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admitted in his disputed memoir that he suered from bouts of impotence, which he
apparently treated with testosterone. He also wrote of his concerns about masturbation,
which at the time was considered a sign of moral weakness that could also lead to many
physical ailments, such as weak eyesight, impotence, and insanity.
HUBBARD WAS FINALLY given another ship of his own, the USS PC-815, and he requested
Moulton to join him as his executive ocer. The ship was being constructed in Portland,
Oregon, and when it was nally commissioned, in April 1943, the local paper wrote
about it, describing Hubbard as a “Lieutenant Commander” (he was actually not yet a
full lieutenant), who was “a veteran sub-hunter of the battles of the Pacic and the
Atlantic.” There is a photo of Hubbard and Moulton standing in front of the small ship,
which was suited mainly for harbor patrol. Hubbard is wearing his glasses and holding a
pipe in his hands, with the collar of his pea jacket turned up and a determined look on
his face. “These little sweethearts are tough,” he says of the ship. “They could lick the
pants o anything Nelson or Farragut ever sailed. They put up a sizzling ght and are
the only answer to the submarine menace. I state emphatically that the future of
America rests with just such escort vessels.”
It is worth lingering a moment over this overblown statement. The scripted language
might as well have been lifted from one of Hubbard’s pulp-ction heroes. Hubbard must
have longed to be such a gure in reality, only to be thwarted by his repeated quarrels
with higher authority. Each detail Hubbard oers—comparing himself advantageously
with history’s greatest naval heroes, asserting that he holds the future of his nation in
his hands—testies to his need for grandeur and heroism, or at least to be seen as grand
and heroic. He would soon be given an opportunity.
The PC-815 was equipped with depth charges and sonar to detect enemy submarines.
Sonar sends out pinging sounds, which, in clear water, go unanswered, but obstacles,
such as enemy submarines—or sh, or debris, or even schools of shrimp—generate
echoes. The art of reading such responses is a tricky one, and although Hubbard had
trained on the device in sub-chaser school, he had been near the bottom of his class.
He cast o from Astoria, Oregon, for his shakedown cruise on May 18, bound for San
Diego to pick up radar equipment. At 3:40 a.m., only ve hours out of port, the sonar
picked up an echo ten miles o Cape Lookout in a heavily traveled shipping lane.
Hubbard and Moulton immediately put on headsets, trying to determine what the object
was. In particular, they were listening for the giveaway sound of a propeller. The craft
made no recognition signals that would have indicated it was an American vessel. “It
made noises like a submarine and it was behaving like a submarine,” Moulton later
testified. “So we proceeded to attack.”
“The target was moving left and away,” Hubbard wrote in his subsequent Action
Report. “The night was moonlit and the sea was at calm.” The professional writer in
him warmed to the narrative: “The ship, sleepy and sceptical, had come to their guns
swiftly and without error. No one, including the Commanding Ocer, could readily
credit the existence of an enemy submarine here on the steamer track.”