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in private. Field Marshal Wavell was of mixed mind regarding Hart’s suitability for command. He complained to Winston Churchill via telegram that the fall of Manila had given the American “exaggerated ideas of Japanese efficiency.” Wavell described Hart as “a quiet attractive character and seems shrewd. But he is old and openly says so and gives me the impression of looking over his shoulder rather too much.” Hart was conscious that “almost no one had ever been retained in a sea-going command beyond the age of 64.” There was, he wrote, “a movement toward youth in all sea commands.” Tall, thin, and white-haired, the sixty-four-year-old habitually joked about being an “old man.” This might have been a gambit to build collegiality through self-effacement, but it only eroded the Allies’ confidence in him. Tommy Hart was, in his own words, “a worrier who never could sit back and coast until whatever was in hand was tied down and double-rivetted.” He would compose a diary of three thousand pages, the handwriting decaying into a shaky, arthritic scrawl by the end.

Hart was caught in a political crossfire from both east and west. At home, as the U.S. Army and Navy maneuvered to assign blame for the Pearl Harbor debacle, General MacArthur was trying to saddle him with the loss of the Philippines. Hart had to contend, too, with the Dutch admiralty’s bitterness over their exclusion from ABDA leadership. Admiral Helfrich was not only commander in chief of the Royal Dutch East Indies Navy but minister of marine in the Dutch government. His civilian authority underscored the awkward fact that Hart superseded him in the military hierarchy. Helfrich’s counterpart, General ter Poorten of the Dutch Army, was a co-equal of Hart’s. For Helfrich to stand beneath his peer seemed hard for him to take. He ribbed Hart about the inefficacy of U.S. submarines in the theater. The American suspected Helfrich might have withheld information from him, and even lied about the readiness of Dutch warships for counterattacks against the Japanese.

Hart sympathized with the Dutch and took pains to suggest to Helfrich that he had accepted the ABDAfloat post only reluctantly and had not lobbied for it. “I did not like to be commanding Admiral Helfrich on his own home ground,” he later wrote. As a sop to Dutch national pride he delegated to Helfrich the task of dealing directly with Rear Adm. Doorman, the commander of the Dutch surface combatants in ABDA, whom Hart would later put in command of a reconstituted Combined Striking Force.

Restrained and decorous in public, Hart never criticized the Allies in the press. In private, though, he was candid, even blunt, incapable of endorsing sunny pretenses about the military situation as he saw it. He could be intimidating to underlings. An Asiatic Fleet destroyer captain remarked, “I was scared of the old devil. It was a well known fact that he could shrivel an individual to a cinder with but a single glance of those gimlet like eyes.” When it came to jousting with foreign contemporaries, however, he appears to have been something of a pushover. Hart’s candor would be his own worst enemy. As disarming as he must have hoped his references to his age might be, it only gave Helfrich leverage in his back-channel effort to undermine him. If Hart’s combat instincts and the readiness of his ships would determine his fortunes in theater, his political survival would hinge on battles fought in Washington, a continent away.

Word of the “strategic withdrawal” of British troops down the Malay Peninsula arrived on January 31. The erosion of their position defied the royal imagination. Yet there the Japanese were, somehow vaulting the length of the jungle-sotted peninsula, on the verge of seizing “the Gibraltar of the East,” Singapore, Britannia’s most important naval base east of Ceylon. The quick collapse highlighted the futility of the British preference for convoying troops, and the grand waste of using all available Royal Navy and Dutch surface ships to escort convoy after convoy of troops bound for precipitous surrender.