Military Career of L. Ron Hubbard - War Wounds

War Wounds

As the psychologist and computer scientist Christopher Evans has noted, "One aspect of war record that is particularly confused, and again typical of the mixture of glamour and obscurantism which surrounds Hubbard and his past, is the matter of wounds or injuries suffered on active service." Hubbard asserted after the war that he had been "blinded with injured optic nerves, and lame with physical injuries to hip and back... Yet I worked my way back to fitness and strength in less than two years, using only what I knew about Man and his relationship to the universe." Accounts published by the Church of Scientology asserted that he had been "flown home in the late spring of 1942 in the secretary of the Navy's private plane as the first U.S.-returned casualty from the Far East". A 2006 publication goes further, describing him as "the first American casualty of South Pacific combat".

Thomas Moulton, Hubbard's executive officer on the USS PC-815, testified in 1984 that Hubbard had said that he had been shot in the Dutch East Indies, and that on another occasion Hubbard had told him that his eyes had been damaged by the flash of a large-caliber gun. Hubbard himself told Scientologists in a taped lecture that he had suffered eye injuries after having had "a bomb go off in my face." He told Robert Heinlein, the science fiction writer, that "both of his feet had been broken (drumhead-type injury) when his last ship was bombed." According to Heinlein, Hubbard said that he had "had had a busy war – sunk four times and wounded again and again". Hubbard was said to have been "twice been pronounced dead" and to have spent a year in a naval hospital which he "utilized in the study of endocrine substances and protein". The techniques that he developed "made possible not only his own recovery from injury, but helped other servicemen to regain their health". On another occasion, Hubbard said that he had been hospitalized because "I was utterly exhausted. I'd just been in combat theater after combat theater, you see, with no rest, no nothing between."

This account was challenged by a series of writers and journalists from the mid-1970s onwards. Writing in 1974, Evans noted that the Veterans Administration had confirmed that (even at that late stage in his life) Hubbard "receives $160 a month in compensation for disabilities incurred during the Second World War. However the conditions listed as being '40% disabling' are: duodenal ulcer, bursitis (right shoulder), arthritis, and blepharoconjunctivitis." Evans noted: "a Navy Department spokesman has stated that 'an examination of Mr Hubbard's record does not reveal any evidence of injuries suffered while in the service of the United States Navy'."

Sixteen years later, the Los Angeles Times obtained Hubbard's medical records through the Freedom of Information Act. The records stated that Hubbard had told doctors that he had been "lamed" by a chronic hip infection, and that his eye problems were the result of conjunctivitis caused by exposure to "excessive tropical sunlight". Hubbard's post-war correspondence with the VA was also included, including letters in which he requested psychiatric treatment to address his "long periods of moroseness" and "suicidal inclinations." He continued to complain to the VA about various physical ailments into the 1950s, well after he had founded Dianetics; the Times noted that, significantly, Hubbard had promised that Dianetics would provide "a cure for the very ailments that plagued the author himself then and throughout his life, including allergies, arthritis, ulcers and heart problems." Other documents on Hubbard's medical file stated that he had injured his back in 1942 after falling off a ship's ladder.