The traditional history denies, however, that the uranium on board U-234 was enriched and therefore easily usable in an atomic bomb. The accepted theory asserts there is no evidence that the uranium stocks of U-234 were transferred into the Manhattan Project... And the traditional history asserts that the bomb components on board (the) U-234 arrived too late to be included in the atomic bombs that were dropped on Jepan.

The documentation indicates quite differently on all accounts. 

~Carter Hydrick, Critical Mass: the Real Story of the Atomic Bomb and the Birth of the Nuclear Age

---

 

In December of 1944, an unhappy report is made to some unhappy people:

A study of the shipment of (bomb grade uranium) for the past three months shows the following....: At present rate we will have 10 kilos about February 7 and 15 kilos about May 1.

This was bad news indeed, for a uranium based atom bomb required between 10-100 kilograms by the earliest estimates (ca. 1942), and, by the time this memo was written, about 50 kilos, the more accurate calculation of critical mass needed to make an atom bomb from uranium.

 

One may imagine the consternation this memo must have caused at headquarters. The was, perhaps, a considerable degree of yelling and screaming and finger pointing and other histrionics, interlarded with desperate orders to re-double efforts amid the fire-tinged skies of the war's Wagnerian Gotterdämmerung.

 

August 1945 London Daily Telegraph article about a 1944 German Atom Bomb Scare in Britain

The problem, however, is that the memo is not German at all. It originates within the Manhattan Project on December 28, 1944  from Eric Jette, the chief metallurgist at Los Alamos. One may imagine the desperation it must have triggered, however, since the Manhattan Project had consumed two billion dollars all in the pursuit of plutonium and uranium atom bombs. By this time it was of course apparent that there were significant and seemingly insurmountable problems in designing a plutonium bomb, for the fuses available to the Allies were simply far too slow to achieve the uniform compression of a plutonium core within the very short span of time needed to initiate uncontrolled nuclear fission.

 

That left the uranium bomb as the more immediately feasible alternative - as the Germans had discovered years earlier - to the acquisition of a functioning weapon within the projected span of the war. Yet, after a veritable hemorrhage of dollars in pursuit of the latter objective, the Manhattan Project was far short of the necessary critical mass for a uranium bomb. And with the inevitability of an invasion of Japan looming, the pressure on General Leslie Groves to produce results was immense.

The lack of a sufficient stockpile, after years of concentrated all-out effort, was in part explainable, for two years earlier Fermi had been successful in construction of the first functioning atomic reactor. That success had spurred the American project to commit more seriously to the pursuit of a plutonium bomb. Accordingly, some of the precious and scarce refined and enriched uranium 235 coming out of Oak Ridge and Lawrence's beta calutrons was being siphoned off as feedstock for enrichment and transmutation into plutonium in the breeder reactors constructed at Handford, Washington for the purpose. Thus, some of the fissionable uranium stockpile had been deliberately diverted for plutonium production. The decision was a logical one and the Manhattan Project decision-makers cannot be faulted to taking it. The reason is simple. Pound for weapons grade pound, a pound of plutonium will produce more bombs than a pound of uranium. It thus made economic sense to convert enriched uranium to plutonium, for more bombs would be possible with the same amount of material.

But in December of 1944, having pursued both options, General Leslie Groves now stood on the verge of losing both gambles. And let us not forget what had just happened in Europe to sour the mood of "those in the know" in the United States even further. There, six months after the Allied landings in Normandy and the headlong dash across France, Allied armies had stalled on the borders of the Reich. Allied intelligence analysts confidently reassured the generals that no further significant German military offensive was possible, and their optimism was reflected in the general mood of the citizenry in France, Britain, and the United States. The mood was brutally shattered when, on December 16. 1944, the German Army and Luftwaffe mounted one last, desperate offensive with secretly husbanded reserves in the Ardennes forest, scene of their 1940 triumph against France. Within a matter of hours, the offensive had broken through American lines, surrounded, captured, or otherwise decimated the entire 116th American infantry division, and days later, surrounded the 101st Airborne division at Bastogne, and appeared well on the way to crossing the Meuse River at Namur. On December 28, 1944, when the memo was written, the German offensive had been stalled, but not stopped. 

For the Allied officers privy to intelligence reports and "in the loop" on the Manhattan Project, the offensive was possibly seen as confirmation of their worst fears: the Germans were close to a bomb, and were trying to buy time. The horrible thought in the back of every Allied scientist's and engineer's head must have been that after all the Allied military successes of the previous years, the race for the bomb could still be won by the Germans. And if they were able to produce enough of them to put unbearable pressure on any one of the Western Allies, the outcome of the war itself was still in doubt. If, for example, the Germans had a-bombed British and French cities, it is unlikely that a continuance of the would have been politically feasible for Churchill's wartime coalition government. In all likelihood it would have collapsed. A similar result would have likely occurred in France. And without British and French bases available for supply and forward deployment, the American military situation on the continent would have become untenable, if not disastrous.

In any case, word of the Manhattan Project's difficulties apparently leaked in the Washington DC political community, for United States Senator James F. Byrnes got in on the act, writing a memorandum to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and confirming that the Manhattan Project was perceived - at least by some in the know - as being in danger of failure:

 

 

 

SECRET March 3, 1945

MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT

FROM: JAMES F. BYRNES

 

I understand that the expenditures for the Manhattan project are approaching 2 billion dollars with no definite assurance yet of production.

 

We have succeeded to date in obtaining the cooperation of Congressional Committees in secret meetings. Perhaps we can continue to do so while the war lasts.

 

However, if the project proves a failure, it will be subjected to relentless criticism.

~Memorandum of US Senator James F. Byrnes to President Frankliin D. Roosevelt, March 3, 1945, cited in Harald Fath, Geheime Kommandosache -S III Jonastal und die Siegeswaffenproduktion: Weitere Spurensuche nach Thüringens Manhattan Project (Schleusingen: Amun Verlag, 2000)

 

Senator Brynes' memorandum highlights the real problem in the Manhattan Project, and the real, though certainly not publicly known, military situation of the Allies ca. late 1944 and early 1945: that in spite of tremendous conventional military success against the Third Reich, the Western Allies and Soviet Russia could conceivably still be forced to a "draw" if Germany deployed and used atom bombs in sufficient numbers to affect the political situation of the Western Allies. With its stockpile of enriched uranium already depleted by the decision to develop more plutonium for a bomb (which as it turned out was undetonatable with existing British and American fuse technology anyway) and far below that needed for a uranium-based atom bomb, "the entire enterprise appeared destined for defeat." Not only defeat, but for "those in the know" in late 1944 and early 1945, the possibility was one of ignominious defeat and horrible carnage.

 

If the stocks of weapons grade uranium ca. late 1944 - early 1945 were about half of what they needed to be after two years of research and production, and if this in turn was the cause of Senator Byrnes' concern, how then did the Manhattan Project acquire the large remaining amount or uranium 235 needed in the few months from March to the dropping of the Little Boy bomb on Hiroshima in August, only five months away? How did it accomplish this feat, if in feet after some three years of production it had only produced less than half of the needed supply of critical mass weapons grade uranium? Where did its missing uranium 235 come from? And how did it solve the pressing problem of the fuses for a plutonium bomb?

 

Of course the answer if that if the Manhattan Project was incapable of producing enough enriched uranium in that short amount of time - months rather than years - then its stocks had to have been supplemented from external sources, and there is only one viable place with the necessary technology to enrich uranium on that scale, as seen in the previous chapter. That source was Nazi Germany. But the Manhattan Project is not the only atom bomb project with some missing uranium.

 

Germany too appears to have suffered the "missing uranium syndrome" in the final days prior to and immediately after the end of the war. But the problem in Germany's case is that the missing uranium it not a few tens of kilos, but several hundred tons. At this juncture, it is worth citing Carter Hydrick's excellent research at length, in order to exhibit the full ramifications of this problem:

From June of 1940 to the end of the war, Germany seized 3,500 tons of uranium compounds from Belgium - almost three times the amount Groves had purchased.... and stored it in salt mines in Strassfurt, Germany. Groves brags that on April 17, 1945, as the war was winding down, Alsos recovered some 1,100 tons of uranium ore from Strassfurt and an additional 31 tons in Toulouse, France ..... And he claims that the amount recovered was all that Germany had ever held, asserting, therefore, that Germany had never had enough raw material to process the uranium either for a plutonium reactor pile or through magnetic separation techniques.

 

Obviously, if Strassfurt once held 3,500 tons and only 1,130 were recovered, some 2,370 tons of uranium ore was unaccounted for - still twice the amount the Manhattan Project possessed and is assumed to have used throughout its entire wartime effort.... The material has not been accounted for to this day....

 

As early as the summer of 1941, according to historian Margaret Gowing, Germany had already refined 600 tons of uranium to its oxide form, the form required for ionizing the material into a gas, in which form the uranium isotopes could then be magnetically or thermally separated or the oxide could be reduced to a metal for a reactor pile. In fact, Professor Dr. Riehl, who was responsible for all uranium throughout Germany during the course of the war, says the figure was actually much higher....

 

To create either a uranium or plutonium bomb, at some point uranium must be reduced to metal. In the case of plutonium, U238is metalicized; for a uranium bomb, U235 is metalicized. Because of uranium's difficult characteristics, however, this metallurgical process is a tricky one. The United States struggled with the problem early and still was not successful reducing uranium to its metallic form in large production wuantities until late in 1942. The German technicians, however,... by the end of 1940, had already processed 280.6 kilograms into metal, over a quarter of a ton.

 

These observations require some additional commentary.

 

First, it is to be noted that Nazi Germany, by the best available evidence, was missing approximately two thousand tons of unrefined uranium ore by the war's end. Where did this ore go?

 

Second, it is clear that Nazi Germany was enriching uranium on a massive scale, having refined 600 tons to oxide form for potential metalicization as early as 1940. This would require a large and dedicated effort, with thousands of technicians, and a commensurately large facility or facilities to accomplish the enrichment. The figures, in other words, tend to corroborate the hypothesis that the I.G. Farben "Buna" factory at Auschwitz was not a Buna factory at all, but a huge uranium enrichment facility. However, the date would imply another such facility, located elsewhere, since the Auschwitz facility did not really begin production until sometime in 1942.

 

Finally, it also seems clear that the Germans possessed an enormous stock of metallic uranium. But what was the isotope? Was it U238 for further enrichment and separation into U235, was it intended perhaps as feedstock for a reactor to be transmuted into plutonium, or was it already U235, the necessary material for a uranium atom bomb?

.

In any case, these figures strongly suggest that the Germans, ca. 1940-1942 were significantly ahead of the Allies in one very important aspect of atom bomb production: the enrichment of uranium, and therefore, this suggests also that they were demonstrably ahead in the race for an actual functioning atom bomb during this period. But the figures also raise another disturbing question: where did this uranium go?

One answer lies in the mysterious case of a U-boat, the U-234, captured by the Americans in 1945.

Los Alamos laboratory indicates the stock of fissile U235 is far short of the needed critical mass, and would remain so for several months.

 

The conclusion is therefore simple, but frightening: the missing uranium used in the Manhattan Project was German, and that means that Nazi Germany's atom bomb project was much further along that the post-war Allied Legend would have us believe.

 

But what of the other two items in the U-234's strange cargo manifest, the fuses and their inventor, Dr. Heinz Schilcke? We have already noted that by late 1944 and early 1945, the American plutonium bomb project had run afoul of some nasty mathematics: the critical mass of a plutonium bomb, "imploded" or compressed by surrounding conventional explosives, would have to be assembled within 1/3000th of a second, otherwise the bomb would fail, and only produce a kind of "atomic fizzling firecracker", a "radiological" bomb producing very little explosion but a great deal of deadly radiation. This was a speed far in excess of the capabilities of conventional wire cabling and the ordinary fuses available to the Allied engineers.

 

The accounts that have been proven to support the crash of a UFO in Roswell, New Mexico are as follows: 1) We know something crashed in 1947 on a ranch in the vicinity of Roswell, New Mexico. 2) We know that some residents of the area stated they handled a material that consisted of an unknown metal. 3) We know that many of the residents reported seeing the craft and the bodies. There were people stationed at Walker air force base at that time who have come forward and divulged that they too seen the disc and the bodies. 4) We know that the remains of the weather balloon was transported to what is now Wright Patterson air force base, a military post that has been rumored to deal with other sensitive alien cases. 5) It is claimed by some that the actual UFO that crashed in Roswell never left the area. Instead, it moved to area 51. Area 51 refers to a location where alien studies are being conducted, and yet the existence of such a place is denied by the United States government. We know that area 51 does exist. 6) We know that a picture that depicts a letter has surfaced that was taken in 1947 during the aftermath of the crash. Using computers to enlarge the photographed letter, it was realized that the letter was an order to the major at Walker air force base to remain silent regarding the facts of the crash. 7) We know that the weather balloon story was a smoke-screen. 8) We know that the test-dummy explanation was impossible. Test-dummies were not used until six years later. There has also been much debate about another UFO crashing in the Antarctic region The wreckage was reported to have been brought back to the United States on the naval ship, USS Pine Island. According to reports, the USS Pine Island was involved in a military exercise, code-named operation Highjump in 1947. According to our government, Operation Highjump entailed the following instructions: (a) to train personnel and test material in the frigid zones; (b) to consolidate and extend American sovereignty over the largest practical area of the Antarctic continent; (c) to determine the feasibility of establishing and maintaining bases in the Antarctic and to investigate possible base sites; (d) to develop techniques for establishing and maintaining air bases on the ice, (e) to amplify existing knowledge of hydrographic, geographic, geological, meteorological and electro-magnetic conditions in the area. Little other information was released to the media about the mission. Most journalists were suspicious of its true purpose given the huge amount of military resources involved. The US navy also strongly emphasized that Operation Highjump was going to be a navy show; but, there were to be no spectators. It had been rumoured that Adolf Hitler had been building a secondary Nazi stronghold in the Antarctic region in the event that the war was lost. There are those who believe that Operation Highjump was actually an investigation into these claims. Then there are those who believe that Operation Highjump was a mission to search the Antarctic continent for signs of alien life-forms. The Antarctica has always been suspected of having an alien base on it. Over the years, there have been many UFO's sighted in the Antarctica. The continent itself is a vast area and most of it is inaccessible. Whatever its outcome was to be, operation Highjump was not a small endeavour. It was comprised of some 4700 military personnel, six helicopters, six martin PBM flying boats, two seaplane tenders, fifteen other aircraft, thirteen US navy support ships and one aircraft carrier. Admiral Richard Byrd was the operation's leader, while Rear Admiral Richard Cruzan headed the task force. Supposedly, the USS Pine Island brought back a UFO from the Antarctic and took to San Diego. It then was transported to what is now Wright Patterson air force base. We have been told in countless statements that mechanical problems occur in powered devices when they are in the close proximity of alien crafts. Let's look at the history of the USS Pine Island. It was built in 1942. It was launched on February 26, 1944. It departed from California on June 16, 1945. After numerous engagements in the West Pacific, it was called to duty during Operation Highjump in 1947. In August of 1947, it was sent to the Far East. It was decommissioned in May of 1950. After repairs had been made, it was re-commissioned on October 7, 1950. On June 16, 1967, the USS Pine Island was decommissioned for the final time. It was 25 years old. That is a very short life span for a ship. Thus, we can only wonder if the transporting of an UFO led to its early retirement.

It is known that late in the timetable of events leading to the Trinity test of the plutonium bomb in New Mexico that a design modification was introduced to the implosion device that incorporated "radiation venting channels", allowing radiation from the plutonium core to escape and reflect off the surrounding reflectors as the detonator was fired, within billionths of a second after the beginning of compression. There is no possible way to explain this modification other than by the incorporation of Dr. Schlicke's infrared proximity fuses into the final design of the American bomb, since they enabled the fuses to react and fire are the speed of light.

 

In support of this historical reconstruction, there is a communication from May 25, 1945 from the chief of Naval Operations, to Portsmouth where the U-234 was brought after its surrender, indicating that Dr. Schlicke, now a prisoner of war, would be accompanied by three naval officers, to secure the fuses and bring them to Washington. There Dr. Schlicke was apparently to give a lecture on the fuses under the auspices of a "Mr. Alvarez," who would appear to be none other than well- known Manhattan Project scientist Dr. Luis Alvarez, the very man who, according to the Allied Legend, "solved" the fusing problem for the plutonium bomb! So it would appear that the surrender of the U-234 to the Americans in 1945 solved the Manhattan Project's two biggest outstanding problems: lack of sufficient supplies of weapons grade uranium, and lack of adequate fusing technology to make a plutonium bomb work. And this means that in the final analysis the Allied Legend about the Germans having been "far behind" the Allies in the race for the atom bomb is simply a incorrect in the extreme in the best case, or a deliberate lie in the worst. But the fuses raise another frightening specter: What were the Germans developing such highly sophisticated fuses for? Infrared heat-seeking rockets, which they had developed, would be one answer.

 

Dr.Luis Alvarez also had some other strange distinctions to his credit, being one of the scientists allegedly involved with the alleged Roswell "UFO" crash, the CIA’s subsequent "Robertson Panel" in the 1950s on UFOs and government policy, and subsequent cosmic ray experiments inside the 2nd Pyramid at Giza and of course an implosion device to compress critical mass would be another.

 

But what about the other missing German uranium mentioned previously? The mission of the U-234 and its precious cargo thus raises certain other questions, and highlights other possibilities in this regard. It is a fact that throughout the war Germany and Japan both conducted long-range exchanges of officers and technology via aircraft and submarine - the exchange of technology being mostly a one-sided affair from Germany to Japan. It is conceivable that many of these voyages - just as with the U-234 - would have included similar transfers of uranium stocks and high technology to Japan. Some of the missing uranium must therefore surely be looked for in the Far East, in the Japanese atom bomb program.

 

Similarly, during the war both Germany and Italy undertook long-range flights to Japan, the Germans using their special long- range heavy lift transport aircraft such as the Ju-290 for polar flights. It is conceivable that these flights and their Italian counterparts also involved the exchange of officers and technology, if not a small amount of raw material as well. Some of the missing uranium probably also fell into the hands of the Soviets as the Russian armies steamrollered into Eastern Europe and finally into what would become the Soviet "eastern" zone of occupation in Germany.

 

But why, after traveling under radio silence from Germany, did the U-234 finally surrender its precious uranium, fuses, and "water", when its obvious destination was Japan? This is an intriguing question, and one that unfortunately cannot be answered here except briefly. Again, Carter Hydrick's superb research elaborates one highly probable hypothesis: U-234 was handed over to the US authorities on the orders of none other than Martin Bormann, in a maneuver designed to secure his and others' freedom after the war, and as part of a deliberate plan to continue Nazism and its agendas and research underground. It is thus, on this view, the first visible, and crucial, element of the emerging Operation Paperclip, the transfer of technology ami scientists from the collapsing Third Reich to the United States. There, the German scientists and engineers could, would, and did continue their lines of esoteric research and development of high technology and sophisticated weaponry, with a similar moral and ideological effect on the culture at large as occurred in Nazi Germany.

And finally, of course, as we have already seen, some of the missing uranium ended up in the German atom bomb program itself, enriched, and refined, and probably assembled and tested - if not used - in actual bombs themselves.
 

 

 

Who Stole Hitler's A-Bombs? Some 600 pounds of Yellowcake Uranium 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. 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   The Japanise Atomic Bomb   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. 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 Führer, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. 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.

 

U-234 is an element that is sometimes called Uranium II. It has an Atomic Mass of 234.0409456 +- 0.0000021 amu. There is nothing strange about this in itself, but U-234 was also a World War II German submarine that was picked to smuggle atomic material to Japan……… Germany's Last Mission to Japan the Failed Voyage of U-234 Unterseeboot U-234 was built between 1 October 1941 and 2 March 1944 at Kiel by F. Krupp Germaniawerft AG. Originally designed in 1938, it was intended to be one of a total of eight Type XB ocean-going mine-layers. It was instead refitted as a transport submarine and assigned to the perilous Germany-to-Japan run. This was the largest type of German U-boat ever constructed at 1763 tons displacement, 2710 tons submerged and fully loaded, and 89.9 meters in overall length. Under the command of Kapitänleutnant (Kptlt., e.g. Lt. Cdr.) Johann-Heinrich Fahler, U-234 was originally designed to carry 66 SMA mines. It had only two stern torpedo tubes and carried a maximum of fifteen torpedoes. A newly-designed breathing and exhaust mast, the Schnorchel, permitted the U-234 to travel submerged for extraordinary distances. U-234 departed Kiel on its maiden voyage on 25 March 1945, bound for Kristiansand, Norway. There it loaded important cargo and personnel and departed on 15 April for a submerged voyage which was to take them around the Cape of Good Hope, eventually concluding in Japan. That transit was never completed. Among the three hundred ton cargo were three complete Messerschmitt aircraft, a Henschel HS-293 glider-bomb, extra Junkers.....   Germany's largest U-boat, the 1,700-ton Type XB minelayer U-234 found itself at sea when the war ended and surrendered in mid-ocean to an American destroyer escort. Her original destination had been Japan. Her cargo included two complete ME-262 jet fighters (disassembled in crates, but with complete technical data) and 550 kilograms of Uranium 235 (or Uranium oxide -- sources differ), packed in lead containers. No one has ever determined -- or at least revealed -- the reason the Germans were sending the uranium to Japan.       The traditional history denies, however, that the uranium on board U-234 was enriched and therefore easily usable in an atomic bomb. The accepted theory asserts there is no evidence that the uranium stocks of U-234 were transferred into the Manhattan Project... And the traditional history asserts that the bomb components on board (the) U-234 arrived too late to be included in the atomic bombs that were dropped on Jepan. The documentation indicates quite differently on all accounts.  ~Carter P. Hydrick, Critical Mass: ‘The Real Story of the Atomic Bomb and the Birth of the Nuclear Age.'

 

 

The U-234   At first, the men on the submarine thought it was a trick. The radio message from the German High Command told them the war was over; they were to surrender to the nearest Allied authorities.  The U-234, 294 feet long and 22,000 tons fully loaded, was one of the titans of the German undersea fleet; it had surfaced briefly somewhere in the mid Atlantic at this pivotal moment in its history -- May 10, 1945 -- to receive radio messages and find out what was happening in the European war.    No trick: The war in Europe was over The mystery of U-234 and its cargo had just begun, however. The boat was en route to Japan on a secret mission, carrying enough uranium to make two atomic bombs. She would end her journey at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard instead.  The radio message was so stark, so shocking, Lt. Johann Heinrich Fehler, captain of U-234, wasn't about to take it on face value. He would have to test it out, make sure it was authentic, before deciding what his response would be.  The message, issued under the auspices of Admiral Karl Dönitz, former German U-boat chief elevated to supreme commander after the death of Adolf Hitler, praised all U-boat crews for "fighting like lions" for more than six years and then informed them that the enemy's material superiority had driven Germany to defeat.  "We proudly remember our fallen comrades," Dönitz consoled. "Long live Germany!" He ordered surrender.  U-234 immediately submerged. "They are trying to trick us," Fehler speculated, "they" being the enemy -- Britain, Canada, the United States.  Fehler knew all about tricks. As an officer aboard the German raider Atlantis, he'd become familiar with the ship's somewhat infamous means of surface deception. The Atlantis would disguise itself as a friendly ship and lure enemy ships to within range of its camouflaged guns before opening fire. The Atlantis had thus bagged 22 Allied ships before it was sunk by the British cruiser, Devonshire; in November 1941.  U-234 sent out a message of its own to a nearby U-boat, in a special code that only captains could send and decipher.  "We have received a very funny message," Fehler radioed. "Have we surrendered? Is it true?"  The reply convinced him the message was no trick. His orders were to surface, to hoist a black flag on U-234's periscope, and to report his position to the Allies.    Not Yet  Fehler was a German officer which meant when he gave orders everybody snapped to But, for whatever reasons, the man who had earned the nick name "Dynamite" for his job of scuttling captured vessels decided to exercise some democracy that day.    Uranium Oxide He asked for opinions from some of his colleagues in the converted minelayer whose cargo contained enough uranium oxide to blow up two American cities -- 1,235 pounds of it, possibly destined for a Japanese atomic bomb program. But it is likely that nobody knew about the cargo except Fehler. The officers and crew therefore were not thinking of uranium when they replied. "We have enough food to last us for years," remarked the boyish second officer, Lt. Karl Ernst Pfaff. "I think we should go to the South Sea and find a deserted island with beautiful girls."  It had momentarily slipped Pfaff’s mind that he was engaged to Fehler's sister-in-law. Fehler laughed. "That is wishful thinking," he told the 22-year-old Berliner who would never be his brother-in-law.  A pattern of responses emerged, the younger men tending to share Pfaff’s compulsion to run from it all while the older ones just wanted to go home to their families and forget the war.  Geography was a major factor in that U-234's position lay at the convergence of four Allied zones established for U-boat surrenders. Fehler could have surrendered to the enemy port of his choice. Britain, Gibraltar, Canada or the United States; or he could have attempted to return to Germany.  The latter would have been risky, Fehler knew, because the Russians -- no admirers of Hitlerite fighting men -- had been expanding naval operations in German waters. Neither he nor anybody on board wished to become a Soviet prisoner.    Picked U.S. Fehler surmised that if they surrendered to Canada or Great Britain, they would be taken prisoner, first in Canada, then England and eventually France and it could be many years before the men returned to their homes.  Fehler perceived Americans as "not war faring people, not very military." At worst, he predicted they could be paraded through the streets, showcased so to speak as proof that real, live U boat crew members had been captured , and then sent home.  Fehler decided to turn U-234 into the gentle Americans. But he had to make sure the Canadians didn't get to him first.  U-234 radioed authorities in Halifax, Nova Scotia, that it was headed northwest, toward Halifax, at 8 knots (8 nautical miles an hour). In reality, U-234 was barreling across the Atlantic at 16 knots on a more or less southwest course, to the port of Newport News, Va.  Japanese Passengers The depressed atmosphere inside the black-flag-flying U-boat was disrupted by an incident involving two passengers, Imperial Japanese Navy Lieutenant Commander Hideo Tomonaga, a leading Japanese submarine designer, and Lieutenant Commander Genzo Shoji, an aircraft expert, who had come along to study German weaponry.(Whether they also knew of the atomic cargo remains one of the unsolved mysteries of U-234.)  Fehler explained to the Japanese that he had to surrender because he had to obey his high command just as they would have to follow theirs.  An officer later recalled: They returned to their bunks where they took Luminol, a very powerful barbiturate, lay down and pulled the curtains and we knew they were killing themselves, and that was their right. They took more than 36 hours to die. Then we buried them at sea, as we would do for any one of our own.    Ulrich Kessler The passenger list also included German Luftwaffe Lieutenant General Ulrich Kessler, former commander of special bombing and attack wings based in Norway. Submarine officers may not have become familiar with him on the trip as he and they had little in common.  Kessler, with a monocle over one eye and a perpetual air of arrogance, passed his time reading books and, upon arrival in Portsmouth, would surrender with a smart salute to the highest-ranking U.S. officer on hand. He later bragged to reporters that he'd learned how to accept defeat in style after World War I and expected he might have to do so even a third time.  But, displaying another, more practical side, Kessler admitted during interrogation that he had intended all along to get off the sub at Argentina -- not an unbelievable story in light of the fact that many top-ranking Germans already had fled to that South American country.  Whether Kessler knew of the atomic cargo remains a mystery today. Researchers find it more likely Kessler, knowing the war was about to be lost, had boarded the sub as a means of escape.  The discrepancy between Fehler's reported and actual course was soon recognized by U.S. authorities who dispatched two destroyers to intercept U-234, wherever it was.  One evening as it plowed the seas south of Newfoundland Banks, U-234 spotted a huge searchlight on the horizon. The destroyer Sutton approached and asked U-234 to identify itself. Crew members of the Sutton boarded and took charge, redirecting it to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard where three other U-boats, U-805, U-873 and U-1228, had surrendered within the last few days.  U 873 Type IXD-2 and U 234 Type XB  in dock at Portsmouth NH 1945 Courtesy of U 873 the boats Surrender    News of the surrender of the giant sub with its high-ranking Luftwaffe passengers turned the surrender into a major news event. Reporters swarmed over the Navy Yard and went to sea in a small boat for an earlier view of the prize.  But the big story -- the more than half a ton of uranium oxide on board -- was promptly covered up.  The United States military, in collaboration with worried officials of the top-secret Manhattan Project, had its own atomic program that would culminate in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August.  Even after the war ended, documents reporting the uranium cargo on U-234 remained classified for the duration of the Cold War as America guarded all its atomic secrets from the new enemy: The Soviet Union.    Researcher Fascinated Velma Hunt is a retired Penn State University environmental health professor who has spent years researching health issues as They pertain to uranium and tracking uranium shipments during the 1940s. She is fascinated with the U-234.  Hunt says finding out the truth about the sub's cargo was complicated by looting by drunken American sailors who not only carried away souvenirs but also managed to lose documents that might have provided crucial details about the origins and intended destination of the uranium.  "Captain Fehler," Hunt said, "while complaining about the looting, mentioned he was all the more indignant about it, considering all he had had to do was pull a lever and every mine shaft would have emptied its contents into the ocean." That would have included the uranium, Hunt said.  Hunt said the U-234 and the Sutton may have gone into two ports between the surrender and the arrival at Portsmouth Navy Yard, once in Newfoundland when an American sailor mistakenly shot in the buttocks had to be evacuated for post-surgical treatment, and once again at Casco Bay. The unscheduled landings presented a problem for Ilmerican intelligence personnel, who worried that some cargo might have been off-loaded in the two ports.  The 41 crew members, six officers and nine passengers had been transferred to a Coast Guard vessel at sea. Fehler's arrival was something less than ceremonious.    Raised Ruckus Portsmouth radio station WHEB reporter Charlie Gray watched them come ashore at the Navy Yard on May 19 and later reported that Captain Fehler raised a ruckus when he was forced to sit with his men and keep his arms folded.  "He compared the tactics of U.S. Naval personnel to that of gangsters," Gray reported, whereupon an American officer retorted, "That's just what YOU are."  Gray described the crew as looking well-fed but wearing the most nondescript uniforms he'd ever seen on a German sub crew. All were dirty, he said, and each carried a small leather bag, canteen, and blankets.  The men of U-234 joined the officers and crews of the three subs that preceded them, as prisoners in the custody of the U.S. Navy. While at the Charles Street Jail in Boston, where they were being held while in transit to more permanent quarters, the commander of the U-boat U-873 slashed his wrists and was taken to a hospital where he died.  U-234 officers were taken to Washington, D.C. for interrogation. Second Officer Pfaff -- he who would rather have been on a South Sea island -- was taken to what he believed to be a topsecret Navy installation in Virginia and into a room in which the cargo unloaded from U-234 was being stored.  Pfaff was ordered to oversee the opening of a metal container. The reluctant welder with the cutting torch pleaded with Pfaff not to let him die because he had a family. The military watchdogs stood back, out of harm's way.  "He begged me not to let both of us get blown up," Pfaff said, I'and I assured him that I too did not want to die young. Why would these boxes be booby trapped? They were on their way to our ally (Japan). Why would we want to blow them up?"  When they saw that it was safe, the military came out of hiding. Pfaff said he was then asked to open the boxes -- little cigar-box shaped boxes, he recalled -- that contained the uranium oxide.  A "tall, skinny fellow" wearing an "Eillot Ness" hat -- that is, a hat fashionable in the 1930s and 40s -- appeared. The only civilian in the room, he went about supervising the opening of the boxes. Who is that? Pfaff asked. Oppenheimer, somebody said.  "I had no earthly idea who Oppenheimer was," Pfaff said. But later, when the war finally ended, Pfaff, in a detention center in Louisiana, read news reports about atomic physicist J. Robert' Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos laboratory where the design and building of the first atomic bomb took place.  "I didn't know for sure that it was Oppenheimer in there," Pfaff said. "I had to take this man's word."    Japan's A-Bomb Robert K Wilcox is an historian who has written about World War II, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War.  In 1985 Wilcox wrote a book,' "Japan's Secret War -- Japan's Race Against Time To Build Its : Own Atomic Bomb," that said the listing of 560 kilograms of uranium oxide for the "Jap Army" on U-234's manifest had elicited such concern with the War Department that it was kept from the public and subsequently became a classified document.  The cargo was not officially revealed. But even if it had been, few Americans would have understood its significance.  This was three months before the United States would drop the world's first two atomic bombs, unlocking the secrets of atomic fission to an incredulous world.  Wilcox cited the story of the U-234 as evidence that the Japanese may have been close to developing their own atom bomb and would not have hesitated to use it.  As the recent public hand wringing over the Smithsonian's Enola Gay exhibit attests, the issue of whether the U.S. was morally justified in its atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki continues to generate controversy. Wilcox's publisher is reissuing his book in time for the 50th anniversary of those bombings this summer.    Pfaff Comes Back Lt. Karl Ernst Pfaff was held in prisoner of war centers in Louisiana and Arkansas until early 1946 when he returned to Germany and married a girl from Heidelberg, not Fehler's sister-in-law.  "I had taken a liking to this country and to the American style," Pfaff said, and he immediately began planning his strategy: to return.  He found his way to Montreal in 1951, and lived there 19 years, working for the Caterpillar Company. He lived in Memphis, Tenn., for another 19 years, and retired to Bellingham, Wash., four years ago.  'The war was a different part of my Life," Pfaff said in an interview last week, "something people don't understand. When the war was over and we had lost it, I had to do something and start another part of my life. I disappeared from the surface. Nobody, except my close friend Fehler, knew where I was."  Fehler acquired an international reputation for clearing waterways such as the Suez Canal of sunken ships. His career as a ship's captain endured, and he ran a supply ship for Kuwait at one time and a hospital ship to Saigon at another.  Pfaff and Fehler lost contact until 1991 when they met for the last time at a U-234 reunion in southern Germany. Fehler died a year ago.  U-234's reunions, like the reunions of all World War II veterans' groups, are attended by fewer people as the years go by. In 1985, there were 60 crew and wives; in 1991, 40.  This September Pfaff will be the highest officer attending the reunion of U-234  "There aren't many of us left Pfaff, now 72, observed, and excused himself to go out and rake the lawn as he had promised his wife he would.

 

Letter from Kpt.Lt  Fehler of the U 234

Fate of Uranium and its Origins Remain a Mystery    Uranium taken by U.S. authorities from a German U-boat at the Portsmouth Naval Yard in 1945 could have been used in later U.S. atomic test blasts in Nevada and the Bikini atoll in the Pacific, according to one authority on the case.   Retired Penn State University environmental health professor Vilma Hunt who assisted in the investigation of the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, is writing a book exploring uranium trade routes of the 1940s. She says she does not rule out the possibility that the uranium wound up in one of the bombs that landed on Nagasaki or Hiroshima but doubts that could have happened because of the time that would have been required to move the material through the very complex atomic manufacturing process.   Her attempts over the years to find out what happened to U-234's nuclear cargo led to no definitive answers.  "If it did not get into the August bombs it was certainly used in the subsequent bombs," Hunt said in an interview. 'There is no question that it was used and put into subsequent devices that we continued to use for testing, possibly at the Bikini Atoll or in Nevada."  Hunt's interest in U-234 was piqued by a number of still unanswered questions in addition to the mystery of the missing uranium: How did the uranium on U-234 escape the uranium investigative activity of U.S. Gen. Leslie Groves' "Alsos" teams which probed uranium movements in Europe and Asia during World War II?  What part of the German military establishment had the knowledge, power and administrative clout to completely refit a submarine (from minelayer to giant underwater cargo vessel) and fill it with uranium and advanced weapons technology?  The uranium would have come from the Belgian Congo, Hunt believes. But by what paths did the uranium move from there to the sub which was carrying it when it slid into the Baltic Sea on March 25, 1945?  What was the connection, if any, between the high-ranking Luftwaffe Gen. Ulrich Kessler on board U-234, and the uranium oxide cargo? When he told U.S. interrogators he had planned all along to leave the ship in Argentina, was it also his plan to take the uranium ashore with him and use it as a bargaining chip with the Argentineans? Or was he unaware of the uranium?  Her main question was, and still is, how did U.S. authorities manage to keep the uranium a secret for so many years?   Another researcher and author, Robert K. Wilcox, believes the uranium was snapped up by the Manhattan project (the top-secret American effort that concluded in the development of the atom bomb) but hasn't a clue to its ultimate use.  The submarine, U-234, was en route to Japan with its cargo of uranium oxide -- enough, he says, to fuel two Japanese atom bomb attacks on the United States -- when it surrendered on May 19, 1945, Wilcox says. Wilcox, who has written books on a variety of military issues, believes Japan had its own secret atom bomb project and cites evidence that Japan may even have exploded a test device in northern Korea.  In his book, "Japan's Secret War," Wilcox argues that had Germany not surrendered on May 6, ordering its ships and submarines to turn themselves in to the Allies, the first cities to be destroyed by atomic bombs could have been American. Rather than Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, which were bombed by the United States in August of that year. That is, if the Japanese had time to assemble them, he says.  In any event, Wilcox claims, the Japanese were closer to achieving the bomb than the American people knew -- or American authorities since may have wanted them to know.  Wilcox is in the process of updating his 1985 book for a reprinting in August by Marlowe & Company (New York).  The capture of U-234, one of the biggest U-boats of the Third Reich fleet, and its illustrious passengers -- German scientists and high Luftwaffe officers -- made vivid headlines, but not a word of the secret uranium leaked out, Wilcox notes.  Official papers documenting the existence of the uranium were not declassified for many years, and when Wilcox drew attention to the uranium cargo in his book, in the context of Japan's effort to build its own atomic bomb in World War II, nobody seemed to take much notice either, he said this month.  Perhaps Americans didn't find credible his reports that Japan had relocated atomic bomb production facilities to Japanese occupied North Korea in 1945, Wilcox suggests.  But now, with growing U.S. anxiety over the nuclear weapons development program in communist North Korea, Americans may be more willing to take his earlier revelations seriously, he says.  In his book Wilcox traces Japan's determined development effort from its earliest days through possible testing. Wilcox speaks of a network of Spanish spies working in North America, U-234's aborted attempt to deliver 1,235 pounds of valuable, 77 percent pure uranium oxide to Japan, and atomic research centers operating in North Korea.  Wilcox, who at 51 lives in Sherman Oaks, Calif., said in an interview this month that his book was ahead of its time. "In 1985 the country wasn't ready for the story," he said. Japan has always been looked at as the victim of the bomb. And so a lot of people didn't like the book. To be very base about it, there is a whole liberal element that does not want Japan to look like anything but the victim. But the fact is the Japanese tried very hard to make the bomb and would have dropped it."  The main thrust of the book is the Japanese did have an atomic bomb program, Wilcox said. The Japanese knew an atomic bomb was feasible but their problem was uranium.  In his reprinted book, WiIcox will introduce information that Japan near the very end of the war appropriated 25 million yen (about $100 million on today's scale) to find uranium. Much of the money was spent buying up all the uranium in Shanghai and around Japanese-occupied China in factories where it had been used for years in pottery-making.  "Their program did not get going until the end of the war," Wilcox said, "when they were searching for a miracle weapon. We were getting ready to invade Japan, they knew that, and they were going to do all they could to stop it.  "They would have dropped it on us if they had been able to," Wilcox said. "U-234 was one of their last-ditch attempts to get the uranium they needed, although I don't think it would have made that much difference because they had already found it in Shanghai."       A researcher has announced findings that the American atomic bomb program credited with developing the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan to end World War Two, and which resulted in the United States emerging from the war as the most powerful nation on earth, used components developed by Nazi Germany, including enriched uranium, to fabricate the bombs.     U.S. Bomb Nazi Germany Components       In late March of 1945, the Indianapolis  was damaged by a Kamikaze plane during the battle for Iwo Jima.  In late July 1945, following repairs in California, she made a high-speed trip to Tinian Island to deliver atomic bomb components for "Little Boy", the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima.  Thus completing that mission, she sailed for the Philippines.  Shortly after midnight on July 30, 1945 she was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sank quickly.  Nearly 800 of her 1,200 crew members lost their lives.      A Fateful Voyage

 

The Japanese Submarine I-8 was a World War II Junsen Type J-3 Imperial Japanese Navy submarine, famous for completing a technology exchange mission to German-occupied France and back to Japan in 1943.   The series (I-7 and I-8), based on the KD (Kaidai) type, were the largest Japanese submarines to be completed before World War II. They participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor in patrol missions with their Yokosuka E14Y seaplanes being used in reconnaissance flights.       Mission to Germany   These missions took place under the Axis Powers' Tripartite Pact to provide for an exchange of strategic materials and manufactured goods between Germany, Italy, and Japan. Initially, cargo ships made the exchanges, but when that was no longer possible, submarines were used. Only six submarines attempted this trans-oceanic voyage during World War II: I-30 (April 1942), I-8 (June 1943), I-34 (October 1943), I-29 (November 1943), and German submarine U-511 (August 1943). Of these, I-30 was sunk by a mine, I-34 by the British submarine Taurus, and I-29 by the American submarine, Sawfish (assisted by Ultra intelligence). I-52 was the final submarine to make the attempt.   Commanded by Shinji Uchino, I-8 departed Kure harbor on 1 June 1943, together with I-10 and the submarine tender Hie Maru. Their cargo included two of the famed Type 95 oxygen-propelled torpedoes, torpedo tubes, drawings of an automatic trim system, and a new naval reconnaissance plane, the Yokosuka E14Y. A supplementary crew of 48 men, commanded by Sadatoshi Norita, was also packed into the submarine, with the objective of manning a German U-Boat submarine (U-1224, a Type IXC/40 U-boat) and bringing it back to Japan for reverse engineering.   On arriving in Singapore nine days later, I-8 also took onboard quinine, tin, and raw rubber before heading for the Japanese base at Penang.   On July 21, I-8 entered the Atlantic, where she encountered fierce storms, but was able to continue to German-occupied France.   The I-8 arriving in Brest, France. Getting closer to Europe, on August 20th, I-8 rendezvoused with German submarine U-161, commanded by Captain Albrecht Achille. Two German radio technicians were transferred onboard, as well as a FuMB 1 "Metox" 600A radar detector which was installed on the bridge of I-8. As I-8 entered the Bay of Biscay on 29 August, the Germans sent Ju-88s to provide air cover all the way to Brest, France, where she arrived two days later.   The Japanese submarine was welcomed warmly by the Germans. German news agencies announced that "now even Japanese submarines are operating in the Atlantic." Over a period of about a month, parties and visits to Paris and Berlin were organized for the crew.       Return to Japan I-8 left Brest on October 5, with a cargo of German equipment: machine guns, bomb sights, a Daimler-Benz torpedo boat engine, naval chronometers, radars, sonar equipment, anti-aircraft gunsights, electric torpedoes, and penicillin. The submarine also transported Rear Admiral Yokoi, naval attaché to Berlin since 1940; Captain Hosoya, naval attaché to France since December 1939; three German officers; and four radar and hydrophone technicians.   In the South Atlantic, I-8 radioed its position to the Germans, but the message was intercepted by the allies, prompting an attack by anti-submarine aircraft, which failed. I-8 arrived in Singapore on 5 December, and finally returned to Kure, Japan on 21 December, after a voyage of 30,000 miles.     Later developments In late 1944, I-8 was converted to carry Kaiten suicide torpedoes. She was lost off Okinawa on 31 March 1945, in an encounter with the American destroyers USS Morrison and USS Stockton.       1944 Japan fielded the Kaiten suicide torpedo, incorporating elements of the 24-inch, 40-knot version of the Long Lance, with a control compartment into which the pilot was locked. Range: not more than five hours, no matter what. I-class submarines carried Kaiten into battle, and a fairly large number went into action. The record is ambiguous, however. They did succeed in sinking one American tanker and a small landing ship, perhaps also a destroyer escort, as well as damaging two transports.