Introduction
On April 15, 1945--two weeks before Hitler's suicide in Berlin--the dying Nazi spider was still spinning webs and sending out poisonous stings against its enemies. Though amputated of most of its tentacles, Hitler's empire lay narcotized amid its dreams of phantom armies and Wagnerian hordes. Not all of its weapons were phantoms, however. Many of the Wunderwaffen (wonder weapons) of those final days anticipated the fantastic gadgetry of the Cold War to come.
Among the Nazi empire's deadly stingers was an arsenal of atomic bomb material and the jet fighters to deliver the bombs--packed in the holds of a giant submarine and headed for Tokyo, where the bombs and planes would be assembled for a series of numbing strikes on major U.S. cities.
It sounds like the plot from a 1930s comic book, or perhaps a modern Retro movie in the spirit of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but the voyage of Hitler's last known submarine assault really happened, and in this article you will learn some of the astounding circumstances surrounding not only this desperate ploy by the Germans, but how the atomic bomb materials vanished from historical accountability on a U.S. Navy dock in New Hampshire and may have ended up being flown in diplomatic containers to the Soviet Union aboard U.S. aircraft on the Alaska-Siberia Air Bridge from Malmstrom Air Base, South Dakota. The missing materials may just as well have ended up in the bomb that devastated Hiroshima, but we'll probably never know for sure. Meanwhile, here is a fascinating account of this epic adventure, with excerpts from Ann Cymba's global adventure Nob Hill, dramatizing the final voyage of U-234.
Just the size of the boat involved was remarkable for the time. U-234 was one of the largest submarines built in World War II, and her captors were astonished as they tied up to an undersea vessel over one fourth of the size of the Queen Mary, dwarfing the three little U.S. Navy destroyer escorts to whom she was to surrender. If that surrender were the end of the story, it would be a remarkable tale in itself. But there would a lot more web for these spiders to weave--Commie Uncle Joe among them.
The circumstances surrounding the final wartime cruise of the U-234 are touched with tragedy, bombast, and outright comedy. The first time she was to sail (on a different mission, aborted) in late 1943, Allied bombers damaged her so badly she had to limp back into port and be refitted from stem to stern. In April, as special Nazi political and engineer troops loaded the secret cargo aboard, Captain Johann Fehler's regular (and typically cocky) submarine sailors were conspiring to beach the sub in the South Seas and live a Robinson Crusoe existence. Two Japanese engineer officers on board would end their lives in a tortured tryst rather than surrender when the order went out April 30 from the new Fuehrer Doenitz. An anti-Nazi Luftwaffe general and a blowhard Nazi judge aboard the sub would continue verbal sparring until their confinement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Ultimately, one of World War II's greatest unsolved mysteries is who ended up with the material? Was it the U.S. or Stalin's Soviet Union? It's estimated there was enough highly purified yellowcake uranium for up to a dozen atomic bombs of the size that devastated Hiroshima. In the savage dreams of Hitler's desperate henchmen, the United States might have been devastated by up to 12 such catastrophic strikes--perhaps leveling such national treasures as Washington D.C., Manhattan, or Boston on the East Coast or Chicago in the nation's middle. Strategically, the Japanese would have wanted to level important Pacific Coast naval port cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Had the mission of U-234 gone as planned, Japan might have been able to delay her defeat and change the course of history. As it happens, it is quite likely that the secret cargo of U-234, and its unknown end, affected history in ways that may never be fully understood.
Did the uranium end up in a U.S. depot? Was it part of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima? Most provocatively--with the help of Stalin's enormous spy apparatus in the U.S.--could it have been shipped across Siberia on the secret U.S.-Soviet Air Bridge between Montana and the U.S.S.R." If the latter scenario were true, it would have given the Soviet Union the materials for their first atomic bomb--in any case, the U.S.S.R. had atomic weapons by 1949, or about 48 months after the Hiroshima bombing.
World War II can be regarded in three very broad sections. First, roughly 1939-1942, we have the terrifying and seemingly unstoppable assault by the Axis powers against the free world. Second, roughly 1942 to 1944, we see the slowing and rollback of the Axis advance in some of the most desperate hours for both sides. Third, from 1944 to 1945, we have the (from the victor's standpoint) exhilarating and unstoppable assault against the crumbling Reich and its allies. In the final months of the latter period, we see the remarkable intersection of two of history's most enormous struggles: World War II and the Cold War (or World War III, as future historians may well call the struggle between Communism and Capitalism). In the middle months of 1945, in San Francisco, President Harry Truman and some 50 other world leaders would launch the United Nations amid fanfare, triumph, and hope. At the same time, atomic bomb material was passing through the port of San Francisco on its way to staging areas in the Pacific Ocean, for final assembly and dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the same time, also, even though the Soviet Union had been decimated by war--an estimated one fourth of its population may have perished--Stalin coldly and characteristically was waging an unprecedented espionage war within the United States. This espionage campaign stretched from coast to coast, from Canada to South America, from the shadows of the White House to the halls of major universities involved in the war effort. All the major powers during World War II were seriously engaged in atomic bomb research--the U.S., the U.S.S.R., Germany, Japan, Britain. The anti-Semitic policies of Czarist Russia and, later, Hitler's Germany had driven many prominent intellectuals to the United States (Albert Einstein, Lawrence Oppenheimer's parents, and many others) and ironically enough this put the U.S. in the forefront of atomic bomb development. The other powers were perhaps years, perhaps months, behind on the development track. In any case, had Japan received the materials Hitler was sending aboard U-234, the Japanese might well have been able to assemble the bombs and the jets to deliver them in time to salvage something from their desperate situation.
Perhaps one fact above all gives a clear indication of how utterly and thoroughly Stalin's espionage apparatus had infiltrated much of the U.S. infrastructure. During the ceremonies and delirium surrounding the founding of the U.N. in San Francisco, and in the years immediately after, as Stalin successfully followed up on his Yalta Conference victories and created what President Ronald Reagan termed The Evil Empire (probably borrowing from a Star Wars theme, which movie itself clearly borrowed from earlier dark memories of the 20th Century--witness Darth Vader's Germanic headgear).
What wasn't clear at the time was that the first Secretary General of the United Nations was a full-blown Soviet spy, a deep cover mole whose betrayal of the West tilted the balance in favor of the Soviets for decades to come. His name was Alger Hiss--one of those names that will live in infamy, to borrow FDR's phrase describing the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
The Soviets not only received vast amounts of U.S. materiel via the famed Arctic convoys running to Russia's few ice-free ports like Murmansk. Because of the long journeys involved, and the heavy losses, the U.S. provided an air bridge as well. This air bridge extended from Malmstrom Air Base near Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It began naturally, as a way for U.S. pilots to fly Lend-Lease aircraft northwest along what was called the Alaska-Siberia Air Bridge. Either in Alaska (because Stalin was paranoid about allowing foreign pilots on Soviet soil, even his U.S. allies) or in eastern Siberia, Soviet pilots would typically take over and fly the war planes west to the Eastern Front where Hitler's armies were being ground up at Stalingrad and Leningrad.
Notoriously, Soviet diplomats, under total immunity, shipped countless sensitive documents, industrial components, and any other intelligence-worthy materials they could steal, back to Russia along this air bridge.
In the far-ranging and speculative novel Nob Hill, Ann Cymba introduces the possibility that some 600 pounds of yellowcake could have been smuggled out in their original stainless steel containers. Under cover of diplomatic pouches or crates, these materials could have been smuggled somehow into Soviet hands, somewhere between their disappearance at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and their eventual destination. That destination is to this day still unknown.
Here are the two chapters of Nob Hill that dramatize, in fictional form based very closely on true history, the final journey of U-234.
)
