Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(14)
One of those momentary mates was named Helen. “I loved her and she me,” Hubbard recorded. “The affair would have lasted had not Polly found out.” Polly had discovered two letters to different women that Hubbard left in the mailbox when he was back in Port Orchard; she took the letters, read them, then vengefully switched the envelopes, and put them back in the mail. For a while, Ron and Polly didn’t speak.
They were apparently reconciled in 1940, when the two of them cruised to Alaska on their thirty-foot ketch, the Magician, which they called Maggie. They left their children with other family members for the several months they were gone. Hubbard called the trip the Alaskan Radio-Experimental Expedition, which entitled him to fly the Explorers Club flag. The stated goal was to rewrite the navigation guide of the Alaskan coast using new radio techniques; however, when the engine broke down in Ketchikan, he told a local newspaper that the purpose was “two-fold, one to win a bet and another to gather material for a novel of Alaskan salmon fishing.” Some of Hubbard’s friends, he related, had wagered that his boat was too small for such a journey, and he was determined to prove them wrong.
While he was stranded in Ketchikan, waiting for a new crankshaft, Hubbard spent several weeks regaling listeners of the local KGBU radio about his adventures, which included tracking down a German agent who had been planted in Alaska with orders to cut off communications in the case of war, and lassoing a brown bear on a fishing trip, which proceeded to crawl into the boat with him.
When the crankshaft finally arrived, Ron and Polly headed home, arriving a few days after Christmas, 1940, nearly six months after they set out. Little had been accomplished. “Throughout all this, however,” the church narrative goes, “Mr. Hubbard was continuing in his quest to answer the riddles of man.”
THE COMPETING NARRATIVES of Hubbard’s life arrive at a crucial point in the quarrel over his record in the US Navy during the Second World War and the injuries he allegedly received. He certainly longed for a military career, but he failed the entrance examination for the US Naval Academy and was further disqualified because of his poor eyesight. He lied—unnecessarily—about his age when he signed up for the US Marine Corps Reserve in 1930, backdating his birth by two years; this stratagem may have helped him get promoted over his contemporaries to first sergeant. His official record notes that he was “inactive, except for a period of active duty for training.” He requested to be discharged the following year because “I do not have the time to devote to the welfare of the Regiment.”
Months before Pearl Harbor, however, Hubbard was once again angling to get a commission in the Navy. He gathered a number of recommendations, including one from his congressman, Warren G. Magnuson, who wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt, praising “Captain” Hubbard, “a well-known writer” and “a respected explorer,” who has “marine masters papers for more types of vessels than any other man in the United States.… In writing organizations he is a key figure, making him politically potent nationally.” The congressman concluded: “An interesting trait is his distaste for personal publicity.” Senator Robert M. Ford of Washington signed his name to another letter of recommendation that Hubbard actually wrote for him: “This will introduce one of the most brilliant men I have ever known: Captain L. Ron Hubbard.”
In April 1941, his poor eyesight caused him to fail his physical once again. But with German U-boats attacking American shipping in the North Atlantic—and even in American coastal waters—President Roosevelt declared a national emergency, and Hubbard’s physical shortcomings were suddenly overlooked. He received his commission in the Naval Reserve, as a lieutenant (junior grade), in July 1941.
According to Hubbard, he got into the action right away. He said he was aboard the destroyer USS Edsall, which was sunk off the north coast of Java. All hands were lost, except for Hubbard, who managed to get to shore and disappear into the jungles. That is where he says he was when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. (Actually, the Edsall was not sunk until March 1942.) Hubbard said that he survived being machine-gunned by a Japanese patrol while he was hiding in the area, then escaped by sailing a raft to Australia. Elsewhere, Hubbard claimed that he had been posted to the Philippines at the outbreak of the war with Japan, then was flown home on the Secretary of the Navy’s private plane in the spring of 1942 as the “first U.S. returned casualty from the Far East.”
According to Navy records, however, Hubbard was training as an intelligence officer in New York when the war broke out. He was indeed supposed to have been posted to the Philippines, but his ship was diverted to Australia because of the overwhelming Japanese advance in the Pacific. There he awaited other transport to Manila, but he immediately got on the wrong side of the American naval attaché. “By assuming unauthorized authority and attempting to perform duties for which he has no qualification he became the source of much trouble,” the attaché complained. “This officer is not satisfactory for independent duty assignment. He is garrulous and tries to give impressions of his importance.” He sent Hubbard back to the United States for further assignment.
Hubbard found himself back in New York, working in the Office of the Cable Censor. He agitated for a shipboard posting, and was given the opportunity to command a trawler that was being converted into a gunboat, the USS YP-422, designed for coastal patrol. “Upon entering the Boston Navy Yard, Ron found himself facing a hundred or so enlisted men, fresh from the Portsmouth Naval Prison in New Hampshire,” the church narrative goes. “A murderous looking lot, was Ron’s initial impression, ‘their braid dirty and their hammocks black with grime.’ While on further investigation, he discovered not one among them had stepped aboard except to save himself a prison term.” Hubbard allegedly spent six weeks drilling this convict crew, turning them into a splendid fighting unit, “with some seventy depth charge runs to their credit and not a single casualty.” But according to naval records, he was relieved of command before the ship was even launched, by the commandant of the Boston Navy Yard, who declared him “not temperamentally fitted for independent command.” There is no record that Hubbard saw action in the Atlantic at any time.