was on the waterfront watching the excitement. Knowing no one more likely to give sound advice, Tommy appealed to Admiral Brownson. “Don’t haul down that flag!” the admiral immediately replied. That was good enough for Hart; the flag continued to fly even as he towed the Geier to Pearl Harbor for a permanent and safe internment. Her crew, with their pets, their tubas, their souvenirs, and their only slightly dampened Teutonic arrogance, were marched off to hastily improvised camps. It was a “rather ticklish job,” Hart wrote, which did nothing to diminish his respect for Admiral Brownson’s quick thinking and good judgment.
Early the next morning Caroline contributed her part to making February memorable by giving birth to Thomas Comins Hart, or Tom as he was called. There was little time for even becoming acquainted with his youngest before Tommy took off for San Francisco to take his written examinations for promotion to commander. All went well and, despite the discovery that he had very poor color sense, which he had known for years, he was duly promoted.
He was back in Hawaii by the time the United States declared war on 6 April. Because of the preparations he had made, all that remained to be done was to change the status of the interned German sailors to that of prisoners of war and put warheads on his torpedoes. Then he settled down to wait. It was a long wait and more than a trifle anticlimactic. There really was very little to do other than exercise to keep up efficiency and hope that a German raider would appear in the area to make life interesting. About the most warlike thing he did was set his crews to cultivating a victory garden.
Finally, in May, came orders that at least moved him closer to the scene of hostilities. He was assigned as commander of the submarine base at New London, Connecticut, with additional duty as chief of staff to the commander of the Atlantic Fleet’s submarine force. Within three days the whole family was aboard a ship headed home. Hart was not happy with a shore detail, but to get it changed he would have to go to Washington. The chief of the Bureau of Navigation was his old friend and member of his wedding, L.C. Palmer, who heard him out patiently but could not, at the moment, offer him a more exciting billet.
The problem was that Hart was the victim of some rather sloppy detailing, which was to have long-range consequences. Since the previous commander of U.S. submarine forces, Rear Admiral Albert W. Grant, had not been moving as expeditiously as some would have liked to get American submarines into actual combat, he was to be replaced by Captain Samuel S. Robison.31 But before Grant turned over the command and before Robison could choose his own chief of staff, Hart had been selected for the billet. It was more than slightly awkward. Robison brought his former executive officer, Commander Arthur Japy Hepburn, a classmate of Hart, with him and made it clear that Hart’s duty commanding the base at New London was going to be his only duty. As Hart told Robison and Palmer, he was not qualified to command the major U.S. submarine base, since he really was not an experienced submarine officer, nor did he care to be stuck in the States with a war going on.
For the moment there was nothing to be done so he went, with what grace was possible, to New London, where he reported on 20 July. It was a big job, a sensitive situation, and, seemingly, a dead end. After plugging away unenthusiastically through the remainder of July and half of August, luck, or something much like it, came through. Either as a result of his continued pressure on Palmer, or possibly because Robison was as eager as Tommy to ease the personality situation, Hart was to be relieved. The Navy Department needed someone with long-range cruising experience in submarines to take an expeditionary force of boats across the Atlantic to conduct antisubmarine warfare against the Imperial Navy in the waters off the British Isles. Hart qualified. They wanted a volunteer—Hart more than qualified. Tommy Hart was going to war again.
When he arrived at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on 30 August he found that his submarines were still undergoing refit and repairs. He was not pleased by this news, by the way the workmen in the yard approached their tasks, by the general efficiency of his own crews, or, for that matter, by the state of the nation. Everyone at the yard seemed to be rushing about throwing money at problems and building more facilities than were necessary, instead of paying attention to simple matters such as doing small tasks well. He stomped around in a dark-brown study for weeks.
Complaints to Captain Robison accomplished little, and before all was in readiness late summer had turned into early fall. The first consignment of U.S. submarines, four K-boats, accompanied by Commander Hart in the tender Bushnell, set sail for the Azores on 13 October 1917. The route was by way of Nova Scotia and thence across the North Atlantic to Ponta Delgada in the Azores. The submarines were supposed to be towed part of the way because they were not designed for eighteen-hundred-mile cruises across open ocean. Towing was fine when the weather was decent, but as any sailor knows, the North Atlantic can be treacherous in the fall. When winds and seas rise, as they did midway in the trip, tow lines part and problems multiply. However, after ten and a half days—a record—Hart and his charges arrived safely in the Azores.
With four submarines at least in the arena of the war, Hart turned back to pick up the rest of his command. With the experience of one crossing under his belt, he thought he would be able to make a quick turn-around voyage. He figured without the mediocre efforts of the workmen at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. When he arrived there, he found that the remaining submarines were not ready. For the next two weeks he fretted and stormed, trying to put some fire under the workmen in the yard. Whether this had any effect is hard to tell, but by 18 November his next detachment was ready for sea. When he had picked up more submarines at New London, his group consisted of seven submarines, three seagoing tugs, and the tenders Bushnell and Fulton. These boats plus the submarines already in the Azores were to base in the British Isles for the duration of the war, so there were serious good-byes to be said. Caroline, instead of breaking down in tears as she had every right to do, sent him off with a smile, a slap on the back, and a cheery “Good luck!” “Is there another woman who could thus have sent her man to war?” he wondered. As for himself, he was unable to speak.
This passage was a little different from the first. Hart decided to take the most direct route across the open Atlantic to make up lost time. Unfortunately he did not take enough account of two things: the shortcomings of the tugs and the weather. Bad weather set in four days out of New London. The barometric pressure dropped to 28.98 as Hart and his little fleet found themselves in the center of a real stem-winder of a gale, which served to point up the deficiencies of the tugs as well as of some of the submarines. Consequently, when Hart was forced to put in to Bermuda on 13 December, five of his submarines and two of his tugs were missing. He went through ten anguished days of searching before he found all but one of his charges: one of the tugs, perhaps prudently, had given up and returned to New York.
Hart and his detachment spent late December 1917 and early January 1918 in the Azores. Finally, after much muddling, which he attributed to the difficulties of operating an alliance, he was ordered to take his force to Queenstown, Ireland. This port proved unsatisfactory because it was also serving as headquarters of the surface patrol forces, so Hart’s operation was transferred to the base at Berehaven in Bantry Bay.
The place might well have been called “Barrenhaven.” Its shore line was surrounded by low peat hills broken here and there by rocky piles 800 feet to 1,000 feet high. The wind blew rain or snow from all points of the compass while heavy dark clouds usually obscured the sun. Technically Hart was serving under Rear Admiral William S. Sims, who commanded all American forces in European waters, but his immediate superior was Captain Martin E. Dunbar-Nasmith, RN. Hart soon became very fond of Nasmith who had an enviable war record, a quick wit, and a love of the outdoors that equaled his own. Rainy, blustery afternoons would often find the two captains—Hart’s temporary promotion came through on 1 February 1918—tramping over the hills or clambering over the rock piles around the bay.
As commander of the only U.S. submarine flotilla in the European theater, Hart could hardly wait to send his boats into action. The British had found that a submarine with her low profile was much better able to approach another submarine undetected than was a larger vessel. Hence the game was to send one ship-killer in search
