Ships
- USS Condor (AMc-14) Ensign, officer in charge when placed in service, 18 April 1941 · DANFS and NavSource do not name a relief · The 7 December history names Ensign Russell G. McCloy as executive officer and does not say whether Hubbell was aboard
Monroe H. Hubbell, an ensign in the Naval Reserve, was the officer in charge of the coastal minesweeper Condor when she was placed in service at San Diego on 18 April 1941. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships entry, updated by Robert J. Cressman and dated 31 May 2022, names Ens. Monroe H. Hubbell, USNR, in that sentence. NavSource's line for the ship says the same: placed in service on 18 April 1941 under the command of Ens. Monroe H. Hubbell, USNR. Neither source names a relief. Neither says he was still in charge on 7 December 1941, and neither says he was aboard that morning.
Birth, home, and family were not in either source. The initial H. is all either source gives for a middle name.
No academy class and no earlier ship appear on the lines. Condor had been the wooden purse seiner New Example, built at Tacoma in 1937. DANFS says the Navy acquired her on 28 October 1940. NavSource says 24 October 1940. The conversion was at Martinolich in San Diego. She was assigned to the Fourteenth Naval District on 1 March 1941, before the day Hubbell is named.
Escorted by the oiler Tippecanoe, she sailed for Hawaii on 14 May 1941 and arrived on 28 May. The entries do not say that Hubbell made that passage. They say he was officer in charge when she was placed in service, three weeks and a half before she sailed.
Late in the mid watch on 7 December, sweeping off the Pearl Harbor entrance, Condor sighted a suspicious object and called the destroyer Ward. Ward sank a Japanese Type A midget submarine and reported it. The carrier planes arrived over the warning. Condor's own history does not name the lookout. Crossbill's history names Condor's executive officer, Ensign Russell G. McCloy, as the man who was certain he had seen a periscope. McCloy is not Hubbell, and Crossbill's entry does not mention Hubbell. A Wikipedia article says the Coast Guard manned Condor and gives the times 0350 and 0357. DANFS does not say that the Coast Guard manned her, and it does not give those times. Nothing in the Navy history puts Hubbell on the bridge, on leave, or anywhere else that morning. The gap is left as a gap.
She stayed in Hawaiian waters for the war. DANFS does not describe the years between the attack and her laying up, and it names no other officer. She was placed out of service at San Diego on 17 January 1946, struck on 7 February 1946, and transferred to the Maritime Commission on 24 July 1946. NavSource carries her after that as the fishing boat New Example, then as Veteran, then under the flag of El Salvador, fate unknown. None of that later life is tied to Hubbell.
No later command, promotion, or date of death was found.