The Cthulhu Wars

by Kenneth Hite

  While Japan grappled with an even more extensive series of Deep One infiltrations in its own Naval ranks, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had ensured that Germany devoted significant resources throughout the war to the pursuit of occult knowledge, which he believed held the secret to ensuring Aryan domination over the known world. By the end of 1943, Nazi Germany had amassed the single largest extant cache of Mythos-related tomes, scrolls, and grimoires in existence. SS Obergruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the head of the Reichssicherhauptamt (Reich Main Security Office; RSHA), tasked the catalog and study of this Mythos library to a Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service; SD) intelligence officer, SS Obersturmbannführer Werner Göttsch, as part of a program known as Projekt Leo. In January 1944, Göttsch consolidated 8,000 occult and Mythos tomes at Burg Niemes in the Sudetenland, where they could be studied “for potential tactical use” as the tide of the war began to shift in the Allies’ favor.

  Over the following year, Göttsch and his adjutant, Sturmbannführer Hans Richter, collected almost 35,000 books and documents at Burg Niemes. They plundered Masonic libraries, private collections from the Hexenturm at Idstein and the Faussesflammes Chateau in Vichy France, witch-trial archives, and in July even the Abwehr’s extensive library. The Leo collection included kabalistic texts looted from synagogues, church documents acquired from fascist holdouts in Rome, and (although Allied bombing directed by Unit 10 destroyed the Greek copy at Monte Cassino) a Latin Necronomicon recovered from a ruined castle in Romania. Göttsch then selected one hundred of the most significant items and moved them to Altaussee, Austria, where he was to attempt a ceremony to summon a being or force that Kaltenbrunner believed would come to the immediate defense of a Germany under siege. By the time arrangements for the mystical working were complete, however, Allied forces had begun to close in on Austria from both sides. After hearing reports of the brutal Soviet assault on Vienna in April 1945, a terrified Göttsch sent word to nearby American units that he was willing to defect if he could be extracted before Soviet forces arrived, and emphasized that he was willing to hand over whatever he could about Projekt Leo.

  A Unit 10 team swept into Altaussee to recover Göttsch and his holdings on May 8, 1945, just ahead of a much larger Soviet force. Although Göttsch was extracted successfully, agents were only able to recover less than half of the Leo trove before battlefield conditions forced them to retreat. Göttsch spent less than a week in a POW camp in Europe before being transferred to SAC:ST custody. Although his associates were all tried and executed at Nuremberg, Unit 10 recruited Göttsch after a substantial debriefing, and he served the United States in various capacities as an intelligence asset on NRE activity until his disappearance in 1974. There is no evidence that the Soviets captured any Projekt Leo personnel after the war, but they had almost certainly secured the remainder of the Leo documents for their own use by June 1945.

  THREAT REPORT: MEGARKARUA SAPIENS

  “Scientists to the last – what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forebears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn – whatever they had been, they were men!”

  –Professor William Dyer, “Response to the Report of the 1930–1931 Pabodie Antarctic Expedition”

  Megarkarua sapiens, perhaps better known to MAJIC agents as simply “the Elder Things,” are believed to have been the first complex multi-cellular organisms on Earth, arriving on the planet from a distant star system approximately 545 million years ago (MYA), just before a sudden explosion of biodiversity among the primitive bacterial life of the Precambrian era. Although some scientists have argued that the timing is mere coincidence, and that animal life would have developed even without the assistance and interference of the Megarkarua, the simple fact remains that many, if not most, of the extant species on this planet arose as the result of their engineering. Consequently, although the Megarkarua are rightly considered aliens by most observers, their place at the origin of what is otherwise considered “native” life on earth suggests that much, if not all, of the observable biodiversity on Earth is of similarly extraterrestrial origin.

  Adult Megarkarua sapiens stand 2 to 2.7m tall. Their bulging, five-ridged, radially symmetrical bodies are equipped with wings, and thin stalks used for locomotion and grasping protrude from the bottom and center of their bodies. They are incapable of speech but can communicate telepathically with other species. They reproduce by sporification, and in their larval stages appear similar to non-intelligent, native, prehistoric echinoderms: fossilized crinoid Megarkarua young were once thought to be a separate species of echinoderm designated Arkarua adami. The creatures can hibernate almost indefinitely in response to isolation or environmental stress, with some living examples known to be at least 80 MYA.

  Using bio-engineered alien or terrestrial slave-weapons called shoggoths, the Megarkarua expanded over the entire surface of the Earth, building cities both on land and underwater. The arrival of further extraterrestrial competitors (Flying Polyps ca. 500 MYA; Yithians ca. 450 MYA; Cthulhu ca. 350 MYA) slowly chipped away at Megarkarua dominance, but the real blow to their civilization came from within.

  Although not truly sentient, shoggoths are clever, aggressive, and violent. They turned on their masters around 252 MYA, igniting a global war that incidentally drove 85 percent of Earth’s species extinct. After a multi-million-year struggle that splintered the continent of Gondwanaland, the Megarkarua defeated the shoggoths, reducing them to a few breeding pits. The inability of shoggoths to breed independently, no doubt a deliberate fail-safe, has since kept them from overwhelming vulnerable native species.

  The war crippled the Elder Things, however, leaving them vulnerable to their rivals; the irruption of the Mi-Gö around 130 MYA eventually restricted the Megarkarua to Antarctica and the surrounding continental shelf. The glaciation of Antarctica finally ended the Elder Things’ civilization around 15 MYA.

  MAJIC considers the few remaining shoggoth breeding pits strategically vital. They serve as a major motivator for the continued US and Russian presence in Antarctica; Russia has maintained a supposedly peaceful scientific base atop an abandoned Megarkarua settlement in Lake Vostok since 1964. Such Megarkaruan ruins can become unstoppable biological weapons factories, but the physical constraints of polar military operations and the dangers of escalating combat with non-dormant shoggoth defenses keep US options limited. The disastrous Pabodie and Starkweather-Moore Antarctic expeditions in the 1930s demonstrated that some Megarkarua have survived their eons-long hibernation; possible Soviet-Megarkarua contacts were an ongoing nightmare for MAJIC planners during the Cold War.

  THE COLDEST WAR (1945–91)

  “How can you expect a man who is warm to understand one who is cold?”

  –Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Pictured receiving the Medal of Merit from President Truman, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal (1892–1949) provided crucial leadership in the postwar creation of MAJIC. He served on its governing committee until Truman fired him in March 1949, at which point he suffered a massive mental breakdown (doubtless caused by exposure to Mythos truths) and entered psychiatric care. On May 22, 1949, corpsmen found Forrestal hanged by the neck from the window of his room at Bethesda Naval Hospital, in circumstances that remain mysterious to this day. (NARA)

  When President Truman formally disbanded the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in September 1945, Unit 10 quietly continued operations under the auspices of the War Department’s Strategic Services Unit. It was supervised by Curtis V. Ropes, a physics professor who had been drawn into the OSS at OSS Director William Donovan’s request in the early days of the war, along with several other New England academics. Despite the vast amount of NRE material uncovered during the war, the Unit 10 operation budget dwindled with the rest of the national security establishment. Uniformed personnel demobilized; aca
demics returned to universities whose student bodies were booming thanks to the GI Bill; and the investigators who had formed the core of the prewar unit were transferred back to the FBI. Hoover considered the Deep One threat contained – and more importantly, he believed in the supremacy of his FBI fiefdom: no outsiders requested or required. To defend the nation against the Mythos threat, Dr Ropes relied on a trickle of War Department funding and staff, and on his own powers of persuasion.

  Pole Positioning

  The United States occupied Greenland in 1941 after Denmark fell to Hitler’s forces, and postwar strategists intended a permanent military presence to remain on the island. When Ropes found out about the planned deployments, he arranged a special compartmented briefing for Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, outlining the dizzying array of Mythos dangers in both the north and south polar regions. He urged Forrestal to organize several precautionary expeditions before committing US military personnel to operate in what Ropes believed was effectively enemy territory.

  A modern view of Thule Air Base in Greenland, established in 1951 near the site of a World War II-vintage USAAF weather station. In 1982, Thule became a USAF Space Command base, monitoring not just ballistic missile launches but Flying Polyp activity in the Van Allen belt and potential alien incursions from extralunar space. (PD)

  Ropes had reason to be concerned. He had been one of the survivors of the 1930–1931 Pabodie Antarctic Expedition, and after being read into Unit 10 in 1941 had been shocked to learn that then-Commander Richard Byrd’s 1928–1929 expedition had actually overflown the same abandoned, prehistoric city where he had left seven of his colleagues dead. On the other side of the world in 1860, Ropes’ great-uncle, Princeton anthropologist William Channing Webb, had encountered an isolated Greenland Inuit tribe who practiced a bloodthirsty religion centered around the appeasement of several malevolent demigods who were believed to inhabit the island’s glacial interior – and of Cthulhu himself.

  Byrd, who had narrowly survived an encounter with an unknown Mythos presence on his second Antarctic sojourn in 1934, eagerly added his voice to Ropes’. Forrestal reluctantly approved a series of expeditions designed to help manage the potential threat posed by NREs at both poles.

  The US Antarctic Program photo library describes this picture as one of Albert H. Taylor (1879– 1961) of the Naval Research Laboratory experimenting with sound transmission through ice at the Little America station during Operation Highjump in 1946–47. The man depicted looks considerably younger than the 67-year-old Taylor, however, and this may be a photo of Commander James Starkweather (1894–1973) using experimental radars designed by Taylor to detect Megarkaruan structures under the ice cap. (LOC)

  THE THULE INCIDENT

  MAJIC attempted a tactical nuclear strike against Itlaqqa in January 1968. Most information on the mission remains classified, so it is impossible to determine its success: however, it is known that the B-52G Stratofortress HOBO 28 crashed onto the sea ice near Thule Air Base on January 22 with only four of its five warheads still on board. A MAJIC tiger team noted in 1998 that following the mission global temperatures began rising after a 30-year plateau; they have now increased by 0.7°C, leading to increased Greenland ice melt. Is this Itlaqqa’s response to the strike, or has a rival NRE such as Tsathoggua moved into the empty niche?

  Operation Nanook

  In late July 1946, the Balao-class submarine USS Atule, the US Coast Guard icebreaker USCGC Northwind, and three US Navy auxiliary ships led by the seaplane tender USS Norton Sound, arrived in Greenland’s North Star Bay on a supposedly cartographic mission, codenamed Operation Nanook. All but one of the ships had seen service in the Pacific Theater, with veteran crews who had survived combat operations in or near presumed NRE strongholds. Over the course of several weeks, the fleet surveyed the region for an area suitable for the establishment of a weather station and an airstrip suitable for launching combat and surveillance operations into Greenland’s interior; by early August three Martin PBM Mariner bombers had delivered over 30,000 pounds of conventional ordnance over at least one Inuit village, as well as an isolated peak believed to be identifiable with the Hyperborean Mount Voormithadreth alluded to in both the Pnakotika and the pre-Roman Book of Eibon.

  On March 5, 1927, President Coolidge awarded Commander Richard E. Byrd (1888-1957) the Medal of Honor for his pioneering flight over the North Pole on May 9, 1926. The hand-written sextant readings in Byrd's journal of that flight do not match his typed dead-reckoning numbers, which historians take to be a sign of exhaustion, error, or fraud. Another possibility is that Byrd encountered (or entered geometric space distorted by) Itlaqqa, a Flying Polyp, or a similar NRE -- which would explain his decades-long, near-fanatical devotion to exploring Mythos activity in Antarctica. (LOC)

  When one of the bombers crashed into the Fenris glacier after clipping an invisible object on its way back to the fleet’s operating base near Thule, the Norton Sound contacted Danish authorities in an attempt to organize an overland rescue expedition. Although three Inuit tribes initially volunteered to assist the task force in recovering the downed crew, they balked and refused to proceed when they learned the plane’s estimated location. The Inuit warned the Naval personnel that the territory was considered sacred to the evil spirit they called Itlaqqa, a name possibly derived from the Inuktun Itla-shua or Tunumiisut Tlam-shua (“Universe Owner”). The Inuits’ description of this being suggested a possible connection to the Ojibwa and Cree cannibal madness-spirit Witiko or Wendigo, a supposition lent greater credence by the state in which the downed crew was eventually found: although they had evidently survived the crash itself, they murdered each other while awaiting rescue. The last to die had eaten the feet and hands of those who had preceded him in death, even though the plane’s emergency food rations were found accessible and intact.

  Operation Highjump

  “The fantastic speed with which the world is shrinking … is one of the most important lessons learned during [our] recent Antarctic exploration. I have to warn my compatriots that the time has ended when we were able to take refuge in our isolation and rely on the certainty that the distances, the oceans, and the poles were a guarantee of safety.”

  –Rear Admiral Richard Byrd (Ret.), after Operation Highjump

  During Operation Nanook, in late August 1946, Rear Admiral Richard Cruzen led a separate and much larger expedition to Antarctica, codenamed Operation Highjump, with Byrd along as an “advisor.” Highjump’s Task Force 68 (TF 68) included more than 4,700 men, 33 aircraft, and 13 ships organized into three semi-independent groups, led by the newly built Essex-class aircraft carrier USS Philippine Sea, which would see its first combat action during the operation. Officially, the expedition was engaged in a scientific survey of the Antarctic coast that was to end in the establishment of a research base informally named “Little America IV.”

  Since at least the 1960s, conspiracy theorists have suggested that the true purpose of Highjump was an attack on a secret Nazi UFO base hidden beneath the Antarctic ice that served as a final redoubt for the defeated Reich. This is, of course, absurd. The true purpose of the mission was to establish a permanent American foothold on the continent that would allow it to surveil, and if necessary destroy, the ancient Megarkarua sapiens city that the Byrd and Pabodie expeditions had discovered in 1929 and 1931.

  A rare photograph of a Mi-Gö in flight, shot from a B-17 gun camera over Germany in August 1944. Normal film cannot record Mi-Gö matter, likely due to its divergent superstring weft; the white dome in this shot may be a Yuggothian vehicle carapace, or the sunlight glinting off the Mi-Gö body. The USAAF classified all such sightings as "foo fighters," a name of uncertain origin. It may have come from men of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron overhearing Unit 10 agents referring to "Cthulhu" while investigating the sightings: "thooloo" or "thoo" lights becoming "foo fighters" in the official records due to phoneme drift or Unit 10 censorship. (Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy)

  Byrd’s
previous expeditions had been greatly publicized in the United States, but he had studiously avoided any references to NRE phenomena in public statements about his experiences. As TF 68 approached the Antarctic coast, he revealed the true nature of the danger in a classified briefing aboard the Philippine Sea. While the few aerial photographs of the above-ground city in the Transantarctic Mountains strongly suggested that it was uninhabited, the Balao-class submarine USS Sennet located a second pre-human city on the sea floor beneath the Ross Ice Shelf in early September.

  Over the next five months, TF 68 meticulously mapped numerous Mythos sites on the continent, frequently encountering Mi-Gö “foo fighter” probes. In December, efforts to establish a more permanent forward operating base carved into the thick ice of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet led to the inadvertent discovery of a massive temple complex, apparently wholly separate from the Megarkarua city, which was filled with sinister carvings of cyclopean bird-like saurians vaguely resembling pterodactyls: likely identifiable with the “Shantak-birds” mentioned in von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten. The collapsing ice freed several of these evidently ageless creatures, which harassed Highjump personnel for almost two weeks until shot down by F8F Bearcat fighters launched from the Philippine Sea. Despite these difficulties, by January 1947 Highjump had secured photographs, artifacts, and in several cases tissue samples from each of the pre-human sites they identified, as well as complete live (if hibernating) specimens of the Megarkarua themselves.