Richard N. Billings

twenty-year career of Navy test pilot and astronaut Wally Schirra, collection of personal anecdotes, casual stories of both his professional lives
One of America's first astronauts and the only one of the original seven to fly in all three pioneering space programs - Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo - Wally Schirra inherited a love of flying and spirit of adventure from his World War I-ace father and barnstorming, wing-walking mother. In this revealing autobiography, Schirra takes an inside look at the early days of spaceflight and the men who captured the heart of the nation.… (més)

Author Richard Billings has a bad case of multiple personality disorder, or something. Battleground Atlantic appears to be written by three different people; a reasonably serious (though mostly derivative) journalist writing on Japanese naval intelligence operations in WWII Europe, and Japanese naval technology exchange with the Germans; a potboiler writer scraping up some sort of excitement about a series of submersible dives on a sunken Japanese submarine; and a sensationalist hack trying to spin shreds of data that he doesn’t understand into an imaginary threat of a radiological attack on US West Coast cities in 1945.


So – the facts (I know these seem disconnected, but so is the book): The Japanese submarine I-52, on route to Lorient with a cargo of molybdenum, tin, tungsten, gold, rubber, opium and quinine was sunk by Avengers from the USS Bouge on June 24, 1944. The German U-boat U-234, on route to Japan with a disassembled Me-262, 5600 kilos of uranium oxide, and two Japanese naval officers, surfaced and surrendered to the USS Sutton on May 8, 1945. The United States broke Japanese naval codes. Various German physicists engaged in not very successful attempts to build a nuclear reactor during WWII. Various Japanese naval attaches discussed various projects with the Kriegsmarine near the end of the war. Various minor Japanese military officers and civilians made “peace proposals” to miscellaneous Swiss and Americans in 1945. The US ALSOS mission wandered around Germany looking for evidence of a German nuclear program and collecting stray physicists. The battleship Yamato sortied on a mission to support troops on Okinawa, without enough fuel to return to Kure. Several large Japanese submarines left Japan at about the same time with instructions to raid Ulithi Atoll. The US atom bombed Japan and they surrendered. Another US mission wandered around Japan looking for evidence of a Japanese nuclear program and collecting stray physicists.


Then, there’s something of a discontinuity. In 1995 salvor Paul Tidwell located the wreck of the I-52; in 1998 he assembled some backers and hired the Russian oceanographic research vessel Akademik Mstislav Keldysh to act as mother ship for dives on the I-52 with a pair of Mir deep submersibles (the Russian oceanographic research establishment being somewhat in need of cash at the time). A National Geographic photo crew, eventual Battleground Atlantic author Richard Billings, and some of Tidwell’s backers were also on board the Keldysh. Although the Mirs photographed I-52 and picked up a few tin ingots and some personal effects from the Atlantic ooze, Tidwell’s backers called a halt to things when the reported two tons of Japanese gold failed to materialize.


So, from this Billings spins the following (please don’t jump up screaming “No way!” until you read it all; you’ll just have to do it again):


*The Germans actually succeeded in building a reactor, and used it to irradiate a quantity of uranium oxide.

*The gold on the I-52 was intended to pay for the now ultraradioactive uranium oxide, which would then be transported back to Japan…

* …where it would be made into radiological bombs.

*Because the I-52 was sunk, the ultraradioactive (yes, I know) uranium oxide was instead shipped out on the U-234 but she surrendered, despite be urged to continue by the Japanese officers on board.

*The fuel that could have allowed the Yamato to abort and return to Japan was instead being hoarded for the radiological attack mission…

*… which would be carried out by seaplanes launched from Japanese submarines, that were instead diverted to Ulithi Atoll once no ultraradioactive uranium oxide was forthcoming.

*And the whole plan was concocted by Hitler, who wanted an attack on the US civilian population for revenge but wanted it blamed on the Japanese so there would be no retaliation against Germany.


Yeah, right.


Billings’ discussion of the more normal Japanese-German technological exchanges was reasonably interesting. The mention of late-war peace proposals was interesting but more or less a complete non-sequiter. The accounts of the dives on I-52 would have made an agreeable magazine article. The nuclear stuff is completely wacko; Billings appears to have picked up his information on nuclear technology from some of the less reputable Wikipedia articles and manga. The fact that the ALSOS mission somehow missed the supposed reactor (which Billings keeps calling a “pile”) is dealt with by ignoring it. He refers to the uranium oxide on U-234 as “U-235”, discusses a German “V-4” rocket that was originally supposed to launch the radiological weapon against the US from France, and claims that German physicist Fritz Houtermans later went to work for the Soviets (which is apparently true) where he developed a method of enriching uranium by “splitting isotopes” (which, unless my own knowledge of physics is completely wrong, is nuts. Perhaps a misunderstanding of “separating isotopes”; yes, I guess I could believe you can enrich uranium by “separating isotopes”, alright).


Even this wouldn’t be so bad if Billings had told the story in a more-or-less coherent fashion, but it jumps all over in what was probably an attempt to make it more interesting. Thus the story of the I-52 get intermingled with the discussion of Japanese-German naval exchanges and Tidwell’s wreck dives and the putative German reactor.


There are actually a few items of interest in this mess; at one point the Japanese naval attaché in the rapidly collapsing Third Reich suggested the entire German U-boat force sail for Japan and continue the war from there; this was treated with polite incredulity by Doenitz but might make an interesting alternate history scenario. Billings claims the Japanese attempted to buy a Ju-290 for air service to Japan; there was a plan to institute some such missions and a claim that one was actually successful but they were undertaken with German aircraft. (The Japanese did buy blueprints and a manufacturing license for the Ju-390). Japanese officials quoted by Billings note that flying a Japanese-owned Ju-290 service from Germany across Siberia to Manchuria would require “delicate” negotiations with the USSR, which demonstrates considerable understatement.


Not worth paying money for; WWII aficionados might want to leaf through it in a library for the occasional useful paragraph but you will need to exercise some self-discipline to avoid screaming “WTF!” and hurling the book across the room during the wacko parts.
… (més)