The Cthulhu Wars

by Kenneth Hite

  Between July 1927 and February 1928, military assets were secretly recalled from police actions in Central America and staged in New England to prepare for Operation Ashdod (named from a passage in the First Book of Samuel), a full-scale assault on the Innsmouth threat. The objective was not merely to eradicate the Innsmouth cult, but also to recover sufficient intelligence to finally understand the nature of the “Pacific threat” once and for all. The 66th Company of 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment pulled out of Nicaragua and staged at Camp Devens west of Innsmouth in December to prepare for the operation. The USS O-9 (also known as SS-70), an O-class submarine launched in 1918, providentially ordered to New London from the Panama Canal Zone, began loitering off the coast of Massachusetts in January.

  A surprisingly well-publicized photograph of the USS O-9 (SS-70) in the Panama Canal Zone, officially dated to February 22, 1928, a week after the Innsmouth Raid she assisted by torpedoing the Deep One arsenal off Devil’s Reef. On the morning of June 20, 1941, while cruising with two other subs off the coast of Maine, an unknown force crushed her hull and pulled her under with the loss of all hands. (PD)

  Despite the heavy military component, the operation was led, at least nominally, by the FBI. On the night of February 13, 1928, the Bureau passed down instructions for Massachusetts State Police to close all roads leading to and from Innsmouth. Bureau special agents moved into position at the town limits on Massachusetts state highway 1A, where they briefed Marine Corps troops on the full scope of the assault. At the same time, FBI men aboard the Coast Guard cutter USCGC General Greene, based out of Boston, briefed its captain and the commander of the O-9, Lieutenant J. T. Acree, received orders to sail into Innsmouth harbor to support a Marine operation against “bootleggers,” who were expected to receive support from “the seas east of Devil Reef.” Although a little mystified by the order, Acree stationed his boat above a deep submarine gorge near the reef.

  The Marines encountered little resistance as they moved through the mostly abandoned streets of Innsmouth until they reached Federal Street. Clearing the ramshackle houses along the route they uncovered several slumbering families, all of whom professed their innocence and surrendered immediately. The Marines attempted to move the families out of the combat zone quietly, so they could continue toward the Marshes’ expected strongholds around New Church Green near the town center: the location of the Esoteric Order of Dagon and the Marsh, Gilman, and Eliot estates. However, a young girl and her mother, both of old Innsmouth stock, suddenly turned on their caretakers, wresting a Thompson submachine gun from a startled lance corporal and opening fire on the column from the rear.

  Taking cover among the residences, the Marines returned fire, and then continued forward – but they knew that the element of surprise was now lost. The Marines began setting fire to homes and businesses as they passed them to ensure against another unexpected attack, and for the remainder of the battle surrendering townsfolk were shot out of hand, any survivors being taken as prisoners to the staging area outside town. Although this tactic (honed in the Philippines and Nicaragua) almost certainly prevented additional attacks from behind the lines, it also forced the few innocent Innsmouth residents to oppose the Marines, effectively stiffening the town’s resistance. Despite the presence of both the General Greene and the O-9 in or near Innsmouth harbor, several belligerents are believed to have escaped into the sea, where they attempted to summon reinforcements from their aquatic cousins in the nearby Deep One settlement, which recovered records and subsequent interrogations would identify as Y’ha-nthlei.

  By 4.00am a Marine mortar barrage breached the Marshes’ hastily constructed defenses, allowing a platoon of Marines to begin a room-by-room attack on the old Masonic temple that had served the Esoteric Order of Dagon as its headquarters for almost 90 years. For the first time, the Marines found themselves in open battle with Deep One hybrids, and the under-prepared unit began taking heavy casualties.

  At about the same time, O-9 detected the first significant Deep One activity in the gorge just beyond Devil Reef, reporting “flashes of light” and “a low, moaning roar that rattled the hull so hard it popped rivets.” Whether they were warned by fleeing hybrids or contacted telepathically, the Deep Ones were stirring. As the submarine dove below increasingly choppy seas, the O-9’s hydrophones detected a large object rushing toward the boat from the canyon. Acree ordered the crew to fire torpedoes, ultimately collapsing the walls of the canyon before the creature – if creature it was – could emerge. MAJIC’s official assessment later classified the O-9’s target as a huge amorphous bioweapon known as a Shoggoth, but given the limited sensor capability of the O-class submarine no definitive determination can be made.

  Despite the loss of almost half a platoon in under an hour, the Marines ultimately eliminated the resistance within the Esoteric Order of Dagon’s temple, while the rest of the company moved on the massive, labyrinthine homes of Innsmouth’s most powerful residents. Even given the warning of machine-gun fire in the early stages of the attack, Innsmouth’s inhuman residents had been unable to prepare an adequate defense. By dawn, Operation Ashdod was over: the Marines withdrew, taking 249 prisoners back to Camp Devens, and Unit 10 began securing the town’s records, family libraries, financial documents, and Deep One artifacts for further study.

  The Innsmouth Aftermath

  “I am … contagious… I request you not to investigate the conditions of my death.”

  –Columbia University anthropologist Buell Halvor Quain

  On February 14, 1928, the United States government learned it had been at war for longer than it had been in existence. The Innsmouth raid took so many prisoners, and recovered so much intelligence – not just the crumbling tomes and scriptures from the Esoteric Order of Dagon hall, but bills of lading and payment from the Marsh Refinery – that the scope of the “Cthulhu cult” was finally, and terrifyingly, laid bare. An initial survey of captured documents broadly hinted that multiple species of nonhuman intelligences were arrayed against the United States specifically and humanity more generally, effectively threatening a global extinction event if unchallenged. In their first classified after-action report, Unit 10 agents asserted that “we appear to have uncovered a loose organization that transcends boundaries of nation and even species, dedicated to the destruction of this and every other state on earth. The antiquity of some of the documents collected suggests that this goal is longstanding. Their plan, if a strategy that extends across countless generations can even be called that, is already well under way.”

  In 1930, following a prolonged legal battle, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts began to fill the Quabbin Reservoir in the upper Miskatonic and Swift River valleys. The Secretary of War intervened in the case, ostensibly to guard Connecticut’s water rights, but in actuality to ensure the drowning of the town of Dunwich, a hotbed of Yog-Sothoth cultism. During the decade the reservoir filled, the Army Air Corps repeatedly bombed Dunwich and other sensitive valley sites including the meteorite-stricken Gardner farmstead: again the War Department cooperated, declaring the future lake bed the Quabbin Reservoir Precision Bombing and Gunnery Range. (James M.Hunt / Alamy)

  Despite the exemplary cooperation between federal criminal investigators and the US Navy throughout Operation Ashdod, lines of communication began to break down almost immediately afterward. Unit 10 took steps to classify the Innsmouth evidence almost as soon as it was removed from the town. Citing the ONI’s open investigation into what now appeared to be a pervasive infiltration of Deep Ones into the Navy’s ranks, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover refused to share either the evidence or the results of the Bureau’s analysis with the Navy. This did not prevent the Bureau from turning to private industry to examine its findings – but these first attempts to correlate the contents of the “Innsmouth cache” would end badly.

  In early 1930, the Bureau sent several samples of Deep One artifacts and remains to DuPont’s Purity Hall laboratory for chemical analysis by the prominent rese
arch chemist Wallace Carothers. Although the Purity Hall research did result in several critical breakthroughs – including the development of some of the first practical polyester fabrics – exposure to the alien materials exacerbated Carothers’ already serious depression. He committed suicide in a Philadelphia hotel room in April 1937 by drinking a cocktail of cyanide and lemon juice.

  Unit 10 read astronomer William Wallace Campbell into its research program in 1935 after he retired from the presidency of the National Academy of Sciences. He was asked to assess the validity of some of the astronomical data found among the Esoteric Order of Dagon’s documents, in particular those documents which alluded to alien intelligences in nearby space. Campbell’s research was short-lived: by early 1938, he had begun experiencing unexplained neurological disorders that left him blind and unable to speak for long periods at a time. In June of that year, he leapt to his death from a fourth-story window in San Francisco.

  The Bureau recruited a young Columbia University anthropologist named Buell Halvor Quain in 1935, following his year-long study of the culture and legends of isolated Pacific islanders. It was thought that Quain’s work would leave him well positioned to help translate and analyze certain religious texts and objects taken from the Innsmouth cache. Quain led two expeditions into the Brazilian interior in 1937 and 1938 to locate a native tribe that he believed was still speaking a “pure” (and possibly pre-human) language which underpinned much of the syncretic “Mythos” that the Cthulhu cult had adopted as its own. It was largely through Quain’s reports that the term “Mythos” was adopted in government documents after 1937. During his second expedition, Quain came to believe that he had contracted a mysterious linguistic disease; he quarantined himself from all human contact to prevent his condition spreading, finally hanging himself in early August 1939.

  While the FBI took the lead in examining, correlating, and cataloguing the Innsmouth cache, the US Navy found itself in charge of almost 250 prisoners, most of whom were only partly human. Initial attempts to hold the prisoners at a single facility were plagued by escape attempts. After having to take extraordinary measures to thwart these attempts throughout the winter and spring of 1928, the ONI had the prisoners separated into small groups and sent to inland military hospitals and prisons throughout the Midwest and Southwest, where their access to so-called “friendly alien populations” was assessed to be less likely.

  A US Marine detachment engages in a reconnaissance in force of Mi-Gö bases in Vermont, following a phosgene gas bombardment by Keystone B-6 bombers. This photograph, taken some time in 1937 or 1938, shows a Marine suffocating after removing his gas mask for unknown reasons: B-8 investigators suggested telepathic control, overwhelming panic, or an unknown side-effect on some personalities from handling Mi-Gö equipment. (Everett Collection Historical/Alamy)

  In the short term, the ONI debriefings were more productive than the Bureau’s disastrous attempts to comprehend the scope of their findings. As the Navy began to understand the scope of the threat, it prioritized immediate and aggressive, even ruthless, intelligence gathering. This was not without some cost to its own personnel: one very promising and open-minded investigator, a lieutenant on Pacific station on the USS Roper, had to be invalided out when he contracted a pulmonary infection from Deep One secretions. With few exceptions, prisoners whose intelligence value had been exhausted were tried and executed on charges of treason, though a small group of un-indicted detainees were still being held at the State Mental Hospital in Yankton, South Dakota, as late as 1949.

  The decisive moment of the Innsmouth Raid (on land at least) comes when a squad of Marines led by Lieutenant Allen Schofler advances without orders, entering the Esoteric Order of Dagon temple from Broad Street through a side window rather than supporting the frontal assault across the New Church Green. Caught unprepared, the hierophant (shown in the golden tiara described in Olmstead’s testimony but not listed in the official inventory of captured temple paraphernalia) flees through a secret passage into the network of tunnels beneath Innsmouth. Although the two full Deep Ones shown would kill or cripple five men in Schofler’s squad before going down in a hail of .45 bullets, the rapid capture of the cult’s idol broke the morale of the Marsh clan and their Deep One allies. At the end of the day, the Marines’ superior rate of fire and unit cohesion overcame the unnatural stamina of the Innsmouth folk, who were armed (if at all) with spearguns and antique Civil War-era firearms.

  Evolving Defense Schemes

  The Navy’s rapidly evolving counter-NRE mission was (and would remain) highly compartmented, with ONI officers deployed to several critical locations to monitor the Mythos threat. By 1929, the ONI had secretly tasked a unit in the First Naval District (encompassing most of New England) with monitoring several NRE-linked sites in coastal waters. This watching brief was under the auspices of the district’s Communication and Information Service, which until World War I had largely employed local reservists and volunteers. After the Department of the Navy overhauled the entire Naval district system in 1931, this small detachment was renamed Section B-8, and reorganized as a special departmental unit tasked with monitoring current intelligence on potentially Mythos-related activity from all 17 naval districts and re-examining historical holdings to ensure that earlier indications of NRE-related threats had not gone unnoticed.

  The discovery of several then-unidentifiable alien corpses – later determined to be Mi-Gö – in the aftermath of the 1936 Northeast Flood led Section B-8 to begin a series of visual surveillance overflights of New England. The overflights allowed B-8 to identify several previously unknown locations in northern Vermont that showed evidence of substantial occupation and excavation, as if the then-unknown creatures were mining the Green Mountains for some unknown but apparently valuable material. Sufficiently concerned about the possibility of additional non-human threats after its Innsmouth experience, the Navy worked quickly to organize three bombing runs over each of the sites, dropping conventional ordnance as well as phosgene and chlorine gas bombs on the sites within weeks of their discovery. The attacks were apparently successful. When a US Marine detachment reached the site on foot, they encountered no resistance, and recovered samples of advanced Mi-Gö technology that had been only slightly damaged in the attacks. In order to ensure that site exploitation could continue without undue public scrutiny, the former Mi-Gö operating base was absorbed by an expansion of the Army’s Camp Ethan Allen, which continues to serve as a testing ground for advanced weaponry to this day.

  World War II

  The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 served as a significant distraction from the varied threats posed to the United States by Mythos entities; when Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor drew the US into the war in 1941, the immediate threat overcame lingering but less pressing concerns about K’n-Yan, Deep Ones, Old Ones, and their supposed alien masters.

  One effect of this distraction was that a small Wisconsin publisher brought to press the works of H. P. Lovecraft in three volumes. The ONI did not learn of the leak until 1945, with the publication of The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Tales as #730 in the Armed Services Editions. The dangers posed by the Mythos were not completely forgotten, however: B-8 fell under the auspices of the counter-supernatural Supreme Allied Command: Shadow Theater (SAC:ST), and Vice-President Henry Wallace (an initiate into Central Asian traditions opposed to those of the Mythos) forced Hoover to promise full cooperation with SAC:ST operations, including cross-deployment of liaison personnel.

  One of the few known photographs of a Unit 10 team in action depicts a squad deploying flamethrowers against part of a small Cthulhu-spawn colony on the island of Eniwetok in February 1944. Unit 10 discovered that Eniwetok rests on a Cretaceous seamount, a major outcropping of Cthulhu’s sunken continent of Yhe. Whether the Japanese intended to lure the Americans into a Mythos deathtrap or fortified the atoll in ignorance, the response was overwhelming firepower: the battleships USS Tennessee and USS Iowa, along with shore artillery,
delivered over a kiloton of ordnance against both the Japanese and Mythos threats. (Osprey Publishing)

  This hybrid B-8/FBI group, which retained the cryptic designator “Unit 10” throughout the war, tracked a variety of known Mythos actors to ensure non-human elements would not be inadvertently drawn into the war. They hoped that even if NREs and their servitors became formal belligerents, the Allies would not be caught flat-footed. In but one example, Unit 10 maintained an extensive record of remote Mi-Gö probes penetrating and observing Allied bombing columns, where confused pilots referred to them as “foo fighters.” In the Pacific Theater, limited new intelligence and the now-fully analyzed partial reports from Ellis’s undercover mission in the Caroline Islands led Unit 10 to issue warnings prompting Allied forces to skip a planned invasion of Ponape during the island-hopping campaign. Instead, dozens of B-24 and B-25 bombers blanketed Ponape despite a limited Japanese presence on the island, and the battleships USS Iowa and USS Massachusetts bombarded the island on Walpurgisnacht, 1944. Thanks to the Ponape bombardments and an unknown number of other still-classified missions, the worst of Unit 10’s fears were never realized.

  The Château des Fausses Flammes in Auvergne, depicted after its destruction by the Maquis du Mont Mouchet in May 1944. Originally built on a pre-Roman foundation in the 9th or 10th century, Fausses Flammes became the center of a Melusine cult until its destruction by the pious monks of nearby Perigon. The decadent Duc des Esseintes rebuilt the château in 1875 and assembled one of the best occult libraries in Europe there. In 1944, the Nazis’ Projekt Leo targeted the Fausses Flammes library; a Unit 10 OSS team parachuted in to prevent the books falling into Kaltenbrunner’s hands, joining up with the local Resistance for what eventually proved to be a Pyrrhic victory for both. The Germans made off with portions of the library despite the château’s destruction; the Maquis were badly mauled in the fight and nearly the entire Unit 10 force ended the operation missing or captured. The confused reports of “living mummies” and “serpent vampires” do little to clear up the mysteries surrounding this obscure engagement. (LOC)