IJN Kako Captain from 15 September 1941 · In command when she was lost, 10 August 1942
Yuji Takahashi was a captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy. On 15 September 1941 he took command of the heavy cruiser Kako, second ship of the Furutaka class, and he was still her captain when she was lost on 10 August 1942. That same day she was in Cruiser Division 6 of the First Fleet with Aoba, Furutaka, and Kinugasa. Rear Admiral Aritomo Goto flew his flag in Aoba.
In November 1941 the division was assigned to the South Seas Force for the opening attacks in the central Pacific. Kako left the Hashirajima anchorage on 30 November, called at Hahajima in the Bonins, and stood by while troops went ashore on Guam. She then went on to Truk, arriving on 12 December. The first attempt on Wake Island had already failed, so Cruiser Division 6 went out with the second expedition, patrolled east of the atoll while Wake fell on 23 December, and returned by way of Roi to Truk on 10 January 1942.
Through the early months of 1942 Takahashi kept Kako on the move south. The division covered the seizure of Rabaul, then operations toward Lae and Salamaua, and in April the landings around Bougainville and in the Admiralty Islands. In early May, Goto’s cruisers and the destroyer Sazanami formed the main body of the Port Moresby operation together with the light carrier Shoho. On 7 May American carrier aircraft sank Shoho north of Tulagi. The carrier battle the next day stopped the move against Port Moresby. Kako and Aoba stayed with the retiring transports while Kinugasa and Furutaka were sent with the carrier force. One of Kako’s floatplanes went missing and was picked up by the seaplane tender Kamikawa Maru. On 11 May the cruiser turned toward the minelayer Okinoshima after a submarine attack and found that the minelayer had already gone down. Kako and Aoba entered Kure on 22 May for a dockyard period.
After the Battle of Midway the navy pushed airfields into the eastern Solomons and eastern New Guinea. Kako and Aoba sailed with Cruiser Division 18 and reached Truk on 23 June. Just before arrival, Kako’s number-one floatplane ditched on an antisubmarine patrol, and the three men aboard were the ship’s first dead of the war. Late in June she helped cover the convoy that put a construction force onto Guadalcanal, then worked through Kieta to Rekata Bay on Santa Isabel, where the ships swept and surveyed the coast. On 14 July Cruiser Division 6 passed into the new Eighth Fleet under Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa.
On 7 August 1942 United States Marines landed on Guadalcanal and Tulagi. Cruiser Division 6, then at sea on the way toward Rabaul, joined Mikawa’s Chokai, the light cruisers Tenryu and Yubari, and the destroyer Yunagi. In the dark hours of 8–9 August the column ran in between Guadalcanal and Savo Island and met the Allied covering cruisers. Flares from Japanese floatplanes lit the ships, and the gun and torpedo action that followed sank the United States heavy cruisers Astoria, Quincy, and Vincennes and the Australian heavy cruiser Canberra. Kako came through the night undamaged. Her gunners fired 192 rounds from the main battery, 124 from the high-angle guns, and 149 from the 25 mm mounts, and the ship launched ten torpedoes. A floatplane she had sent up did not return.
On the morning of 10 August the four cruisers were steaming alone toward Kavieng after three days of wartime passage, making about 16 knots in two pairs and holding a steady course. Near seven o’clock the United States submarine S-44 fired four torpedoes from a few hundred yards at the rear ship of the near pair, which was Kako. Three struck along the starboard side, one abreast the forward turret and the others farther aft near the magazines and the forward boiler rooms. The cruiser had little time to turn. Within minutes she listed to starboard, rolled over, and sank bow first off Simberi Island. Sixty-eight men were killed. Takahashi and about 650 others got clear in the ship’s boats. Aoba, Furutaka, and Kinugasa dropped depth charges, left the boats, and went on to Kavieng. The survivors landed on Simberi. On 11 August the destroyer Uzuki and three landing craft carried them to Kavieng, where they were taken aboard the ships of the division and later sent on to Rabaul in the auxiliary Iro. Kako was struck from the navy list on 15 September 1942. Takahashi’s appointment as her captain ran until 1 September. In later years he wrote a memoir of the command, the night battle off Savo, and the morning the cruiser was lost.