Customer Reviews

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

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I found the book to be very interesting. My father survived the sinking of the USS John Barry. He thought that they were transporting gold. He also predicted some day there would be an attempt to recover the cargo. The details of the voyage, sinking, and actions of the crew, are in accordance with his report. He would have enjoyed this book.

The USS John Barry was a mystery ship in all respects: what was its cargo, where was it going and why? The author explores the multiple mysteries with all the forces at his command, yet is obstructed at every turn: the US government withholds documents, the ship lies split in half at the bottom of the Arabian Sea and the weather prevents the 1994 salvage operation from looking in all the holds. Given these problems, the author has to be credited with a heroic effort, not faulted for failing to solve all the mysteries. He unearths and reasonably interprets historical documents, both American and Soviet; he interviews people of the time, including one of the German crew on the U-boat that sunk the John Barry in August 1944; and he provides backgrounds and portraits of the daredevils who try to recover the treasure from the deep. Best of all, he reviews the WWII history with a fresh eye, and sees that Lend-Lease to Britain served a far different purpose than the lifesaver role it played for the USSR: for Britain it was meant to break the economy, destroy the colonial system and to make the UK more dependent on the USA. All in all, this is an offbeat story with lots of difficulties, but with the grist and thrill of reality. A lot of funny things happened during President Roosevelt's last year, and the mystery voyage of the USS John Barry seems to be one of them. All archival documents relating to it, of course, should be released, along with all other government documents of 50 years duration.

I agree with the review of Kirkus Reviews. The author tries hard to make the search for the John Barry exciting but the ending is anti-climactic, to say the least. The book is very self-serving for the searchers and adds little to solving the mystery of the SS John Barry. Nice glimpse of WW II naval history though.

The Japanese, like the Germans, Soviets, and British, had an atomic bomb program. The appendix notes that the Germans transferred V2 rockets via submarine to the Japanese (a long steam around South Africa), with a view to "revenge" against the US. The Japanese would have used the V2s to deliver atomic bombs against the US fleet. Luckily that particular field-leveler never materialized, as the Japanese bomb project was at least two years behind that of the US. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, interest in nuclear technology (which the Japanese government had developed in secret) was at best muted. In recent years the possibility of cheap electricity using small reactor designs has emerged.

This book is otherwise about the attempted transfer (in 1944) from the US of silver and other "hard assets" to the Soviet Union, under Lend-Lease. I have to wonder why such materials were of interest to Stalin, particularly in 1944 when the German army and Waffen SS was in retreat. Also available in hardcover (0312205902).