5 Buried Secrets of the Manhattan Project

On May 14, 1945, the German U-boat U-234 surfaced in the North Atlantic and surrendered to the USS Sutton. It was an unusual sight—a Nazi submarine willingly turning itself over to the Allies. But what lay inside was even more extraordinary.

Buried in its compartments, packed in lead-lined containers labeled for the Japanese Army, sat over half a ton of uranium oxide. Had history played out differently, it might have fueled Japan’s own atomic ambitions. Instead, it vanished—absorbed into the labyrinth of the Manhattan Project.

Was this German cargo, the last desperate offering of a dying Reich, used in the Little Boy bomb that would destroy Hiroshima just months later?