Richard N. Billings's new book, Battleground Atlantic, narrates the sinking of a Japanese submarine, I-52, on 24 June 1944, and the surrender of a German sub, U-234, in May 1945, and explains how the Allies' "eavesdropping" in World War II turned the tide against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Battleground Atlantic: How The Sinking of a Single Japanese Submarine Assured the Outcome of World War II
by Richard N. Billings
published by New American Library, a division of the Penguin Group (USA), New York (April 2006)
Hdbk., 312 pages
ISBN: 0451217667

Key battles in World War II turned on superb intelligence. “Magic” and “Ultra” intercept programs, breaking Imperial Japan’s and Nazi Germany’s codes, came early on, and stayed hush-hush until well after the war.

Only once, in June 1942, a newspaper revealed a top secret intercept. In reporting the victory at the Battle of Midway, the Chicago Tribune unwittingly let on that U.S. intelligence had foreknowledge of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s plans. (If only news media today were as circumspect, thus to safeguard our nation’s secrets from enemies, instead of opting to put us in harm’s way.)

Purloined enemy communiqués turned the tide of battle. Clandestine, quite warrant-less “wiretapping” was a Godsend then.

Knowing precisely what happened, not only wars' outcomes, is critical to understanding history. We military history buffs, particularly us war vets, become incurable page-turners, each of us a sort of history detective.

Richard N. Billings's new book, Battleground Atlantic, narrates the sinking of a Japanese submarine, I-52, on 24 June 1944, and the surrender of a German sub, U-234, in May 1945 at the war’s end.

When history reads like spellbinding fiction, say like a Vince Flynn novel (Consent to Kill) or a Scott Thurlow potboiler (Ordinary Heroes), our buffs’ brains kick into high gear, forever seeking answers. Battleground answers lots, yet leaves other questions dangling, even 61 years after hostilities ceased.

At the outset, England teetered at the brink, nearly invaded by Nazi storm troops on barges. Except for a world-class navy that ruled the waves, and the intrepid RAF flyboys, inhabitants of the British isles might now be speaking German, at least as their second language.

General, then Prime Minister Tojo might have achieved Japan’s “co-prosperity sphere,” lording over the Philippines, Australia and at least a partitioned China. Enslavement and pillaging of vassal nation-states would be brutal consequences, wholesale slaughter the norm, nihilism writ worldwide. It is a ghastly nightmare to contemplate if the evil-doers then had won, same as now.

Never a close-knit alliance, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan nevertheless shared military hardware and plans, including Hitler’s vaunted “secret weapons.” But how to get the stuff from Germany to Japan?

The distance could not be bridged by aircraft of the day without Russian bases. Surface shipping was verboten, owing to superior Allied air and sea power.

With the Suez Canal in Allies’ hands, transshipments had to go around the horn of Africa in submarines of leviathan proportions. Danger lurked every nautical mile. Growing expertise of the Allies’ ASW (anti-sub warfare) made it perilous. Few made it round-trip.

Neither Axis enemy knew — unlike today’s cave-dwelling enemy — that the Allies were “eavesdropping” on their message traffic. In 1930 Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, a Republican stalwart, had said infamously, “gentlemen do not read other’s mail.” That’s when he shut down the cryptology department (the “Black Chamber”) at State. Silly him.

A decade later, as FDR’s trusted Secretary of War (1940-45), Stimson relied profoundly on the top secret intercepts, another rich irony of history.

Battleground Atlantic zeros in on Japan’s giant (327 ft.) cargo sub I-52. It is the “single Japanese submarine” in Billings’s overstated title. No way, of course, its fate “assured the outcome of World War II.” (Hyperbole to sell books?  Shame on someone!) 

Sunk while en route to Germany, with the loss of all hands (122), the behemoth sub was to return with ingredients for “a radiological bomb.” The Japanese called it gensai bakudani. Translated literally, “the bomb as of now.”

Tipped off by the both “Magic” and “Ultra,” Avenger torpedo bomber pilots off the tiny (440 ft.) flight deck of the escort carrier USS Bogue (CVE 9) sank I-52. It had just dived on the moonless night of 24 May 1944, its captain and crew unaware it was being tracked.

Aircraft from the “baby flat top” Bogue had had a field day, sinking five U-boats in six weeks. Sophisticated radar, propeller-sensing sonar buoys, new acoustic torpedoes, did the job. Ultrasecret intercepts led them to proximity of enemy subs.

Sent to pick up bomb elements, I-52 carried a cargo of its own — rare ores, tungsten, and 59 tons of raw rubber in bales. (Most bales improbably popped to the surface, to be salvaged by Allied ships.) Most notably, two tons of gold bullion, picked up in Singapore, were also aboard.  The gold was booty from Chinese banks, intended to pay the Nazis for the return cargo. 

The critical item on the I-52’s return manifest read, “13. Uranium oxide, 500 kilograms,” an intercept revealed.

German scientists at the University of Hamburg had concluded a “radiological package,” wrapped in garden-variety explosives, such as TNT, could be detonated, spreading agonizing death in at least a two-mile radius. Today we call this a “dirty bomb.”

(It is likely the dream WMD of today’s radical Islamic terrorists.  Few Americans, untipped by media, fathom its terrible nature. Depending on the size of the “package,” a bomb such as this could kill tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds, and leave a blast field contaminated (“hot“) for generations. Yes, generations.)

If such a bomb — gensai bakudani – were developed, author Billing speculates, not so wildly, targets would include San Francisco, Los Angeles and the Panama Canal. Attacks would lift off of two new subs, I-400 and I-401, designed for the purpose. Each carried two twin-engine mini-bomber aircraft. Launched late, in January 1945, neither sub saw action.

Japan never fashioned its “dirty bomb,” its nuclear program not an immediate threat, as discovered after the war, same as in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Who knew?  Do we roll the dice with countless Americans’ lives on the line?

Eleven months after I-52 was sunk, Germany's U-234 tried again to move the uranium. The giant U-boat left Kiel, Germany, on 15 April 1945, its uranium cargo encased in lead. Two Japanese officers aboard watched over the shipment, consigned to the “Japanese Army.”

Germany’s surrender found the sub southbound in the Atlantic. Its skipper, Kapitanleutenant Johann Fehler, who long ago felt the war was lost, surrendered his U-234 to the USS Sutton (DE 771), a destroyer escort out of Newfoundland.

The two Japanese officers committed hari-kari. As requested in their jointly-written suicide note, their bodies were committed to Davy Jones’s locker.

Escorted to the U.S. Navy base in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the U-234 yielded the following: Two twin-jet aircraft (Me 262), dissembled in crates with plans for mass production; other plans and weapons including antitank guns and new acoustic torpedoes; and the uranium.

Still encased in lead, it was shipped secretly by train under 7/24 guard to New York for analysis, then to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. There it joined in the development of “Little Boy,” the nuclear bomb dropped by the B-29 Enola Gay on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.

The saga of two subs in Battleground gives new meaning to the phrase “what goes around.”

No evidence shows the German uranium was used, or not used, in “Little Boy.” Manhattan Project’s security chief, Lieutenant Colonel John Lansdale, said it could have been, but he’d not bet the farm on it. (If not in “Little Boy,” other military authors, including Philip Henshall, in Vengeance: Hitler‘s Nuclear Weapon (1995), say the uranium would’ve been devoured in the Bikini Atoll or Nevada testing.)

Billings, author of six books, strives for sensationalism, as if his subject is not dramatic enough. He tells a spellbinding tale, a bit speculative at times, and “padded” at the end with irrelevant science. Whether Japan had the capacity to build a “dirty bomb,” and the time to do so, and then could deliver it, are unanswerable questions.  More of those What Ifs? of history.

Billings’s book is an absorbing read, especially if you like Vince Flynn novels wherein Mitch Rapp does what it takes to save the lives of countless Americans from terrorists. Something lost on many Americans today, tragically, likely for petty "political" reasons. 

Postscript: Discovery of the wreck of I-52 in 1995 by salvage entrepreneur Paul Tidwell was subject of a TV special, National Geographic’s “Search for Sub I-52,” on 12 January 2003. By all reports, the gold bullion is still inside the wreck, found 3.2 miles down on the craggy Atlantic floor, a mile deeper than Titanic. It is an official grave site marked by a Japanese ensign and a memorial tablet put there by Tidwell’s deep-sea submersible’s second visit in 1998. The towed hulk of U-234 was sunk by U.S. Navy target practice 40 miles off the coast of Cape Cod on 20 November 1947.

Battleground Atlantic is available at Amazon.com.