ROCHELLE HUDSON: Ingenue, Actress, Spy

ROCHELLE HUDSON

INGENUE, ACTRESS, SPY

(1916 - 1972)

the Wanderling

Movie actress Rochelle Hudson (1916-1972), a starlet at 13, was a longtime family friend of Edgar Rice Burroughs the author/creator of Tarzan The Ape Man. Reportedly snubbed by her schoolmates because of her rising fame as a movie star, she became close friends of the Burroughs family, often given rides to school by Burroughs' son Jack and going on vacations with them.

During a good part of World War II Hudson lived in Hawaii with her second husband, a naval officer stationed there. Edgar Rice Burroughs visited them in Hawaii several times during those years. Only 25 years old when the war broke out, Hudson had already worked many years in the film industry, appearing in a number of films ranging from Mr. Moto to Curly Top to Boston Blackie.

In 1939 Rochelle Hudson was working on a movie titled Convicted Woman for Columbia Pictures that was released in 1940. Another player in the movie was an actress named June Lang . During production the two struck up conversation in a friendly manner because both had worked on Shirley Temple movies, inspiring a sort of special "esprit de corps" between them. Like Hudson's career would soon be, Lang's film career would be interrupted as well, albeit for totally different reasons. Hudson took way too much time away from her acting career with her husband for reasons explained in the next paragraph. Lang got mixed up with and married a suspected heavyweight mob figure said to be a film producer named Johnny Roselli which, as a mob figure, was viewed way to unfavorable by the studios as well. Neither Hudson's nor Lang's careers really got back on track after the war. For more about the collaboration on their movie Convicted Women, click HERE .

Because of the marked slowdown to an almost complete halt in Hudson's film career in the years just prior to the war and into it's early years after having gone gangbusters for the whole decade before, people have long thought she had fallen into disfavor with the Hollywood powers that be or that her popularity had just waned to such a point she was simply just being passed over. However, on what some consider to be rather flimsy evidence, it has been reported, and what will be substantiated further down --- with only flimsy evidence found elsewhere notwithstanding --- that she had in fact been working as a spy during that period for the Naval Intelligence Service. She and her husband, posing as a civilian, were doing espionage work primarily in Mexico and together they posed as a vacationing couple to detect if there was any German or Japanese activity there.[1]

The Germans and the Japanese had set into motion their plans for world domination around the globe both overtly and covertly sometime in the mid to late 1930s, and because of the nature of the duties of Rochelle Hudson's husband in the Navy she was drawn into the events ahead of the curve. For almost everybody else in the western hemisphere, except possibly the American pilots and ground crews that volunteered clear across the world in China for the Flying Tigers , it started in earnest on December 7, 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Seven days after Pearl Harbor, on December 14, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy loaded nine of their largest most modern long range submarines, each airplane equipped and packed to the gills with extra munitions and explosive ordinance, and sent them clear across the Pacific, thousands and thousands of miles from their homeland, with orders to attack the U.S. mainland December 25th. Then the Japanese postponed the attack until the 27th. Then they canceled the 27th attacks. In the meantime, on Christmas Day, one of the nine submarines dispatched to the U.S west coast, the I-19, torpedoed and sank an unarmed American ship the SS Absaroka carrying nothing but lumber, in the Santa Catalina channel less than a mile off Point Fermin near Los Angeles in broad daylight. Why? A lot of it had to do with the sea facing radar and the coastal defenses. BUT, a lot of it had to do with how the Japanese were going to beat the system. After the I-19 attack all eyes were focused toward the ocean. However, other things were in the works, much bigger things. In Harbor Defenses of Los Angeles in World War II by John R. Monett, Lester Cole and Jack C. Cleland (1945) the following is found:

On December 31, 1941, the IV Interceptor Command reported that several enemy planes were<br>believed to have landed and been hidden near the inland desert communities of Indio and Brawley in the Imperial Valley of California. They also reported that five messages in Japanese code were being sent daily between Brawley and Mexico City via short wave radio. At 12:32 PM in the afternoon of December 31, 1941, the Federal Bureau of Investigation relayed the following message:

"There is a plan for air and sea attack against San Diego, San Pedro and San Francisco,...