Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

three-man Board of Investigation concluded that Lieutenant Hubbard had disregarded orders, both
by conducting gunnery practice and by anchoring in Mexican territorial waters without proper
authority.
It was recommended, in the light of the short time he had been in command, that he should be
admonished in lieu of the more drastic disciplinary action that the offences would normally have
deserved.[9] But it was also decided that he should be transferred to other duties.
On 7 July, after just eighty days as Commanding Officer of his own ship, Ron signed his last page
of the PC-815's deck log: '1345, Signed on Detachment, L. R. Hubbard.'
In a fitness report covering his brief career as a Commanding Officer, Rear-Admiral E.A. Braisted,
Commander, Fleet Operational Training Command, Pacific, rated Lieutenant L.R. Hubbard as
'below average' and noted: 'Consider this officer lacking in the essential qualities of judgement,
leadership and cooperation. He acts without forethought as to probable results. He is believed to
have been sincere in his efforts to make his ship efficient and ready. Not considered qualified for
command or promotion at this time. Recommend duty on a large vessel where he can be
properlysupervised.'[10]
Ron was posted to temporary duty in the Issuing Office at Headquarters, Eleventh Naval District in
San Diego, where he almost immediately reported sick with a variety of ailments ranging from
malaria to a duodenal ulcer to pains in his back. He was admitted to the local naval hospital for
observation and remained there as an in-patient for nearly three months. He wrote home to inform
the family that he was in hospital because he had been injured when he picked up an unexploded
shell from the deck of his ship; it had exploded in mid-air as he threw it over the side.[11]
In later years Ron would tell a story of how he had helped the staff at San Diego Naval Hospital
during this period.[12] It seemed a regiment of marines had been shipped home with a disease
called filoriasis about which the doctors knew nothing. Ron, because of his experience in 'the
South Pacific', advised them that although there was a serum available to treat the condition, his
understanding was that a spell in a cold climate would work equally well. Accordingly, the regiment
was despatched to Alaska where, Ron said, 'I am sure they all recovered.'
This good deed done, in October 1943 Ron was sent on a six-week course at the Naval Small Craft
Training Center on Terminal Island, San Pedro, California. In December he learned he was to be
given another opportunity to go to sea - as the Navigating Officer of the USS Algol, an amphibious
attack cargo ship under construction at Portland, Oregon.
To judge from an entry in his private journal, he was not particularly thrilled about going back to sea,
nor indeed, about being in the Navy at all. 'My salvation is to let this roll over me,' he noted gloomily
on 6 January 1944, 'to write, write and write some more. To hammer keys until I am finger worn to
the second joint and then to hammer keys some more. To pile up copy, stack up stories, roll the
wordage and generally conduct my life along the one line of success I have ever had.'[13]
'The only thing that ever affected me as a writer,' he recalled years later in a newspaper
interview,[14] 'was the US Navy when their security regulations prohibited writing. I was quiet for
about two years before I couldn't take it any more and went and took it out on a typewriter and,
wearing a stetson hat in the middle of a battle theater, wrote a costume historical novel of 60,000
words which has never seen the light of day.'
For the first six months of 1944, Ron remained in Portland during the fitting out of the Algol. News of