Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(16)

Hubbard continued the attacks all day and into the next morning. At seven a.m., he reported, “a boil of orange colored oil, very thick, came to the surface immediately on our port bow.… Every man … then saw the periscope, moving from right to left.” His gunners let loose. “The periscope vanished in an explosion of 20mm bullets.”

After sixty-eight hours of action, Hubbard’s ship was ordered to return to port. Hubbard and Moulton claimed that they had succeeded in sinking at least one, possibly two, enemy subs. An official investigation of the incident concluded, “There was no submarine in the area.” A well-known magnetic deposit nearby most likely caused the echoes that were picked up on the sonar. The only evidence of a submarine was “one bubble of air,” which might well have been the result of the turbulence caused by the heavy explosions. Japanese records after the war showed that no submarines had been present off the Oregon coast at the time.1

Hubbard continued to San Diego on his shakedown cruise. In June, the PC-815 participated in an exercise off the coast of the Mexican state of Baja. Afterward, he ordered additional gunnery and small-arms fire, shelling South Coronados Island, a dry atoll that he apparently failed to realize was a part of Mexico. He was admonished for firing on an ally and relieved of his command. He felt unjustly treated but also remorseful about the compromised situation he had placed his shipmates in. “This on top of having sunk two Jap subs without credit, the way my crew lied for me at the Court of Inquiry, the insults of the High Command, all combined to put me in the hospital with ulcers,” Hubbard noted in his disputed secret memoir. He spent the next three months in a naval hospital in San Diego. In a letter to his family he explained that he had been injured when he had picked up an unexploded enemy shell that had landed on deck and had blown up in midair when he tried to throw it overboard.

In October, he got another assignment, this time as the navigation officer on the cargo ship the USS Algol. The US Navy and Marines had begun their final island-hopping campaign before the expected invasion of Japan itself—Operation Downfall. Millions of Allied casualties were forecast. For a man who wanted to be a hero, there would be a genuine opportunity. Instead, Hubbard requested a transfer to the School of Military Government at Princeton. “Once conversant with the following languages, but require review: Japanese, Spanish, Chamorro, Tagalog, Peking Pidgin and Shanghai Pidgin,” Hubbard wrote in his application, adding, “Experienced in handling natives, all classes, in various parts of world.” Through all the carnage, the end of the war was lurching into view, and the likely occupation of Japan was on the horizon. A polyglot such as Hubbard claimed to be would certainly find a place in the future administration.

When he arrived in Princeton, in September 1944, Hubbard fell in with a group of science-fiction writers who had been organized into an informal military think tank by his friend Robert Heinlein. The Navy was looking for ways to counter the kamikaze suicide attacks on Allied ships, which had begun that fall as desperation took hold of the Japanese military planners. Hubbard would spend weekends in Philadelphia at the Heinleins’ apartment, along with some other of his former colleagues, including his former editor, John Campbell, gaming different scenarios for the Navy. (Some of their suggestions were actually tested in combat, but none proved useful.) Heinlein was extremely solicitous of his old friend, remarking, “Ron had had a busy war—sunk four times and wounded again and again.” The fact that Hubbard had an affair with Heinlein’s wife didn’t seem to affect his deep regard. “He almost forced me to sleep with his wife,” Hubbard later marveled.

There was another lissome young woman hanging around with the science-fiction crowd: Vida Jameson, whose father, Malcolm, was a part of the Campbell group of Astounding writers. “Quiet, shy little greymouse,” one of the crowd described Vida, “with great soulful black eyes and a habit of listening.” She was twenty-eight, and already selling stories to the Saturday Evening Post, a more respectable literary endeavor than the pulps. Hubbard proposed to her. She knew he was married and refused his offer; still, she was captivated by him and continued her relationship with him until after the war.

Hubbard graduated from the School of Military Government in January 1945, and was ordered to proceed to Monterey, California, to join a civil affairs team, which would soon follow the invading forces. The Battle of Okinawa, in southern Japan, got under way that spring, creating the highest number of casualties in the Pacific Theater. Kamikaze attacks were at their peak. American troops suffered more than 60,000 casualties in less than three months. Japanese forces were fighting to the death. The savagery and scale of the combat has rarely been equaled.

Once again, Hubbard stood on the treacherous precipice, where the prospect of heroic action awaited him—or else indignity, or a death that would be obscured by the deaths of tens of thousands of others. One month after the invasion of Okinawa, Hubbard was admitted to the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, complaining of stomach pains.

This is a key moment in the narrative of Dianetics and Scientology. “Blinded with injured optic nerves and lame with physical injuries to hip and back at the end of World War II, I faced an almost nonexistent future,” Hubbard writes of himself during this period. “I was abandoned by my family and friends as a supposedly hopeless cripple.” Hubbard says he healed himself of his traumatic injuries, using techniques that would become the foundation of Dianetics and Scientology. “I had no one to help me; what I had to know I had to find out,” he recalled. “And it’s quite a trick studying when you cannot see.”