21Jourdan
Mariners Mirror Vol. Vol 107, No 4 (2021) pp495-496
Operation Rising Sun: The Sinking of Japan’s Secret Submarine I-52
By David W. Jourdan
Potomac Books, 2020, Price £28.50 (hb)
288 pages, illustrations, maps, bibliography, index.
ISBN: 978-1-64012-169-0
I-52 was to take part in the so-called Yanagi missions which aimed to exchange materials, technology and personnel between Japan and Germany. In all, some five missions were undertaken during World War II. Three arrived safely, with two submarines sunk en route. Of the three successful outbound vessels only one completed her return voyage, with two sunk before reaching Japan.
This book focuses on the mission of the I-52. The I-52 was a huge submarine completed at the very end of 1943, some 356 feet in length, displacing over 2500 tons, with a crew of 94 and a range of 21,000 nautical miles. In March 1944 she prepared for the long trip to Germany. She sailed from Kure near Hiroshima, carrying fourteen passengers who were to study how Germany built everything from gun-sights to torpedo boat engines, and a cargo of 146 gold bars. She reached Singapore eleven days later and further embarked over 100 tons of tungsten, molybdenum, quinine, opium, caffeine, raw rubber and codebooks. But the mission proved doomed almost from the start. After barely a week at sea, the Japanese vessel assigned to refuel her was mined. A flurry of diplomatic messages between Tokyo and Berlin seeking assistance was intercepted and read by US cryptanalysts who were able to judge her likely route and timetable.
As the submarine drove on through the Indian Ocean, an escort carrier Task Force led by USS Bogue sailed from Chesapeake Bay on anti-submarine duties. By late June having travelled over 15000 nautical miles and after 105 days at sea, I-52 was in the North Atlantic where she rendezvoused with U-530. A Naxos radar detector set, coding machines and cipher keys were transferred to the Japanese boat along with three unfortunate German technicians. The boats then parted company with the U-boat which headed for the Caribbean on patrol, while I-52 set course for Lorient. Almost immediately planes from the USS Bogue were in the area and attacked and sank the Japanese submarine with a FIDO aerial torpedo. Next morning on 24th June, pieces of wreckage were recovered from the scene by a destroyer from the Task Force, thus confirming the sinking.
This tale is effectively and well told, but there is much more to the book than this piece of history. David Jourdan is a former naval officer and the author of several books. He has a fluent and very readable writing style. He is also the president of Nauticos, a company devoted to deep-sea exploration. Much of the book then circulates around the search for the wreck and its gold cargo in the 1990s. There are four major themes to the book. The first is the story of I-52’s voyage. Next there is the tale of the actual sinking by Grumman Avengers from USS Bogue, described in great detail. Very unusually, the voice recordings of the pilot and crew as well as the underwater noises from the sonobuoys dropped by the aircraft as they hunted for, tracked down and sank the submarine have survived in the US National Archives. A full transcription of these is given in an appendix, along with a detailed timeline of the flight. The main text also has an atmospheric account of the action.
Thirdly, the interception of messages from and about the submarine was crucial to its discovery and there is a substantial section on the development of ULTRA and the cracking of cyphers. Unusually, there is a very full description of the role of Polish scientists, notably the mathematician Marian Rejewski, in the initial pre-war breaking of the German cyphers.
Then finally, fully half of the book covers the attempts to track down the wreck and shifts to a quasi-autobiographical mode. In the post glasnost world of the 1990s it was possible for the wreck hunters to raise the money for an expedition of American technicians to hire a Russian research vessel to undertake the hunt. The team worked somewhat casually with Jourdan who knew many of the technical team personally. After weeks exploring the area where the wreck was assumed to be, Jourdan, who was ashore in the United States, used quite basic but then state of the art computer technology such as floppy disks and primitive e-mail, to recalculate the courses of the US task force and the Japanese and German submarines involved. This navigation analysis recalculated the point of attack and proved to be within half a mile of the actual wreck. The hunters had been looking in the wrong place, but now, short of food and fuel, one last trawl uncovered the wreck and provided enough debris for salvage rights to be claimed. This part of the story also gives a good detailed account of the then advanced survey and discovery technologies used and how they were deployed.
Two decades on, the gold from the wreck has still not been recovered despite later attempts at this. Jourdan delicately but pointedly casts a veil over the murky intrigues of other participants in this period, making it clear that while his company’s sophisticated computer software was essential to the initial expedition, what happened then and subsequently was the work of other less principled actors.
The author has accomplished his objective very well. The book is a nicely written mix of a historical tale, a personal account of his involvement in the hunt for the wreck and a detailed but comprehensible description of the technology used for both deep underwater surveying and the tracing of historical journeys made when most navigation was based in part on dead reckoning and well before GPS allowed accuracy in recording. The historical sources are used impeccably and the charts and diagrams ease understanding to create an original and enjoyable tale.
Derek G. Law
Emeritus Professor
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow