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Page 90.

Chapter 21. U-234 to Japan—Hitler's Final Weapon

As Fortress Germany began to crumble, the Nazi war machine churned on in surviving cities like Kiel and Kristiansand on the North Sea. Nuremberg in the east had just fallen into Soviet hands. Italy, Austria, the Balkans, Poland, France—the litany of lost empire was a mile long, and now Germany was like an insect on its back being plucked apart one leg at a time. In the west, the Allies had crossed the Rhine at Remagen and roared into the ancient cathedral cities of Cologne and Speyer, cutting supply lines and decapitating command centers as they went.

In the Pacific, Japan was fighting her way backward to the homeland, leaving a trail of bitterly contested blood on every tiny atoll and island, but her cause seemed doomed. Tokyo was being firebombed night and day, as were most major cities across the Land of the Rising Sun. Still, on both sides of the world, the victorious Allies were leery of marching into some unknown death trap. There were ominous legends of an impregnable redoubt in the Alps of Europe from which Hitler’s legions could continue the war for years, and there was every indication the mainland of Japan would fight to the last man, woman, and child rather than surrender.

The dark romance of Fascism and Nazism seemed to have everlasting life, and fanatics everywhere were prepared to continue the fight at all costs. In Germany, specially trained teenagers, perhaps the ultimate in a series of vengeance weapons starting with the V-1 and the V-2, roamed about at night as ‘werewolves,’ assassinating Allied occupiers and their German sympathizers. Across Europe and the Pacific, millions still died as the war raged on. And in the surviving pockets of Nazi power, plots were still hatched to save the Third Reich from Doom, whose necrotic breath blew down the Germans’ backs.

In the midst of this chaos, where often the most basic rules of law and order were breaking down day by day, many pragmatic individuals could see the coming doom of the Nazi order and sought practical ways to ensure their survival. One such individual was the handsome and rugged captain-lieutenant of a giant sub, the U-234, named Johann Heinrich Fehler.

In the badly damaged concrete redoubts of the harbor in Kiel, one of Germany’s preeminent seafaring cities, several surviving submarines were being hastily outfitted for desperate, last-minute missions on behalf of the Fuhrer and the Reich.

The Germans had been developing a dizzying array of so-called Wunderwaffen, wonder weapons, during the last year of the war to stave off the growingly inevitable defeat. They were launching rocket ships with explosive warheads hundreds of miles downrange from Northern Germany into England. They were perfecting early jet fighter and bomber aircraft like the Messerschmitt 262 and the Arado 310 Blitz. When their runways were bombed out, they invented the Jet Assisted Take-Off (JATO) rocket which helped lift propeller-driven cargo planes off the ground in a golden shower of light. Their ingenuity was boundless, although they were in fact behind the allies in certain critical technologies. Two of these technologies, whose development by Britain and the United States was shadowed at every turn by Nazi and Soviet spies, were RADAR and the atomic bomb.

Captain Fehler himself had no real idea, and only half-heartedly cared, what top secret cargo was being loaded into his gigantic submarine in the desperate days of April 1945.

U-234 was a 1600-ton boat, 270 feet long, one of the two largest submarines ever built in Europe (the Japanese had some twenty even larger I-Class subs, 356.5 feet long, all but one sunk by late 1944 after putting nearly sixty Allied merchant ships on the bottom). By comparison, at 882.5 feet (269 meters) and a beam 92 feet (28 meters), the late R.M.S. Titanic was just over three times U-234’s length. U-234 had been designed as a minelayer of the XB Class but circumstance and strategy had changed her to a long-range heavy underwater transport, meaning she would now be used to ferry up to 250 tons of cargo halfway around the world between Germany and Asia. She could make 20 knots on the surface, or 12 knots submerged, and could dive to 300 meters (over 900 feet). She was a Wunderwaffe in her own right.