Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

Shortly after ten o'clock that evening a brief signal was received 'Lt Lafayette Ron Hubbard, D-v (S),
USNR 113392, is this date detached from duty.'
On 4 October, the USS Algol sailed for Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands, from where she
would take part in the invasion of Luzon in the Philippines and the landings on Okinawa, earning
two battle stars. Her erstwhile Navigating Officer, meanwhile, was on a four-month course in
'Military Government' at the Naval Training School, Princeton, prompting him to claim ever after that
he finished his education at the venerable Ivy League university of the same name.
While he was at Princeton, Ron was invited to join a group of science-fiction writers who met every
weekend at Robert Heinlein's apartment in Philadelphia to discuss possible ways of countering
the Kamikaze menace in the Pacific. They were semi-official, brainstorming sessions that Heinlein
had been asked to organize by the Navy, in the faint hope of coming up with a defence against
young Japanese pilots on suicide missions. 'I had been ordered to round up science fiction writers
for this crash project,' Heinlein recalled, 'the wildest brains I could find.'[16]
Heinlein's apartment was only three hundred yards from Broad Street Station in downtown
Philadelphia and the group gathered on Saturday afternoons, arriving on Pennsylvania Railroad
trains which ran every half hour into Broad Street. 'On Saturday nights there would be two or three in
my bed,' said Heinlein, 'a couple on the couch and the rest on the living-room floor. If there was still
overflow, I sent them a block down the street to a friend with more floor space if not beds.'
Heinlein tried to avoid asking Ron to walk down the street as Ron had said that both his feet had
been broken when his last ship was bombed. 'Ron had had a busy war - sunk four times and
wounded again and again,' Heinlein explained sympathetically.
Sunday morning was set aside for the working session, after which everyone sat around swapping
stories and jokes. Ron often got out his guitar and entertained them in a rich baritone voice with
songs like 'Fifteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest' and 'I Learned about Women from Her'. He could
also reduce the assembled company to helpless laughter with his repertoire of fast-moving
burlesque skits in which he played all the roles.
On Saturday 2 December, Jack Williamson, then a Sergeant in the US Army, hosted a dinner in
Philadelphia for fellow science-fiction writers and their wives. He was to be sent overseas in a
couple of days and this was his farewell party. Among those present were the Heinleins, the de
Camps, the Asimovs and L. Ron Hubbard. 'The star of the evening', Isaac Asimov recalled, 'was
Ron Hubbard. Heinlein, de Camp and I were each prima donna-ish and each liked to hog the
conversation - ordinarily. On this occasion, however, we all sat as quietly as pussycats and listened
to Hubbard. He told tales with perfect aplomb and in complete paragraphs.'[17]
The host was less impressed. 'Hubbard was just back from the Aleutians then,' said Williamson,
'hinting of desperate action aboard a Navy destroyer, adventures he couldn't say much about
because of military security.
'I recall his eyes, the wary, light-blue eyes that I somehow associate with the gunmen of the old
West, watching me sharply as he talked as if to see how much I believed. Not much.'[18]
Heinlein's group never came up with any ideas about how to prevent US Navy losses from
Kamikaze pilots, but it did not matter much because the war was drawing to a close and Japan
was running out of aircraft and pilots to fly them. The last big Kamikaze strike was launched in
January 1945 against the US fleet (including Ron's old ship, the USS Algol) taking part in the
invasion of Luzon. That same month Ron was transferred to the Naval Civil Affairs Staging Area in