A Different Kind of Victory. James Leutze

yet tell them that his submarines had sunk a U-boat. “I’d pretty nearly give up my hope of future salvation if one of them would get (Fritz) before I have to leave here,” he wrote in frustration on 19 June. The next day word came that he was not likely to be around if and when that happened. The Navy Department was rotating officers out of the war zone, bringing them home for debriefing, and then sending them back with newer ships. When Sims asked Hart to nominate an officer to go home and report on his observations of British methods, Tommy nominated himself, assuming that he would then get one of the new O-class submarines in the process. Sims and the navy accepted his nomination and, after a little less than five months in British waters, he was on his way home. On the evening of 20 June he set down his reflections in his diary:

      I was not proud of them [his men] for quite a while. They had long been spoiled, the Bushnell was nothing but a yacht and the submarine people were just tinkers who knew little about the sea and gave it scarcely a thought. For months I was clubbing them all about trying to make officers and seamen of them and to get into them some proper conception of what the job means. At times I nearly gave up hope. But the stuff was there and it has come out. They are now a good lot who may be depended upon to deliver the goods—and they are quiet and modest about it too.

      While on his way to Liverpool to catch a ship home he visited several manufacturing plants, including Vickers Ltd. and Cammell Laird & Co., where British submarines were built. Although it was his general impression that they were turning out a product superior to ours, his conclusion was that the most helpful thing would be to capture a couple of the efficient German submarines and copy their designs.³⁴ Once on board the liner Baltic, his primary concern became avoiding those German submarines. There were plenty of them about, but the Baltic, at 23,000 tons and with lots of speed, was not assigned any escort. The voyage, however, passed uneventfully, 6 July marking his return to American soil after eight months out of the country. He went immediately with his family to Little Moose Lake, in the Adirondacks, since those plans had already been made by Caroline before she knew he was coming home. Although offered more leave, he felt he was needed in Washington, so after two days in the woods he reported to the Navy Department. There he received two shocks: he was not to get command of the O-boats and return to England, but was to stay in Washington in some yet-to-be-determined role: and, no one seemed vitally interested in picking his brain for information on the British submarine service. Washington was still in its wartime flurry, no one seemingly knowing who was doing what or why. There were rumors about the particularly bad state of the U.S. submarine forces. On 3 August 1918 Hart set up his desk in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations and was advised by Admiral Benson that he, Hart, had full authority to make decisions on submarine matters in the name of the chief of naval operations. In short, Tommy was given carte blanche to run the submarine service as he saw fit. But the command relationship between his office, Admiral Robison, and the commanding officers of submarines in the field had yet to be resolved.

      At this point Admiral Robison was running all U.S. submarine operations out of his office on board the cruiser Chicago at anchor off New London. As Hart would have been the first to admit, Robison had a tremendous load of work thrust on him by the war.³⁵ There were boats to be worked up, crews to be trained, maintenance to be done, and a constant flow of paper work. It did not make matters any simpler that Robison was also trying to run antisubmarine operations. Indeed, one of the first impressions Hart formed was that antisubmarine warfare could be handled more efficiently out of Washington and he could think of no one more qualified for the job than himself. He realized that this suggestion might well ruffle Robison’s feathers, something that he was extremely loath to do, both because of his regard for Robison and because actuarial statistics showed that it was unhealthy for temporary captains to run counter to the wishes of admirals. However, in this case, Robison proved amenable, telling Hart that he viewed him as the submarine service’s friend at court and agreeing to let him run some of the antisubmarine show. Tommy enthusiastically took on the task because U-boats were beginning to harry shipping off the East Coast. Furthermore, he was eager to apply some of what he had learned from the British. One scheme adopted was based on the idea of using decoys. As applied by Hart, a U.S. submarine would be mothered by a schooner or other such vessel, which would tow the silent submarine behind her. Should a U-boat spot the lone schooner and approach on the surface, the U.S. boat, lurking in wait, would be provided an attractive target.³⁶ It was a good idea and, given more time, it very likely would have borne fruit.

      The submarines’ friend at court had other ideas and they caused some disruption in the U.S. Navy. One day in a conference he mentioned that the commander of the British submarine service had found by experience that he could better control his command from London than from an outlying base. That idea was enthusiastically taken up by Captain William V. Pratt, the assistant chief of naval operations, in part because the Navy Department was eager to free Robison’s flagship, the Chicago, for escort duty. Hart was asked to draft a memorandum on the British command establishment. He did so, and on the basis of that memorandum Robison was told to haul down his flag and move to Washington. According to Hart, the admiral arrived “as full of ire as a man of his temperament could be” and doubtless blamed Hart for his unhappy state. His most immediate counter was to suggest that, since his office was to be in Washington, Hart should go to New London. Tommy, with the powerful assistance of Admiral Benson, resisted this ploy. The chief of naval operations was apparently very pleased with the work Hart was doing and wanted him in Washington. Tommy could see that terrible strains would be created by having overlapping submarine commands, but believed that he could most effectively apply what he had learned by operating out of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. The result was that Tommy stayed and, for several very awkward weeks, existed in a kind of no-man’s-land, trapped between Benson and Robison. “It was a very disagreeable time for me,” he recalled. In late October, tensions boiled over; there was some kind of a blowup involving Robison and Benson, the upshot of which was that Robison found himself out of the submarine service and on his way to France to take up a coastal command.

      On 22 October Tommy moved formally into the billet that later became known as the director of submarines with considerable authority in determining policy and operations. For the next several weeks things worked smoothly; he had only one assistant but most of the bureaus of the Navy Department seemed willing to accept directions from the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, so there was little bureaucratic obstruction. It was the calm before the chaos into which the Navy Department’s internal structure was thrown when peace came. It was a short honeymoon; on 11 November 1918 the armistice was announced. Tommy Hart’s second war was over.