Kiyohide Shima

Also known as: Shima Kiyohide · Vice Admiral Kiyohide Shima

Definition

Kiyohide Shima (February 25, 1890 – November 7, 1973) was a vice admiral of the Imperial Japanese Navy, commander-in-chief of the Fifth Fleet, whose Second Striking Force followed Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimura’s battleships into Surigao Strait on October 25, 1944 — arriving after the Southern Force had been destroyed, colliding with the burning cruiser Mogami in the dark, and turning back. The southern action of the Battle of Leyte Gulf was thus fought by two uncoordinated Japanese commands: Nishimura’s, which died in the strait as this wiki’s Battle of Surigao Strait and Shoji Nishimura entries record, and Shima’s, which survived the night, losing the light cruiser Abukuma to a PT-boat torpedo before the retreat. (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima, Wikipedia — Battle of Surigao Strait)

The two commanders were classmates — both graduated from the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy’s 39th class in 1911, Nishimura ranked 21st of 148 and Shima 69th — yet radio silence and parallel command arrangements kept their forces from coordinating on the approach, a division of command the postwar record fixed on as a principal cause of the disaster. Shima lived to answer it: in 1959 he wrote from Japan to an American teenager to object to historian James A. Field Jr.’s description of him as “the buffoon of the tragedy.” (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima)

Identities

Source	Identifier	URL
Wikipedia	Kiyohide Shima	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiyohide_Shima
Wikidata	Kiyohide Shima (Q646375)	https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q646375
DBpedia	Kiyohide_Shima	https://dbpedia.org/page/Kiyohide_Shima
ProductOntology	N/A	N/A
Wiktionary	N/A	N/A
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)	N/A	N/A
MeSH	N/A	N/A
NCBI Taxonomy	N/A	N/A
AGROVOC	N/A	N/A
Google Scholar	Kiyohide Shima vice admiral Fifth Fleet Second Striking Force Nachi Abukuma Surigao Strait Leyte Gulf	https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22Kiyohide+Shima%22+Surigao+Strait
ConceptNet	N/A	N/A
OpenCyc	N/A	N/A

Also Known As

Shima Kiyohide
Vice Admiral Kiyohide Shima

Examples and Analogies

The classmate who came too late: Shima and Nishimura were commissioned together in 1911 and ended together in one strait — but three decades of parallel careers never produced a common command, and on the night that mattered, radio silence left each admiral ignorant of the other’s position, so Shima’s cruisers trailed 25 nautical miles behind a force already marked for destruction. (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima, Wikipedia — Battle of Surigao Strait)
Torpedoes at islands: the night’s recorded fiasco — Shima’s ships fired sixteen torpedoes at two islands he had mistaken for enemy vessels, and his approach nearly ran aground on Panaon Island after failing to account for the outgoing tide — a case study in how darkness, fatigue, and garbled contact reports deform a commander’s picture of a battle. (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima, Wikipedia — Battle of Surigao Strait)
The retreat that saved half a fleet: his own recorded justification — “If we continued dashing further north, it was quite clear that we should only fall into a ready trap” — reads as prudence after the fact, and it worked: aside from Abukuma and the Nachi–Mogami collision damage, the Second Striking Force escaped the strait unscathed, though its ships were sunk in the later actions around Leyte. (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima, Wikipedia — Battle of Surigao Strait)
Verified data (career chronology):
Born: February 25, 1890, Miyazaki Prefecture; Naval Academy 39th class, 1911, ranked 69th of 148 (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima)
Junior service: midshipman on the cruisers Aso and Hashidate and the battleship Aki; lieutenant from 1918, chief communications officer of the battlecruiser Kirishima; Naval War College, 1921 (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima)
Interwar: aide-de-camp to Prince Takamatsu 1925–1926, serving on the battleships Nagato and Fusō; posted to the United States and Europe 1928–1929; captain 1933; first seagoing command the cruiser Ōi, 1936 (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima)
Flag rank: rear admiral November 15, 1939 (Chief of Staff, Maizuru Naval District); led the Tulagi invasion force, May 3, 1942, in Operation Mo; vice admiral May 1, 1943; commander-in-chief, Fifth Fleet, from February 15, 1944 (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima)
Surigao Strait: Second Striking Force — heavy cruisers Nachi (flag) and Ashigara, light cruiser Abukuma, four destroyers — entered the strait after Nishimura’s destruction; Abukuma torpedoed by PT-137 at about 03:25, October 25 (37 dead); retreat ordered; Nachi collided with Mogami (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima, Wikipedia — Battle of Surigao Strait)
After the strait: Nachi damaged at Manila by Task Force 38 aircraft on October 29 (53 dead) and sunk off Corregidor on November 5, 1944 while Shima was ashore at a conference; he ended the war as commander of the Takao Guard District (May 10 – November 30, 1945) and the final commander of the First Air Fleet (May 10 – June 15, 1945) (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima)
Death: November 7, 1973, aged 83 (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima)

Usage Scenarios

1. Studying the Battle of Surigao Strait

Shima is the second protagonist of the strait action — the trailing command whose cruisers arrived after Fusō, Yamashiro, and three destroyers were gone, whose Abukuma was crippled by the same PT-boat screen, and whose withdrawal ended Japan’s southern approach — the sequence this wiki’s Battle of Surigao Strait entry carries in full. (Wikipedia — Battle of Surigao Strait)

2. Command-and-Control Case Studies

Staff analyses of the Leyte plan use the Nishimura–Shima split as a textbook failure of unity of command: two forces entered the same strait on the same night under separate admirals, joined by no common operational picture and no radio communication, with the result that the second reinforced a disaster already decided. (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima, Wikipedia — Battle of Surigao Strait)

3. Tracing Imperial Japanese Navy Career Paths

His biography samples the surface officer’s whole ladder — communications specialist, imperial aide, foreign posting, cruiser command, district staff, invasion flotillas, fleet command — a career archetypal of the 39th-class generation that reached vice admiral just in time for the fleet’s final sorties. (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima)

4. Postwar Historiography and Memory

The 1959 letter — Shima’s objection, written to an American correspondent, to Field’s “buffoon” characterization — is a documented instance of a defeated commander disputing the victors’ historiography, and a reminder that the Surigao record includes the losers’ self-defense as well as the American account. (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima)

Strategies

Keep the two commands distinct: Nishimura led Force C — the battleships and screen that entered the strait and died; Shima led the separate Second Striking Force from Nachi — accounts that merge them, or assign Shima a role in Nishimura’s destruction, misread the battle’s structure, as this wiki’s Shoji Nishimura entry also cautions. (Wikipedia — Battle of Surigao Strait)
Attribute the coordination failure to structure before personality: the documented causes are radio silence and the plan’s own division of command; personality-based explanations (the standard “Nishimura–Shima” feud narrative) go beyond what the sources establish and should be flagged as interpretation. (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima, Wikipedia — Battle of Surigao Strait)
Use his own words for the retreat: the trap quotation is the admiral’s recorded justification for turning back — cite it as his account of his decision, not as an established verdict on it. (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima)
Date the ladder by the record: captain 1933, rear admiral November 15, 1939, vice admiral May 1, 1943, Fifth Fleet February 15, 1944 — dates that place Tulagi under a rear admiral and Surigao under a fleet commander. (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima)

Security and Safety Measures

Collision avoidance in a night retreat: the Nachi–Mogami collision — a flagship running into a burning, cripple-steered cruiser in the dark — is the standing documented caution that retiring formations under night attack concentrate navigational risk precisely when control is loosest. (Wikipedia — Battle of Surigao Strait)
Respect for war dead and survivors: the men of Abukuma, Nachi, Mogami, and Nishimura’s ships remain in and around Philippine waters; the standard convention treats their wrecks as seamen’s graves, as this wiki’s Battle of Surigao Strait entry records. (Wikipedia — Battle of Surigao Strait)
Source discipline on disputed characterizations: postwar labels like “buffoon” are historiographical claims, contested by the admiral himself; responsible accounts carry the assessment with its attribution and his objection alongside. (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima)
Documented register for a deceased commander: Shima (died 1973) belongs to the historical record — his identity is fixed in the open registers, Wikidata and DBpedia both carrying him — and living-memory claims about his motives should be checked against the documented sources. (Wikidata, DBpedia)

Historical Context

Shima was born in Miyazaki Prefecture in 1890 and commissioned in the Naval Academy’s 39th class in 1911, sixty-nine places behind his future Surigao counterpart Nishimura. His interwar career ran the specialist’s course — communications officer on Kirishima, the Naval War College class of 1921, aide-de-camp to Prince Takamatsu with service on Nagato and Fusō, a 1928–1929 posting to the United States and Europe — before captain’s rank in 1933, command of the cruiser Ōi from 1936, and promotion to rear admiral on November 15, 1939. The war took him to the Solomons early: as a rear admiral he led the Tulagi invasion force of May 3, 1942 in the Operation Mo landings that preceded the Battle of the Coral Sea; vice admiral from May 1, 1943, he commanded the Fifth Fleet from February 15, 1944 — the northern-area force that became the Second Striking Force of the Leyte plan. (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima)

The Surigao run is documented hour by hour. Sailing from Mako behind Nishimura, his cruisers — Nachi, Ashigara, Abukuma, and four destroyers — trailed 25 nautical miles astern when Nishimura entered the strait at 02:00 on October 25, 1944; the sources note his approach nearly ran aground on Panaon Island after misjudging the outgoing tide. By the time he reached the battle, Fusō was gone, Yamashiro was minutes from destruction, and the PT boats had found his own column: at about 03:25 PT-137’s torpedo, aimed at a destroyer, ran deep and struck Abukuma near her forward boiler room, killing 37. Firing sixteen torpedoes at two islands he mistook for ships, and believing both of Nishimura’s battleships already wrecked, Shima ordered the retreat — “If we continued dashing further north, it was quite clear that we should only fall into a ready trap” — and in the withdrawal Nachi rammed the burning Mogami, flooding her steering room; the cruiser was finished off the next morning. The strait’s survivors did not outlive the campaign by long: Nachi, damaged at Manila on October 29, was sunk off Corregidor on November 5 while her admiral sat ashore at a conference. Shima ended the war commanding the Takao Guard District on Formosa and, briefly, the First Air Fleet; he died on November 7, 1973. (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima, Wikipedia — Battle of Surigao Strait)

Challenges and Controversies

The Two-Commander Split

That Nishimura and Shima — classmates, sailing the same night into the same strait toward the same objective — operated as independent commands with no radio coordination between them is the documented structural failure historians return to; whether a single commander of the whole southern force could have changed anything is unknowable, but the plan’s division of responsibility is the standing explanation for why the second force blundered into the wreckage of the first. (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima, Wikipedia — Battle of Surigao Strait)

“The Buffoon of the Tragedy”

The American official historian James A. Field Jr.’s dismissive characterization of Shima became the standard Western verdict; in 1959, answering a letter from an American teenager in San Fernando, California, the retired admiral objected to the label and defended his decisions at the strait. The exchange is cited as a documented case of a defeated commander contesting the victor’s account — and as the reason careful histories carry both the criticism and the reply. (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima)

The Night’s Miscues

The documented failures of the approach — torpedoes loosed at phantom ships that were islands, the near-grounding on Panaon, the collision with Mogami — have been weighed by historians between incompetence and the ordinary fog of a night action fought without radar against an alerted enemy; the sources record the events and the admiral’s own explanation, and leave the proportion of each to the reader. (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima, Wikipedia — Battle of Surigao Strait)

A Flagship Lost Under Another’s Air Attack

Nachi‘s sinking on November 5, 1944 — at least ten torpedoes and roughly twenty-five bombs from carrier aircraft while Shima attended a conference ashore — removed the flagship and most of her crew within eleven days of the battle, an end that complicates any assessment of his command by erasing the force he led it with. (Wikipedia — Kiyohide Shima)