the Failed Voyage of U-234

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U-234 and U235

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.

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

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.