Army & Navy – Tommy Hart Speaks Out

Navy men have long fumed that the Army grabs the glory while the Navy has done most of the fighting. Some admirals have advocated a high-pressure Hurrah-Navy campaign; others have preferred to suffer in seadog silence. But one 65-year-old admiral waited no longer last week.

Before Dec. 7 hard-bitten little Thomas C. Hart commanded the grandiloquently named, puppy-sized U.S. Asiatic Fleet (two cruisers, 13 destroyers, 27 submarines, some auxiliaries). Later he took over what there was of a Pacific Allied Fleet until he was relieved last February in favor of the late Dutch Admiral K. W. F. M. Doorman. In two Satevepost articles innocently entitled What Our Navy Learned in the Pacific and Amphibious War Against Japan, Admiral Hart loosed his pent-up feelings about the Army in terms so thinly veiled that no soldier or sailor could miss his point.

Navy airmen, he said, “have never talked as well as they have flown. . . . Being seamen as well as airmen, when our patrol planes saw something they always knew what kind of a ship they saw. They didn’t report a fishing boat as a large transport or say that a southbound ship was going north.” And Tommy Hart bit hard when he wrote of a Navy plane flying from the Philippines Christmas Eve, “carrying several high-ranking Army air officers who had no other way to fly out.”

Hell & High Water. Time after time Tommy Hart mutters the chronic Navy gripe about Army fanfare: “During the first few days our Navy patrol planes crippled an enemy capital ship, and claimed nothing better than crippling. . . . [They] also seized opportunities for small-scale attacks—the bomb-down-the-smokestacks stunts—but that was flea-bite stuff about which they did not talk. . . . The wing [Patrol Ten] went back to the Malay barrier—fighting and flying and fighting. . . . But getting the information—really as much as the High Command could effectively use—getting it in the face of weather, Japanese Zeros, hell & high water; and always without telling the world how good they were.”

Unified Command. Tommy Hart favors a unified Army-Navy command in each of the respective combat areas (though he hardly promotes it), as “absolutely essential in offensive amphibious warfare.” A unified commander does not necessarily have to have a “name.”* “The history of former wars is replete with instances of the man with a name being chosen, and the selection turning out to be a mistake. . . . The supreme commander should know enough for his task, but he must possess judgment, particularly of men, determination to succeed, stamina . . . and COMMON SENSE.”

Where Was the R.A.F.? Admiral Hart is against a separated air force. He points to the poor British record of employing planes with ships, cries: “The only thing that would have saved Singapore would have been the success of Admiral Sir Tom Phillips’ attempt to place his heavy ships where they could sink the Japanese transports at sea. We have never heard why the R.A.F. fighters, which were half an hour away, gave Admiral Phillips no help whatever” (when H.M.S. Prince of Wales and H.M.S. Repulse were sunk).

Hart’s history of war in the Pacific shrugs off the losses in Pearl Harbor: “Ten years ago, that loss in battleships, either ruined or put out of action temporarily, would have loomed very large to most minds. But it has become clear that no one should have given high valuation to such old and very slow capital ships. Youthful and fast ones are another matter.”

The Philippines were lost. Admiral Hart suggests, in the first two days, when the Japs caught the Army’s planes on the ground. In the whole Luzon-to-java campaign “the Japs had to go to Luzon on their first jump. This was the place and the time to have beaten our enemy in the air. On those fields were more than twice as many P-40s as the A.V.G. ever had, but again we failed to take much toll of the Japanese planes. That first day or so was our chance in the air and we missed it. . .

The strongest elements of our Army took up the defensive position upon Bataan. The enemy contained them there, and went 600 miles south to the southern Philippines, whence he jumped to the northern Dutch island and on, down.” Thus the Japs reached petroleum.

Hart had deployed his Asiatic Fleet as far south as Borneo before the war began. He contends it would have been “footless” to bring his destroyers and cruisers into Luzon waters after control of the air had been lost. Twice—at Balikpapan and Bali —the Asiatic Fleet stalled the Jap drive southward, but (after Hart was relieved) “disaster soon followed and in the end we lost heavily—the Houston [cruiser], Pillsbury, Edsall and Pope [destroyers] were all lost in surface ship action at sea under circumstances about which we know little . . . yes, ships were lost, but it was not footless. They took a good toll from the enemy. . . . The submarines caused much loss and unfortunately have taken some themselves. Not much ever gets said about it for their personnel share, with the entire Navy, the description, ‘the silent service.’ They really overdo it.”

In rectifying an overdoing Admiral Hart presented one player’s version of America’s worst first inning. Historians would have to wait for the postcombat versions of Douglas MacArthur and other Army members still on active duty.

-General MacArthur is the only unified commander who had a “name” before the war began.