Summary of Hubbard's military record

Index of L.Ron Hubbard's entire military record in:
  original sequence
approximate date sequence
sorted by subject and date
Text transcript of the
Board of Investigation on firing of shots from USS PC 815

Welcome Aboard, Mr. Hubbard! I'll just take those records for you and Ensign Jones will escort you to the wardroom.

Now, let's see what kind of fine officer material we have here. Rips open envelope and looks at record.

Debt

There seems to be a 1942 letter of indebtedness from a Mr. Dave Margolis. This letter states that Mr. Hubbard failed to pay Mr. Margolis for a military uniform in the amount of $130.75.

Here is a 1943 letter of indebtedness, again from Mr. Margolis. Mr. Hubbard has progressed. The bill a year later was down to $120.75 And another unpaid bill from Ryders in Australia.

Here are a series of letters from the First National Bank of Ketchikan, trying to catch up with a certain Mr. Hubbard who walked off with $265.00. Mr. Hubbard seems to have kept the Naval Bureaucracy busy with all these letters. He let them know who was responsible for his "small and irregular payments" in his letter of 28 October 1942. It was now the government's fault for not paying him the money to which he would like to be accustomed.

Apparently money is not the only thing that Mr. Hubbard walked away with.

Here are a series of endorsements about a sub-machine gun Mr. Hubbard checked out in Australia but never returned. The strange thing about these endorsements is that they are only the paper trail in Hubbard's service jacket of the actual letter. The copies of the letters from Australia and of the letter from Hubbard explaining the loss seem to have turned up missing from Hubbard's service jacket. Missing, as in "removed." Whoever removed the letters, though, was not familiar enough with Navy administration to also remove the endorsements, which serve as a paper trail of the letters. The mode of transport for a Navy service jacket is that it is commonly carried by the service member when that member is transferred from station to station. There are six endorsements to these letters in Hubbard's service jacket, including one from the "Officer Performance Division" in Washington, D.C.

Dependents

It seems that one of Hubbard's main methods for paying off his debt was to accumulate mileage by transporting his wife and two children back and forth across the United States. The travel claims are too numerous to look at in detail, but he has certainly been a busy bee in this area. He was moving so much that the addresses in between submitting travel claims would change. He seems to have had some difficulty transporting his family back and forth between temporary duty stations and still collect on it, an accomplishment I'm sure all service people would like to achieve.

Discipline

Here is another 1942 report from Australia has turned up missing, and a copy of it had to be requested via radio-telecommunications. The Naval Attache Melbourne had found Hubbard "unsatisfactory for any assignment" and sent him back to the continental USA.

Within six months, Hubbard's new boss "urgently" wanted Hubbard removed from command. This time the report of September 25, 1942 did not turn up missing, but somehow it managed to stay in Hubbard's service jacket, along with a copy of Hubbard's complaint about it.

Nine months after that, in June of 1943, Mr. Hubbard was the subject of a 72-page dissertation on how not to pick artillery targets. His admiral was reacting to a complaint from the Mexican authorities. Key question: "Did either of those buildings resemble a hotel?"

It looks like one result of Hubbard's escapades in Mexico was that he was again relieved of command after receiving an official letter of admonition, this one specified that it was to stay in his service jacket. This one did not stray.

Fitness Reports - Officer evaluations

Most places Hubbard did not stay long enough to get evaluated, and his bosses duly reported that. Anywhere he stayed longer than several weeks, he was given average Navy officer evaluations, with an average of only one horrible exception per year.

July 7, 1943 - "lacking in essential qualities of judgment, leadership and cooperation"

pd fm 21 Jul to 28 Sep 1944, shakedown, Navigator, Trng Officer, Chief Censor, Spanish, Japanese
p. 2, recommended for promotion when due "temperamental, often has his feelings hurt"

October 3, 1945 failed to qualify physically for temporary appointment to Lieutenant Commander. He offered to be physically qualified if he could get the promotion.

Documents

There are a series of documents from April and June of 1941 of how Hubbard lined up a job for himself. Two qualifications he did not have to make up were that he was white and male The others took some imagination. He got good recommendations from college professors. Perhaps they felt sorry for him because of his poor grades. In any case the requirement for formal education was waived in Hubbard's case. In view of the disciplinary problems he caused and the jetstream of debt he left behind, perhaps waiving his requirements was not such a great idea.

Hubbard specifically requested that he become an intelligence officer. To get into the field, he claimed he had "professional experience in newspaper work and travel." In any case, he had plenty of experience in story-telling.

After Hubbard got booted off his boat for opening fire on a Mexican island, he requested orders for any combat amphibious operating area. He probably figured there was less chance of getting in hot water for firing upon friendly forces there, since by the laws of probability, he had a 50-50 chance of hitting something hostile. But in an October 30, 1943 letter, Hubbard's boss referred to the Board of Investigation in forwarding on Hubbard's request for Hero duty, sending his last hope of being a glorious war hero to a watery grave.

In Hubbard's letter requesting combat duty, he said one of his qualifications was "Service in South West Pacific" intelligence from December 1941 to March 1942. Actually he left the United States December 17, 1941 and did not report for duty until January 11, 1942. He arrived back in the USA March 23, 1942, which means he probably left Australia about February 23. It took that long by boat. That means the total time he was attached closer to one month than it was three months.

The longest job he ever actually held may have been "cable censor," which he held at several places.

From that point forward, Hubbard was interested mainly in paperwork

He requested and got a major in school in how to govern territories which the USA had conquered. Hubbard included in his qualifications that: he was the son of a Lieutenant Commander; "once conversant" in Japanese, Spanish, Chamorro, Tagalog, Pekin Pidgin, Shanghai Pidgin; and "experienced in handling natives." A few comments on these languages. Japanese is not a language you can pick up by reading about it or by listening to it. You learn Japanese by studying the grammar, word selection and intonation. It is not a particularly easy language to pick up unless you are surrounded by Japanese-speakers for a relatively long period of time. Spanish and Tagalog are languages spoken in the Philippines, Chamorro in the Marianas Islands. Pidgeon Peking and Pidgeon Shanghai means something like knowing how to buy a pack of cigarettes in those cities. Hubbard got the 90-day school on provincial government, and went to the staging area in California afterwards, but was soon reassigned to the hospital with an ulcer. With a record like this, I would not be too awfully surprised if the CO ordered Hubbard to have an ulcer and then to report to the hospital for treatment.

Freedom of Information

The Scientology has had an official copy of Hubbard's service record since June of 1979. It's main concern, of course, was to find out what everybody else had found out. So Scientology wrote the Navy and asked what information it had released to the California Department of Justice, which had requested information. The Navy said it had released no detrimental information, as there was no detrimental information in Hubbard's record. This would have been truer if Hubbard and the Church of Scientology would not have been distributing their own versions on a millionfold scale of what a big war hero Hubbard supposedly was, how he supposedly had been crippled and blinded from war injuries and how he had allegedly cured himself with his superhuman Scientology powers.

Two interesting documents include a copy of Hubbard's death certificate and his grades as George Washington University.

Medical Records

The medical records from June 1942 to September 1945 are missing, but the records of September 10, 1945 fill in the gaps a little. Hubbard was taking belladonna and phenobarbital for his "ulcer."

What a guy!

Scanning, Analysis and Links - Joe Cisar
Image processing and Web - Arnie Lerma   for Citizens Against Corruption A Virginia public interest non-profit corporation
Hubbard's Navy Record - US Navy with the help of a certain US Senator from Virginia.

Send copies of the  "Ron  the War Zero" flyer
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Available in .rtf format for Word Processors or Web format

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For more information about L Ron Hubbard's Scientology, Dianetics, Narconon, Criminon, Citizens Commission on Human Rights - CCHR, WISE, Volunteer 'Ministers'  and the constantly permutating front groups and other frauds, go to links page

see Chris Owen's expose of L Ron Hubbard's war record here: Ronthewarhero.org 

see L Ron Hubbard's entry at POWnetwork.org