Admiral at the Front

(See Cover) To the U.S. Navy, last week's tension was like a tonic. Even with half its battle fleet in the Atlantic, its timbers shivered with pleasure at the prospect of action instead of tension in the Pacific. Its officers were confident of putting up a good show and none more so than the wiry little man who, if & when hostilities start, will be at the point of contact. His name: Admiral Thomas Charles ("Tommy") Hart, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet.

Indispensable Oldster. When Special Envoy Saburo Kurusu paused at Manila on his way to Washington last week, he paid his respects to Tommy Hart. Murmured he: "It is my business to keep the Admiral idle." The Admiral, weathered, wrinkled, tough as a winter apple, smiled broadly. As full of energy as a boy, he is far happier when he is bouncing around on inspection tours aboard his tooth-shaking, 245-foot yacht The Isabel than when he sits in his shore office in Manila's Mars-man Building, overlooking the Bay where most of his fleet anchors. According to precedent, he should have bowed out of the Navy five months ago. But when he reached the age limit of 64, Franklin Roosevelt decided that Tommy Hart was indispensable in the East.

Last week thunderheads were gathering all over Tommy Hart's Orient. U.S. Marines were ordered to abandon Shanghai, other Chinese stations--lest they be massacred when war came (see p. 29). Australian troops swarmed into Singapore and Canadian troops into Hong Kong in preparation for new Japanese aggression. And at bases from Sydney to Manila, British, Dutch and U.S. ships prepared for action. Already U.S. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had trumpeted: "The hour of decision is here." Tommy Hart was the man for that hour.

He is no glib, soft-spoken naval diplomat. He has a salty tongue and a predilection for blunt truths. In periodic get-togethers with Lieut. General Douglas MacArthur,* who commands the U.S. and native troops in the Philippines, and with Dutch and British officers, he usually says little. He prefers action. Tommy Hart will be ready to shoot.

He has always been forthright in his tactics. In Shanghai in 1940, when British and Italian Marines began to brawl, Tommy Hart didn't wait to consult the Japanese Admiral, who regarded the settlement as his preserve. He went to work on the British and Italian commanders, within a few hours had a twelve-man inter-allied patrol keeping peace throughout Shanghai. The patrol was made up of four Seaforth Highlanders, four Italian Marines, four U.S. Navy men, who were tactfully planted in the middle of the group.

Back in the '20s, when he was captain in command of the battleship Mississippi, Tommy Hart was just as independent as he is today. Once, while leading eleven other battleships in a pea-soup fog, he heard a destroyer's warning siren, somewhere off his bow. Promptly, without consulting his fleet commander, he ordered the line to stop. Hauled up on the carpet for breach of regulations, he exploded: "If I couldn't see, how the hell could the flagship at the end of the line?" He was officially rebuked, unofficially applauded.

Amphibious Warfare. The little fleet that Tommy Hart commands today is stronger than it has ever been before. Three months ago it consisted of two cruisers (one of them, the Houston, is the Admiral's flagship), 13 destroyers, 17 submarines, three gunboats, miscellaneous small craft. It has been reinforced since. "Every damn thing I begged for two years ago, I can have now," says he, "but it takes time, time, time, to get it here. Meanwhile I get along on a shoestring."

In the event of war, the Asiatic Fleet will have to adapt itself to Japanese tactics. With the main U.S. battle fleet under Admiral Husband Kimmel based on Hawaii, 5,587 miles away, Admiral Hart's small force would be mincemeat for the Japanese battle fleet, or any part of it, if he attempted to give action.

It would be possible for the U.S. Asiatic Fleet to stand on the defensive, but there is every reason to believe that if Japan takes a step that provokes war, the U.S. will strike without waiting to be struck. Tommy Hart is not a defensive fighter. He is a scrapper. And in the amphibious warfare that Tommy Hart contemplates, the Army's big bombers (how many there are in the Pacific bases and how fast they are coming is a deep military secret) will certainly take a hard-hitting and far-from-defensive part. From his vantage point near the Philippines the sun goes down like thunder into China across the sea--the South China Sea--and along that China coast ply the Japanese convoys which carry all the goods of war to the Japanese armies that threaten the Burma Road, Thailand, the Malay Peninsula, and return home with rice, rubber and tin for Japan's war machine. He is in a position to raid these convoys. If the Japanese give him chase, he has Singapore and the Dutch East Indies, even Australia, to retire to in case he is cut off from Manila.

This will not be the war that U.S. naval strategists mulled over in peacetime. When the Navy checked and charted possible combat with Japan, it always figured on going to battle unassisted. Now it has the help of the British and the Dutch, who can supply, besides ships and planes, such well-defended havens as Singapore, which can accommodate anything that floats, and Java's Surabaya, which is big enough to handle 10,000-ton cruisers.

Admiral Hart's operations can also be aided by land-based planes. The British have more than a score of air bases recently hacked out of the Malayan jungle by the R.A.F., many an Australian field as well, and further bases are available on the mainland of China as well as in the Philippines. Already well away is a huge naval air base at Cavite, across the Bay from Manila.

The Philippines are no longer indefensible: today they bristle with formidable armament. The fleets maneuvering against Japan will have oil as long as Singapore holds out. Safe in its portentous shadow is the Dutch oil dump at Palembang in Sumatra, which can provide enough fuel for any combination of fleets.

Cox to Four Stars. Up to his shoulder boards in the boiling Far Eastern stew, Tommy Hart last week found time to play a bit of golf, take a few members of his staff to the movies. Too old a sea dog to bark before biting, he still had a twinkle in his weather eye as he kept it cocked on his nautical domain. The beat he patrols is large -- from Wake west to China -- but the Admiral knows it like the back of his hand.

If Tommy Hart goes to war again, it will be for the third time. He first smelled powder in the Spanish-American war, as a 21 -year-old midshipman on the battle ship Massachusetts. (In those days Annapolis graduates served two years at sea before becoming ensigns.) Nineteen years later, in World War I, he commanded two divisions of U.S. submarines operating with the British out of bases in Ireland. For potting German subs he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal.

Tommy Hart had a tough time struggling through Annapolis. Born in David son, Mich., of Revolutionary stock on his father's side, Scottish on his mother's, Tommy Hart was an undersized 15-year-old when he won his appointment to the Naval Academy. There he was derisively christened "Dad." Puny, next to the youngest in his class, he wobbled along For a couple of years, picking up a bit of wooden-ship lore on summer cruises in square-riggers, distinguishing himself not at all. But in his last two years at the Academy he began to get the hang of things, soon was holding his own with older classmates, serving as coxswain for the Academy's first cutter crew. He graduated 13th in a class of 47. Out of that class ('97) came seven admirals besides Tommy Hart.*

On the rare occasions when Tommy Hart talks about his career, he is apt to say that he has been lucky. Lucky or no, he moved up fast. He got his first command when he was in his late 205 (the destroyer Lawrence), became, after a stretch of sea duty, Inspector of Ordnance at the Newport, R.I. Naval Torpedo Station, executive officer of the U.S.S. Minnesota, commander of submarines in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. In 1931 he became Superintendent of the Naval Academy, won a rear admiral's rank, the nickname "Turtleneck" and the gratitude of football fans by settling a squabble with West Point over the eligibility of players, which resulted in resumption of the Army-Navy games after a lapse of two years.

It was when he was an instructor at the U.S. Naval Academy, early in his career, that Tommy Hart first met Caroline Brownson, shy, pretty daughter of Academy Superintendent Admiral Willard Brownson, onetime Commander of the Asiatic Fleet. Tommy Hart stalked Miss Brownson for seven years before he married her. Today they have three daughters, a pair of married sons. One of them, Ensign "Tommy" Hart, graduated from Annapolis in 1939; t he other, Roswell, is, according to the Admiral, "a pretty good businessman in Hartford, Conn."

If it weren't for all the excitement in the East, Tommy Hart would like being in Connecticut himself. Ever since last year when he and his wife were separated by the order recalling all Navy wives from the Far East--an order that Navy men resent more every day--Mrs. Hart has been busy raising cows in Sharon, Conn., on a farm that has been in her family for generations. Like most sailors, the Admiral has a yen for farming, would like to put his wife's dairy on a "businesslike basis." When they were first separated, Mrs. Hart wrote to Tommy that she was lonely. Cheerfully he replied: "If you weren't so darn healthy, you wouldn't be lonely."

When Tommy Hart finished his trick at the Academy in 1934, he was put in command of a division of cruisers. Then came two and a half years as Chairman of the Navy's General Board; he cut red tape with a vengeance, recommended many an improvement in ship design. In July 1939 he was made Commander in Chief of the Asiatic Fleet, assumed the rank of full admiral and hoisted his four-starred flag over the U.S.S. Augusta.

With his four stars, Tommy Hart outranks his opposite number in the Japanese Navy, Vice Admiral Mineichi Koga. Only Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, and Admiral Osami Nagano, Chief of the Naval General Staff, boast equal status.

Tommy Hart likes to hear that he has a wicked temper. But he lets it go only when he wants to. He is hell on efficiency, cuts loose with a fine blast of profanity when his crew shows signs of landlubberly carelessness. In the wardrooms of the Asiatic Fleet, he is known as tough but rated a good man to sail with when trouble looms. "In normal times," commented one officer recently, "I might like to be under someone a little easier than Admiral Hart, but in times like this in the Far East, I would much prefer to be under him."

Tommy Hart insists that his officers keep close to the men in the ranks, share their troubles, watch their morale. He is liberal with praise for work well done, worries a good deal about naval etiquette. An "O.K., sir" instead of an "Aye. Aye, sir" turns him purple with rage. But when anyone complains about seeing sailors loaded to the gunnels staggering around Manila, he steps stoutly to their defense. When seamen, after weeks at sea, roll ashore, he feels they sometimes have a right to "make a rough liberty." Anyhow, he adds complacently, only about 100 are ever reported for misconduct on any one particular night, which is no worse than the average for college boys after a football game.

Whether in his office or in his two-room air-conditioned suite at the Manila Hotel (where he hangs his high-pressure cap in the window to let his boys know he's at home), Tommy Hart can see the crescent bay where most of his fleet now rides at anchor. In the distance he can see the radio towers of the Cavite naval base and ahead, if the day is clear, the looming bulk of Corregidor, the Gibraltar that guards Manila. Close by he can see the merchantmen at Manila's big pier 7 busily unloading the precious stuff that he needs to keep his fleet in fighting trim.

A sociable man ashore. Tommy Hart likes to dine informally with pals at his hotel. He is amused at the rococo atmosphere of his suite. "First," he points out wryly, "they wanted to give me a suite all done up in pink and green satin, but I said 'No, I'd feel like a kept woman.' Now I feel like the Archbishop of Canterbury." At his informal suppers at the hotel, Tommy Hart always entertains some of the local socialite Filipinos. He deplores the Navy's social inbreeding, feels that much of the "Philippine problem" is due to the sniffy attitude taken by whites toward their little brown brothers.

Sprier than most of his juniors, never bothered by the muggy heat of the islands, Tommy Hart religiously (though it bores him) does a daily dozen, including a Father William routine during which he stands on his head. While the tension gathered last week, he went on with his exercises and his appointed rounds, ruled his fleet. Not so confident of the future as he were some of his pals in Washington. Said one of them pessimistically: "Right now, I think that Admiral Kimmel has a much better chance of living to a ripe old age than Tommy Hart."

*The General's brother, the late Arthur MacArthur, was a shipmate of Tommy Hart's on the battleship Massachusetts during the Spanish-American War.

-- Among his classmates: Admiral William Daniel Leahy; Rear Admirals William Gunnell Du Bose, Harry Ervin Yarnell, Arthur Japy Hepburn, Orin Gould Murfin, Arthur St. Clair Smith, Clarence Selby Kempff. The succession in the Asiatic Fleet has been in the hands of '97 classmates since 1937, when Murfin took over, to be followed by Yarnell, then Hart.

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