The Fate of the I-52
Unbeknownst to either the Germans or Japanese, Allied codebreakers had cracked both the Axis partners’ secret communications. They did that so thoroughly that the Allies were often able to intercept, decode, and read Axis secret messages as fast as, or even faster than, their intended recipients. As a result, American intelligence had been decoding the I-52’s traffic signals ever since she had left Kure, and was able to track her throughout her long voyage. On June 6, 1944, the Japanese naval attache in Berlin signaled the submarine that the Allies had landed in France, and advised her to make plans to head for German-occupied Norway, instead. En route, she was to meet up with a German submarine, the U-530, on June 22. The I-52 acknowledged receipt of the message, fatally including her position in the reply.
American intelligence intercepted that exchange and began vectoring a submarine hunter-killer group to find the I-52. Centered around an American escort carrier, the USS Bogue, accompanied by five destroyers, the task group was en route from the US to Europe, when it was tasked with a new mission. On June 15th, following a brief stop in Casablanca, the Bogue group sailed out to begin its hunt. It was a highly successful team of submarine killers, that had sunk a Japanese submarine just a month earlier, on May 13th. Between February 1943 and July 1945, the Bogue team would send 13 German and Japanese submarines to the bottom of the sea.
As directed, the I-52 met up with the German U-530 on the night of June 22nd, about 850 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands. The U-boat topped off the Japanese submarine’s fuel tanks, furnished her with an Enigma coding machine, plus a radar detector, two radar operators, and a German liaison officer to help get her through the Bay of Biscay. The following evening, June 23rd, the Bogue submarine killer group reached the area of the meeting, and began hunting.
At around 10 PM, June 23, the Bogue launched Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers to try and find the enemy submarines. The U-530 slipped away undetected, but at 11:40 PM, an Avenger piloted by Lieutenant Commander Jesse D. Taylor got a surface contact on its radar, about 10 miles away. Taylor homed in on the radar blip, got there within minutes, then dropped flares to illuminate the area. By their glare, the surfaced I-52 became visible to the naked eye. Taylor immediately dropped sonobuoys – a type of underwater microphone that picks up propeller sounds and transmits them to an airplane – then began his attack.
At about 11:45 PM, Taylor dropped two depth bombs, set to explode at 25 feet, and both he and his plane’s gunner saw one bomb explode almost directly on the starboard or right side of the I-52, and another explode about 75 feet away. Two minutes later, Taylor followed that up with an acoustic torpedo, and shortly thereafter, the sonobuoys detected the sounds of an explosion, followed by those of a hull breaking up. Per Taylor, it was: “a crackling and crunching noise … the sounds of a tin can being crushed“. The next day, the area was covered by an oil slick of about 15 square miles. There was also considerable evidence of the submarine’s demise, such as blocks of floating raw rubber, as well as bits of flesh, including a foot in a sandal with Japanese characters. The I-52’s months-long journey had come to an end.
Half a century later, Paul Tidwell found her remains in a debris field three miles beneath the Atlantic, resting mostly upright, with her conning tower and hull number still visible. Plans to raise the I-52 were objected to by the Japanese government, which considered the wreck site a grave. Tidwell eventually worked out an agreement with the Japanese government, allowing him to recover the submarine’s cargo, put it on display, then return all artifacts – except the gold – to Japan. In the end, however, the recovery efforts only managed to locate a single box of opium, but no gold.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
Combined Fleet – Sensuikan! IJN Submarine I-52: Tabular Record of Movement
Naval Historical Society of Australia – I-52, Japan’s Golden Submarine, Sunk in the Atlantic in 1944