Stalin's Silver: The Sinking of the USS John Barry

Beasant's hyperbolic writing betrays his stint as the press agent for the Ocean Group, the company founded to explore the USS John Barry, an American merchant ship sunk in 1944 by a German submarine in the Arabian Sea. To be fair, Beasant has done quite a bit of research into the John Barry, but he hasn't tied all that homework into a cohesive work. The John Barry had long been an enticing mystery to the eccentric and well-funded demimonde of salvage enthusiasts. What was known for sure, when the Ocean Group acquired the salvage rights in 1989, was that the ship had been carrying silver coins minted for Saudi Arabia. But the ship was also suspected to have been loaded with silver bullion for Stalin. When, in 1994, the John Barry was finally salvaged, the Ocean Group found the coins--but no bullion. Beasant's narrative bounces among the story of the John Barry, the story of the salvage operation and the story of U859, the German sub that sank the John Barry. During his investigation, Beasant learned that U859 contained 31 tons of mercury, a discovery that led him to investigate the cargoes of other U-boats. He concludes his book with the supposition that, in the last stages of WWII, German submarines were supplying Japan with materials to build an atomic bomb. Despite Beasant's efforts to inflate the importance of the demise of the John Barry and to portray the salvage operation as a rousing present-day adventure, his suggestion that Japan may have been on the verge of assembling powerful new weapons at war's end overshadows the rest of the narrative. That's too bad, because it's the least documented, most speculative part of his book. (June)