Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(15)
The Navy then sent Hubbard to the Submarine Chaser Training Center in Miami. He arrived wearing dark glasses, probably because of conjunctivitis, which plagued him throughout the war and after, but he explained to another young officer, Thomas Moulton, that he had been standing too close to a large-caliber gun while serving as the gunnery officer on a destroyer in the Pacific, and the muzzle flash had damaged his eyes. Hubbard’s classmates at the sub-chaser school looked upon him as a great authority because of his wartime adventures. That he seemed so reticent to boast about them only enhanced his standing.
While he was in Miami, Hubbard contracted gonorrhea from a woman named Ginger. “She was a very loose person,” he confides in his disputed secret memoir. “I was terrified by it, the consequences of being discovered by my wife, the navy, my friends.… I took to dosing myself with sulfa in such quantities that I was afraid I had affected my brain.”
Wartime sexual diseases were a common affliction, and servicemen were constantly being cautioned about the dangers of casual romance. Although American sexual relations were freer in practice than the popular culture admitted at the time, divorce was still sharply stigmatized; and yet, as a young man Hubbard seemed to be constantly driven toward reckless liaisons and courtships that would destroy his marriages and alienate his children (he would eventually father seven children by three wives). He admitted in his disputed memoir that he suffered from bouts of impotence, which he apparently treated with testosterone. He also wrote of his concerns about masturbation, which at the time was considered a sign of moral weakness that could also lead to many physical ailments, such as weak eyesight, impotence, and insanity.
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HUBBARD WAS FINALLY given another ship of his own, the USS PC-815, and he requested Moulton to join him as his executive officer. The ship was being constructed in Portland, Oregon, and when it was finally commissioned, in April 1943, the local paper wrote about it, describing Hubbard as a “Lieutenant Commander” (he was actually not yet a full lieutenant), who was “a veteran sub-hunter of the battles of the Pacific and the Atlantic.” There is a photo of Hubbard and Moulton standing in front of the small ship, which was suited mainly for harbor patrol. Hubbard is wearing his glasses and holding a pipe in his hands, with the collar of his pea jacket turned up and a determined look on his face. “These little sweethearts are tough,” he says of the ship. “They could lick the pants off anything Nelson or Farragut ever sailed. They put up a sizzling fight and are the only answer to the submarine menace. I state emphatically that the future of America rests with just such escort vessels.”
It is worth lingering a moment over this overblown statement. The scripted language might as well have been lifted from one of Hubbard’s pulp-fiction heroes. Hubbard must have longed to be such a figure in reality, only to be thwarted by his repeated quarrels with higher authority. Each detail Hubbard offers—comparing himself advantageously with history’s greatest naval heroes, asserting that he holds the future of his nation in his hands—testifies to his need for grandeur and heroism, or at least to be seen as grand and heroic. He would soon be given an opportunity.
The PC-815 was equipped with depth charges and sonar to detect enemy submarines. Sonar sends out pinging sounds, which, in clear water, go unanswered, but obstacles, such as enemy submarines—or fish, or debris, or even schools of shrimp—generate echoes. The art of reading such responses is a tricky one, and although Hubbard had trained on the device in sub-chaser school, he had been near the bottom of his class.
He cast off from Astoria, Oregon, for his shakedown cruise on May 18, bound for San Diego to pick up radar equipment. At 3:40 a.m., only five hours out of port, the sonar picked up an echo ten miles off Cape Lookout in a heavily traveled shipping lane. Hubbard and Moulton immediately put on headsets, trying to determine what the object was. In particular, they were listening for the giveaway sound of a propeller. The craft made no recognition signals that would have indicated it was an American vessel. “It made noises like a submarine and it was behaving like a submarine,” Moulton later testified. “So we proceeded to attack.”
“The target was moving left and away,” Hubbard wrote in his subsequent Action Report. “The night was moonlit and the sea was flat calm.” The professional writer in him warmed to the narrative: “The ship, sleepy and sceptical, had come to their guns swiftly and without error. No one, including the Commanding Officer, could readily credit the existence of an enemy submarine here on the steamer track.”
It wasn’t crazy to think that enemy ships might be in the area. A Japanese submarine had bombarded an oil facility near Santa Barbara the year before. Another Japanese submarine, the intrepid I-25, had shelled Fort Stevens, at the mouth of the Columbia River, not far from where Hubbard and his crew were now. The I-25 had also smuggled a disassembled seaplane to the Oregon coast in September 1942, where it was put back together and used to drop incendiary bombs in the forest near Mount Emily.
Shortly after the first echo, “with dawn breaking over a glassy sea,” an object appeared on the surface. Hubbard ordered the guns to open fire. It turned out to be a log. Hours passed. Convinced that the submarine was still out there, Hubbard ordered depth charges dropped on the elusive craft. “Great air boils were seen and the sound of blowing tanks was reported by the soundman,” Hubbard wrote. “All guns were now manned with great attention as it was supposed that the sub was trying to surface.” Incredibly, a second submarine was suddenly detected, only four hundred yards away. Hubbard radioed for assistance and additional explosives. Other naval ships soon arrived, but they were reluctant to drop their charges on a target they couldn’t seem to locate. Hubbard was furious and blamed their “inexperience or unwillingness” for their failure to follow his lead.