IJN Yukikaze

Between the wars the Imperial Japanese Navy invested enormous thought in the destroyer. Knowing it could never match the United States in battleships, Japan planned to whittle down an advancing American fleet with massed night torpedo attacks before the decisive gun battle — and that called for destroyers that were fast, powerfully armed and superbly trained for fighting in the dark. The Kagerō class, of which Yukikaze was one, was the mature expression of that doctrine.

Commissioned in 1940 from the Sasebo Naval Arsenal, Yukikaze — her name meaning “Snow Wind” — was a thoroughly modern fleet destroyer. Nothing about her marked her out from her eighteen sisters at first; what would set her apart was not her design but her astonishing, almost uncanny good fortune over the years of slaughter to come.

The Kagerō class was among the finest destroyer designs of its day. Fast — capable of 35 knots — and heavily armed, the class carried six 127 mm guns in three twin mounts and, above all, a devastating battery of eight 610 mm torpedo tubes firing the formidable Type 93 “Long Lance.”

The Long Lance was the best torpedo of the war: oxygen-powered, it carried a huge warhead at high speed over ranges far beyond anything the Allies possessed, and left almost no tell-tale wake. In the night battles around Guadalcanal these torpedoes, fired by well-drilled crews, repeatedly tore the hearts out of Allied cruiser and destroyer squadrons before the Americans even understood what was hitting them.

Like all destroyers, Yukikaze paid for her speed and punch with a near-total absence of armour. Her survival would depend not on protection but on the skill of her crew — and on a run of luck so sustained that her sailors, and the wider fleet, came to believe she was genuinely charmed.

Yukikaze fought in an extraordinary number of the Pacific war's greatest battles — Midway, the Guadalcanal campaign, the Bismarck Sea, the Philippine Sea, Leyte Gulf and more — and again and again she came through when ships all around her were sunk. Time after time she emerged from actions that annihilated her companions with little or no damage, plucking survivors from the water as she went.

By the war's later years her reputation had become almost legendary. Sailors spoke of her as “unsinkable,” and a posting to Yukikaze was thought to be the safest billet in the fleet. The hard truth behind the legend was grim: she survived precisely because so many other ships did not, and she spent much of the war as a rescue ship, hauling the survivors of sunken battleships, carriers and destroyers from the sea.

Yukikaze's charmed career ran the length of the war. She screened the carriers, fought in the brutal night actions of the Solomons, and escorted the great ships on their last sorties. In April 1945 she was part of the screen for the battleship Yamato on the suicidal Operation Ten-Go; when Yamato was overwhelmed and sank, Yukikaze survived the air attacks and rescued hundreds of her survivors.

Time and again Yukikaze came through actions that sank the ships around her. She fought at the Java Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf, and steamed home each time all but untouched while sisters and battleships went down on every side. Her crew came to believe she was genuinely blessed, and her name — “Snow Wind” — became a byword in the Imperial Navy for good fortune.

When the war ended she was one of the very few major Japanese warships still afloat — virtually the entire destroyer force she had begun the war with lay on the bottom of the Pacific. She was first put to work repatriating Japanese soldiers and civilians from across the shattered empire.

In 1947 the “lucky ship” was handed to the Republic of China as a war reparation and recommissioned as Tan Yang, serving on for years in another navy — a final, improbable chapter for a destroyer that had refused to die. Her anchor and a wheel were eventually returned to Japan, where they remain as relics of the most famous survivor of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

IJN Yukikaze is the great survivor of the Pacific war — an ordinary fleet destroyer made legendary by an almost unbelievable run of luck. She fought in more major battles than almost any other Japanese ship and walked away from all of them, while the navy she served was ground to destruction around her.

Her story is a strange inversion of the usual warship's tale: not a dramatic loss, but a miraculous endurance. Yukikaze stands as both a tribute to a fine ship and a well-trained crew, and a silent memorial to the scale of the catastrophe — for to be remembered as the “unsinkable” destroyer was, in the end, to be the lone survivor of a fleet that had all but ceased to exist.

• Roger Chesneau (ed.), Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1922–1946 (Conway Maritime Press).
• Mark E. Stille, Imperial Japanese Navy Destroyers 1919–45 (Osprey, New Vanguard).