Ships
- USS Missouri (BB-63) Captain, 31 May 1946 – 2 April 1947
Tom B. Hill, Tom Burbridge Hill in full, graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1922 and spent his career in the regular Navy. By the last year of the Second World War he was a captain. In the first spring of peace he was ordered to the Iowa-class battleship Missouri.
He assumed command of Missouri on 31 May 1946, relieving Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter. The ship had just come back to New York from the voyage that carried home the remains of the Turkish ambassador to the United States. Her earlier captains, William M. Callaghan and Stuart S. Murray, had already left her. Murray had the ship on 2 September 1945, when the Japanese surrender was signed on her deck in Tokyo Bay. Chester William Nimitz signed for the United States, with William Frederick Halsey, Jr. among the senior officers beside him. Captain Tom B. Hill was among the officers present on board that day. He received command of the battleship the following May.
His tour was a training command. From the end of May 1946 into the early spring of 1947, Missouri worked in the Atlantic with the forces that remained after the wartime fleets dispersed, exercising along the coast and at sea. The ship had been in commission only since June 1944, and the guns that had fired off Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Japan now served peacetime gunnery and fleet drills.
On 3 December 1946, during a gunnery exercise in the North Atlantic, a star shell fired by the light cruiser Little Rock struck Missouri. One member of the battleship’s crew was killed and three others were wounded. Hill was the commanding officer at the time of the accident.
He was relieved on 2 April 1947 by Robert L. Dennison. The passage to Rio de Janeiro that August, for the Inter-American conference, and President Truman’s visit to the ship there in September, came after Hill had left. He remained in the Navy and later held the rank of admiral. His months in Missouri were the quiet training interval that followed her return from the Turkish mission.