It was almost midnight, 23 June 1944. The crew of the new Japanese jumbo submarine I-52 was securing lines on deck after a successful surface rendezvous and transfer of two German radar technicians and equipment from the German submarine U-530. The Japanese submarine was headed for Lorient on the coast of German-occupied France when suddenly, out of the clear, moonless night, came an Avenger torpedo bomber piloted by Lieutenant Commander Jesse Taylor, flying from the USS Bogue (CVE-9).
Allied intelligence had been monitoring and decrypting enemy radio transmissions for years; by 1944, the Germans and Japanese had few secrets—and the rendezvous was not one of them. The Bogue knew the time and location: 15° 16’ north, 39° 55’ west.
Although several Japanese submarines had failed to reach France, the f-29 recently had succeeded in dropping off raw materials vital to the German war effort in exchange for Zeiss optics.
The doomed I-52 was among the largest submarines used in World War II. She was 356.5 feet long and displaced 3,158 tons at full load. She departed Japan in March to load raw materials in Singapore; she left there in late April for the rendezvous. It was her first mission and she carried 228 tons of tin, tungsten, and molybdenum, 3 tons of quinine and opium (for morphine), 54 tons of raw rubber . . . and 2 tons of gold—146 gold bars, packed in small metal boxes.
She dived as Taylor attacked. The Avenger crew dropped flares and sonobuoys, plus two depth bombs that failed to stop her. Taylor then dropped his top secret weapon: an acoustic homing torpedo. A recording captured propeller sounds, an explosion—and Taylor’s exultant exclamation, “We got that sonofabitch!”
But had they? Running low on fuel, Taylor left and was replaced by Lieutenant Commander Bill “Flash” Gordon, in another Avenger, who claims to have tracked propeller noises at 0230 on 24 June, thanks to the sonobuoys, and fired his torpedo at the same target. They heard an explosion; a few minutes later, the propeller noise ceased. Both officers were awarded Distinguished Flying Crosses for sinking the I-52. The U-530, which had witnessed the attack, escaped undetected.
Searchers found debris and oil floating near the attack—human hair embedded in sheets of rubber, a sandal, and flesh later analyzed as coming from a human stomach. But had the I-52 gone down with all 109 men aboard? Allied intelligence picked up additional radio messages indicating that the Japanese submarine had reached the Bay of Biscay but the submarine was never heard from again.
In 1990, however, Paul Tidwell—who describes himself as a commercial historian—began research aimed at locating the submarine. He used the National Archives, recently declassified Navy and National Security Agency documents, and other sources worldwide. He knew that coordinates for the attack as recorded by the Bogue differed from the position calculated in the U-530's log, but he was confident that he had enough data to locate the wreck, and that the hunt would prove worthwhile; the gold alone is worth about $25 million. Tidwell says he is not really a treasure hunter; his company, however, is called Au Holdings (Au is the chemical symbol for gold) and he has salvaged other treasure ships.
He interviewed Taylor and Gordon. “Without the Navy’s cooperation,” he says, “this project would not exist. [Many] of the people involved ... are still alive.”
By late 1994, he felt he had satisfied the first requirement for making an international claim for rights to the discovery and salvage: exhaustive historical research. The site—roughly halfway between the Cape Verde Islands and Barbados—is more than 1,000 miles from the nearest land in depths of 17,000 feet—almost three nautical miles; the Titanic discovered in 1985, lies more than two miles down.
Tidwell assembled a team of experts. Ted Brockett of Sound Ocean Systems linked him with key players: oceanographer Bob Cooke, and Dave Jourdan and Tom Dettweiler of Meridian Sciences. Dettweiler helped find the Titanic. Meridian Sciences had the expertise and the state- of-the-art sonar, imaging, electronic search and computer technology—much of it recently released by the Navy at the close of the Cold War—to make the project feasible. They wanted to charter a Russian research vessel, the 350-foot Yuzhmurgeologiya but they needed money.
They hooked Fred Neal, Jr., an Arkansas engineer who had struck it rich and was ready to back an adventure, when Tidwell asked him, “How would you like to invest a few million in a World War II submarine full of gold, three miles deep?” Tidwell named the enterprise Operation Rising Sun and the Yuzhmorgeologiya sailed from Barbados in April 1995 with some urgency. They were not the only searchers.
For two weeks, the ship searched the primary sector indicated by Tidwell’s research, towing an MAK-1M side-scanning sonar 100 meters off the bottom. The towing cable was five miles long, requiring 20 minutes for any response and eight hours to make a complete turn.
Dettweiler and Cooke anticipated a large debris field, with little of the hull intact. Submarines usually implode catastrophically on their way to the bottom in deep water, but a World War II submarine might have free-flooded beyond 300 feet, its maximum operational depth. The 1-52 was probably making 15 knots when she went down, and might have taken more than an hour to hit the bottom.
“Two of the most revealing clues,” said Jeff Bums of Meridian Sciences, “were an audio recording of the I-52’s sinking and a German memo ordering radio dispatches designed to confuse and misinform the allied forces.” The primary search sector yielded no results. Tension increased.
Jourdan’s computer magic and post-processing software at the offices of Meridian Science were about to re-navigate the I-52’s position, however, by using the original logs of the surviving vessels, especially that of the German U-boat. The new search area—whose coordinates were sent via e-mail—was more than ten miles from the initial U.S. Navy estimate, understandable given the conditions at the time.
As they began the new search, a bad batch of fuel rendered unusable much of their reserves; Tidwell suspected sabotage. A competing British syndicate had beaten his team to sea earlier that year in a desperate effort to find the submarine. In any case, the situation severely shortened their time on station. Even if they found the submarine, they might not have time to document and identify the wreck to secure salvage rights under international law. Failure loomed. They set 3 May as the date for leaving.
On 2 May, a small image and debris field appeared on the sonar screen, just half a mile from Jourdan’s estimate. A high-resolution sonar pass before dawn on 3 May yielded a remarkably clear image of a debris field, down-blast crater—and a submarine, intact and upright on the bottom. But was it the I-52? The team deployed four acoustic bottom transponders in an array to guide the camera sled and dredge more accurately.
On the fourth pass, the sled operator was horrified to find that the sled was on a collision course with I-52. Fortunately, he was able to raise the sled enough to clear the wreck and capture a series of images as it traveled over the stern. One clearly showed the rudder guard rail, peculiar to this class of submarines. They had indeed found I-52—and the gold was probably just aft of the damaged bow. Two passes with a dredge through the debris field brought up small pieces of painted wood, fragile metal, plastic electrical insulation, and some “biology,” as Bums put it. These confirmed their claim and they headed for home on 6 May.
“Not surprisingly, we didn’t get all the data we need,” Tidwell said. “Work at 17,000 is an . . . immense undertaking. It’s the deepest recovery effort ever. I hope to return in January or February [1996] to document the sub and debris field with a remote operating vehicle and possibly a manned submersible. This time, we’ll have an ever bigger crowd—a video documentary crew, the media, and even Japanese naval officers. Everybody wants to go.”
Major salvage work, possibly raising the submarine, must wait at least until the third voyage, perhaps later in 1996. Tidwell believes there is little threat from claim jumpers now because organizations that have the equipment realize the validity of his claim.
Tidwell has assured the Japanese—including friends and family of the crew— that any human remains will be treated with respect. “There were no bones found at the Titanic,” he said, “and I don’t think we’ll find any here.”
