Today in part 5 of our ongoing series on Hubbard’s dismal naval career, we examine the “Battle of Cape Lookout”, wherein he claims to have damaged and/or sunk two Japanese subs off the Oregon coast. It builds on the work of Chris Owen and Jeffrey Augustine and also draws on additional official US Navy records, and refutes some of the arguments of Hubbard’s apologists that attempt to shore up his Navy record. In doing so, we may have uncovered new evidence of Hubbard falsifying events beyond those previously exposed as fiction. The events here cross the line from normal incompetence to a Walter Mitty-like delusional fantasy, where, in the space of 55 hours at the helm of the USS PC-815, Hubbard attacked two Japanese submarines that existed only in his imagination. The narratives that emerge from this event provide a powerful foreshadowing of Hubbard’s pattern of lies, self aggrandizing fantasy and fraudulent conduct that would define so much of his later life, especially in regards to his military service.
In many ways, the events that occur over the roughly 80 days of Hubbard’s command of the USS PC-815, a PC-461 class patrol vessel and his subsequent spin on these events, provides more fodder in perpetuating all the myths, lies, half-truths and fraudulent misrepresentations Hubbard repeats ad nauseum about his previous 3 years in the Pacific. In our usual fashion, we’ll be providing additional analysis and historical context to the existing record in deconstructing and exposing the fantasy that was his fight off the Oregon coast over the 21st, 22nd and 23rd of May, 1943. We’ll also expose what we believe is an attempt to cover up specific incidents of Hubbard’s incompetence and his crew’s negligence that could have proved fatal. It makes for a rather interesting wartime tale, a tale rife with incompetence and as his after-action report demonstrates, a level of histrionics that reflects typical Hubbardian shirking and unconscionable scapegoating and badmouthing of his fellow officers. Continue reading “Debunking Military Lies Part 5: The Not So Great “Battle of Cape Lookout””