Submarine's Gold Could Yield Treasure For History

A shrouded chapter of World War II history could be uncovered this fall when a salvage team involving three Seattle-area men attempts to recover 2 tons of gold from a sunken Japanese submarine.

The 356-foot vessel, part of little-known wartime Axis commerce, was sunk in 17,000 feet of water by a U.S. torpedo on June 24, 1944, in the Atlantic.

The gold, worth an estimated $20 million, was to pay for German radar detection and snorkel technology needed to cope with radar-equipped U.S. aircraft in the Pacific.

The submarine, called the I-52, and the remains of 94 crew members and several civilian technicians lie off the Cape Verde Islands in the central Atlantic, according to Virginia researcher and project leader Paul Tidwell.

The I-52 was found last spring by a team organized and equipped by Ted Brockett, president of Sound Ocean Systems of Redmond, which located the wreckage of the 1858 steamship Governor off Port Townsend in the early 1980s.

One of the on-scene Atlantic supervisors of the slow and methodical hunt was Bob Cooke of Seattle. Bob Mester of Puyallup was a search consultant.

The sub was sunk after being detected by a secret U.S. Navy device, small listening sonobuoys, and then blasted by a new weapon, an acoustic torpedo that homed in on propeller noise.

Tidwell found a wire recording in the National Archives of the sub's sounds, the blast of the torpedo, the sound of the sinking and the pilot's, "Got the sonofabitch."

The voice belonged to Lt. Cmdr. Jesse Taylor, who flew on that moonless 1944 night in search of the I-52.

Now a crusty 79 and living in Maryville, Mo., the retired Navy captain clearly remembers dropping the sonobuoys to locate the I-52, then flares, two bombs that missed and finally the fatal homing torpedo from his Avenger dive bomber.

Taylor was given virtually no information about the submarine itself. "In fact, I didn't know much about it until long, long after," he said.

FIVE YEARS OF DETECTIVE WORK

Begun in 1990, Tidwell's submarine research and combing of official records - aided by recently declassified documents - found what is hinted at in the only known account of the wartime sub commerce.

Scattered through the pages of "I-Boat Captain," a 1976 personal account by Zenji Orita, are hints of German subs loading war material at a port built for them at Penang in Japanese-occupied Malasia.

Even fewer hints tell of Japanese subs carrying similar cargo to German-occupied France.

Orita says the I-52 refueled from a German sub in the Atlantic. He said word never reached Japan that the ship failed to arrive in the Bay of Biscay with a cargo of 54 tons of raw rubber; 228 tons of strategic metals, including tungsten, tin and molybdenum, and 3 tons of quinine and opium.

Orita doesn't mention the I-52's gold. But Tidwell, prowling U.S. archives, found references in intercepted messages from Japanese and German navies whose codes had been broken.

Tidwell's biggest break came when he found the captured logbook from the German refueling sub and matched it with the logbook for the aircraft carrier Bogue, from which Taylor took off.

FINDING A PINPOINT ON OCEAN FLOOR

Tidwell took the logbooks' course information to Meridian Sciences Inc., a Maryland software developer that specializes in re-navigating the courses of submarines for the U.S. Navy.

Using nonclassified programs, the firm - after correcting navigational log errors - gave Tidwell a geographical point from which to start searching. It turned out to be only a half-mile from the I-52 wreckage.

This spring, nonstop for almost a month, an oceanographic vessel leased by Brockett from a Russian company searched the Atlantic. Crammed with sophisticated gear, the ship crawled at one knot an hour, towing almost 20,000 feet of 1 1/2-inch diameter cable attached to an underwater sled mounted with side-scanning sonar and cameras.

The systematic search took weeks because of the sonar's narrow search pattern. Stabilizing the sled for an overlapping return swath took eight hours each time the ship reversed direction.

Tom Dettwiler of Meridian Sciences commanded the search's

12-hour day watch and Seattle's Cooke, exploration manager for Sound Ocean Systems, the 12-hour night watch.

On May 2, with the search vessel's fuel and food almost exhausted, the underwater sonar painted a scene of debris. On the next pass it detected a cigar-shaped object - the I-52.

Tidwell sent two remote-operated vehicles (ROVs) with cameras down to the 17,000-foot level, where the pressure exceeds 7,000 pounds per square inch. Their photos show the I-52 has some corrosion but is in remarkably good condition.

In November - summer off the Cape Verde Islands - Tidwell and his team will return to where the

I-52 salvage claim has been staked out under international maritime law. After electronic mapping of the debris field, a large ROV will saw a window in the hull to allow an inspection.

"A smaller ROV with a camera about the size and shape of a sausage will go in and look for the 49 metal boxes that hold the gold," Tidwell said. "We know where it was stowed, but it probably did move around some in the sinking."

The large ROV will then be equipped with an arm with mechanical fingers to remove the 146 gold bars, one by one.

SALVAGE COULD COST $5 MILLION

The gold salvage could take up to 90 days and run up a bill of $5 million, paid by a Fred Neal Jr., an Arkansas businessman and Tidwell's sole investor.

Tidwell has informed the Japanese government of the discovery, but no decision has been made about raising the I-52. He also pledged to return any artifacts - expected to include officers' Samurai swords - to families of the crew members.