On the surface it did not seem an unusual retirement ceremony. The ramrod-straight, white-haired admiral in the starched high collar stood awkwardly at the door, bidding a formal good-bye to sixteen younger officers. The first three or four filed past him without demonstrations of emotion, then a red-haired lieutenant commander grasped the older man’s hand in both of his and said “Good-bye, Sir, you are the finest man I’ve ever known.” The old admiral’s eyes misted with tears and suddenly he was incapable of speaking to or even seeing the faces of the remaining men. Perhaps this scene requires closer observation; it is not a normal retirement ceremony: there is too husky a timbre in the voices, the participants are somehow too stiff, the atmosphere too highly charged. Moreover, the senior officer in question wears on his shoulders the four gold stars of a full admiral; the doorway is not in some officers’ club, but in the Savoy Hotel, Bandung, Java; and the officers filing out into the night are the only ones who could be rounded up on short notice from the once-proud Asiatic Fleet to bid farewell to their commander. It is 14 February 1942, and Admiral Thomas C. Hart is stepping down as commander of the ABDA (American, British, Dutch, and Australian) naval forces, the first American ever to serve as commander of an allied naval force. “Oh, it was hard,” he wrote that night; parting always made him sad, but leaving his friends out there in the face of a dangerous enemy and “commanded by God knows whom or how” was almost too much to bear.
The admiral who made that entry in his diary, “Tough Tommy” Hart, as he was called by admirer and detractor alike, at sixty-four had served fifty-one years on active duty, but now he was returning home under a cloud. “Ill health” was the official explanation, but those who knew the situation realized, without having the details, that that was a contrived explanation. Even Admiral Hart did not know all the details and, though he had done nothing wrong, he sensed that it would be a long time before the record was set right. Being removed from command before the final stages of a battle that was going badly was not at all the way he had imagined ending his career. He had hoped to be commanding on the bridge and “catch a 14” shell in the mid section,” or so he had once said. That would have been more in keeping with the prior service of this strict, stern, extremely proper officer, who was known—even feared—throughout the navy for his “sundowner” discipline and compulsive dedication to duty. The irony could hardly have been greater. No one had shown more prescience about the coming of the war; no one had trained for it more arduously; no one had risked more in trying to gather intelligence about the Japanese naval force moving down the coast of Indochina before hostilities began; no one had prepared himself more rigorously, or examined more closely his own abilities to command. Now, with the war barely two months old, “Tough Tommy” was leaving the battle, returning home, probably to retirement on his farm in Connecticut where he could read about younger men, his younger men, getting swept from the bridge by 14-inch shells. “Oh, it was hard,” he recorded, and the hardest part was that he probably did not have many years left to salvage his career or even to see the record set straight.
What was the record of the Asiatic Fleet in the Philippines and of the short-lived ABDA command? What had happened to bring this man to such an ironic denouement? Perhaps the time has now come when we can gain new insight both into what really happened and into the actual role of the “finest man” Lieutenant Commander Redfield Mason had ever known.
It all began on 12 June 1877 when Thomas Charles Hart was born in Davison, Michigan, the son of John Mansfield Hart and Isabella Ramsey Hart.1 His father, who was thirty-seven years old at that time, had enlisted in the Union Navy as a landsman during the War between the States. His home of record was Bangor, Maine, although he actually came from the small community of Holden, and sailors from New England were in great demand. In 1865 John Hart was discharged from the navy where he had served in the frigate Sabine and soon, like many other veterans, made his way west.
Since, in the 1870s, Michigan was still on the frontier, it was a natural place for a Maine lumberjack to settle. Indeed, Bangor lumbermen were in great demand in the Michigan woods, so Hart moved up rapidly from lumberjack to crew chief to supervisor. This was boom time in the small lumber towns that sprang up and vanished with equal rapidity. There was no talk of environmental impact when the forests stretched to the horizon; the only charge was to put the trees on the ground. In 1888 four billion board feet of timber were cut in Michigan, and John Hart did more than his share.
In the course of the employment that took him all over northern Michigan, John Hart met Isabella Ramsey, the daughter of recent Scottish immigrants. Isabella was born in Scotland but now claimed the United States as home. After a short courtship the two were married. Thomas Charles Hart was their first and only child.
One day while Tommy, as he was always called, was still a baby, his father returned from work and in a normal burst of emotion Isabella ran across the yard to greet him. But then to John’s horror, this common domestic scene turned into a nightmare. Before she reached her husband, Isabella lost consciousness and collapsed. Soon she was dead and John was a widower. So horrified was he that he seldom thereafter could bring himself even to reminisce about his wife or their life together. Thus, Tommy was robbed not only of association with his mother but also of any intimate knowledge of her. He did, however, as he grew older and gleaned some details of her death, learn an indelible lesson about the transitory nature of life and the suddenness with which a loved one could be swept away.
Before the turn of the century Michigan was a rather paradoxical environment in which to be raised. The natural beauty of the forests and the lakes was balanced by the scars left by man. The warm and sunny days of July and August were more than offset by the brutal cold of January and February. In fact, the Davison area was usually gray and bleak from November through May. And then there were the people—hardy, robust, pioneering types—but, behind the facade of physical wellbeing, there often lurked the debilitating effects of poor diet, hard work, and exposure to a harsh climate. Doctors were few and people had to rely mainly on home remedies or wait for infrequent trips to town. A healthy man could prosper, but staying vigorous was a constant challenge. For a young boy there were the woods and streams to offer diversions but, as Bruce Catton recalls in Waiting for the Morning Train, there were also times when the brooding presence of the wilderness and the chilling reality that the north wind blew undeflected from the arctic, sent shivers, not of cold, down the spine. In this environment people worked hard, assumed little would come easily, and respected the man who kept his troubles to himself. Thus, it was natural for Tommy, despite his high spirits, to absorb a system of values more often associated with New England: thrift, prudence, self-reliance, and rugged individualism.2
No doubt John Hart mourned his young wife, but there was little outward sign of it. Within two years he was married again, this time to Mary Conklin. In some ways having a mother again was good for the growing Tommy, but his stepmother was never well and apparently made little effort to replace her predecessor. In the end it made no difference anyway since after only a year Mary Conklin Hart sickened and died. Again there was an interval without a woman in the house and then John Hart married for the third time. This stepmother, Amelia Sager Smith, was a widow with two daughters and for the first time since his natural mother died Tommy had someone who at least tried to fill the void. The problem was that after so little motherly attention Tommy was quite a handful to care for. According to his own stories, he was an active perhaps even devilish boy who, since his father was away supervising logging operations during most of the nonsummer months, required considerable looking after. When that looking after was neglected, high spirits and a sense of adventure took control—sometimes with serious consequences. For instance, there was the time Tommy and his friends burned down the hitching shed behind the church and another when a homemade bomb blew a chunk from a tree in the yard. His stepsister Maude Smith, with whom he became quite close, and other female relatives tell of high jinks that would have tried the patience of a saint, much more that of his inexperienced stepmother. Apparently his pranks did not endear him to his new mother who had her hands amply filled running her home and had not bargained on being warden to a young hellion. School officials as well took an unsympathetic view of the growing accumulation