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January 13 - January 19, 2023
In a world where even the moon had been traveled, the floor of the Atlantic remained uncharted wilderness, its shipwrecks beacons for men compelled to look.
If Nagle saw himself in any other diver, that diver was John Chatterton, a ruggedly tall and handsome forty-year-old commercial diver whose booming, Long Island–speckled voice had become sound track to the most important wreck dives of the era. By day, Chatterton worked underwater construction jobs around Manhattan, the kind that required a brass helmet and a ten-thousand-degree Broco torch. By weekend, he masterminded some of the most inventive and daring shipwreck dives ever executed on the eastern seaboard.
Nearly all the myriad other dangers lying in wait for the deep-wreck diver involve narcosis or decompression sickness.
Some compare the effects of narcosis to alcohol intoxication, others to the twilight of a waking anesthetic, still others to the fog of ether or laughing gas.
In an environment as unforgiving as a deep shipwreck, the short-circuiting of judgment, emotion, and motor skills complicates everything.
Charter boats, most of which are longer than thirty-five feet, are built for the rigors of the sea. Customers often make two dives in a day, but they must wait several hours between turns to fully discharge any nitrogen that remains in their bodies. Dive charters, therefore, often become all-day or overnight affairs.
Equipment is the deep-wreck diver’s soul mate. It grants him passage into an off-limits world, then stands between him and nature. There are hints of love in the way the diver clips, wraps, fastens, and jury-rigs his 175 pounds of gear until he is part modern art sculpture, part 1950s movie alien.
A diver lost inside a wreck is in grave danger. He has a finite air supply. If he cannot find his way out, he will drown. If he finds his way out but breathes down his tanks in the process, he will not have enough air left for proper decompression.
At times of such stark darkness, the deep-wreck diver is more a shadow diver, aiming at the shapes of a shipwreck as much as at the shipwrecks themselves.
A great diver learns to stand down his emotions. At the moment he becomes lost or blinded or tangled or trapped, that instant when millions of years of evolution demand fight or flight and narcosis carves order from his brain, he dials down his fear and contracts into the moment until his breathing slows and his narcosis lightens and his reason returns. In this way he overcomes his humanness and becomes something else. In this way, liberated from instincts, he becomes a freak of nature.
This submarine had come from World War II. He knew from his books that there were no sunken American submarines in this area. He looked again at the wreck. For a moment he dared not think it. But it was undeniable. “I’m holding on to a U-boat,” Chatterton said out loud. “I’m holding on to a World War II German U-boat.”
— If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it. — If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving. — Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average. — Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives with these decisions forever. — Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you. — It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and
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On weekends aboard the Seeker in 1986, Chatterton began to notice that the skills he had developed at work seemed to transfer naturally to the business of shipwreck exploration.
One day Nagle paid him the highest compliment by saying, “When you die no one will ever find your body.”
They warned him—relentlessly—about the “snowball effect,” the process whereby a diver ignores a minor problem or two only to encounter other problems that combine with the earlier ones to doom him. “Always answer the first problem immediately and fully,” they said, “or you’re fucking dead.” Kohler took in every word.
Werner was not just any commander. He had written Iron Coffins, a memoir that had become a classic in the genre.
For years, Kohler had believed the U-boats to be nearly invincible. Now he began to learn of “Sauregurkenzeit” or “Sour-Pickle Time,” the year when Allied ingenuity and technological and material superiority reversed the course of the U-boat war so decisively that U-boats sometimes went weeks without sinking a single enemy ship, when the hunters became the hunted.
“I gotta say, this is a mystery like you read in a book,” Kohler said. “A German U-boat comes to our doorstep in New Jersey. It explodes and sinks with maybe sixty guys onboard, and no one—no government or navy or professor or historian—has a clue that it’s even here.”
if one did not accept written history as gospel, worlds of possibility opened.
the divers had taken to calling the wreck U-Who,
That was another thing about wreck diving. So long as you were alive, there would always be another trip.
More than ever, diving had become a reflection of life to Chatterton. The principles by which he had made himself a great diver were the same principles by which he lived.
That evening Lander called Chatterton at home. “Chrissy didn’t make it,” she said. “He died in the chamber.”
Chatterton and Kohler had only recently learned about the postwar assessors. As navy investigators, it was the assessors’ task after the war to make a final report on the fate of all U-boats. In most cases the evidence was clear-cut and the assessors’ job simple. In rarer instances, when a U-boat could not be accounted for, the assessors stretched for an explanation—they were loath to leave question marks in the history books.
the lesson was stark and by now familiar: written history was fallible. Sloppy and erroneous assessments had been rushed into the official record, only to be presumed accurate by historians, who then published elegant reference works echoing the mistakes.
Along the way, each marveled at how easy it was to get an incomplete picture of the world if one relied solely on experts, and how important it would be to further rely on oneself.
By the war’s end, more than thirty thousand U-boat men out of a force of about fifty-five thousand had been killed—a death rate of almost 55 percent. No branch of a modern nation’s armed forces had ever sustained such casualties and kept fighting.
The “Happy Time” had yielded to Sauregurkenzeit, or “Sour-Pickle Time.” The hunters of the early war had now become the hunted.
Dönitz’s own characterization of a U-boat crew. He had called them a Schicksalsgemeinschaft—a community bound by fate—in which each man “is dependent on the other, and is thereby sworn to one another.”
Most men, it seemed to them, went through life never really knowing themselves. A man might consider himself noble or brave or just, they believed, but until he was truly tested it would always be mere opinion.
My garage is like a war zone. But listen to this: the explosion produced a clue. The bottle has a date on it—fifteen-dot-four-dot-forty-four—that’s European for April 15, 1944. That’s the hydrostatic test date, the date the bottle was examined and certified to be good.” “That means our U-boat sailed after April 15, 1944,” Kohler said. “Exactly.”
this was the most important thing of all, that in a quest in which men were asked to really know themselves, an unflinching belief in the possible survived all.
“Richie, we just got an unbelievable letter from Coppock. He dropped an atomic bomb. You won’t believe it—” “Slow down!” Kohler said. “What’s it say?” “It says this: U-869, Horenburg’s boat, the one all the history books say was sunk off Gibraltar, was originally ordered to New York. And not just to New York, but just south of New York, right to our wreck site! It says that headquarters later changed those orders to Gibraltar. But get this, Richie, and I quote: ‘It is certainly possible that Control’s signal ordering U-869 to the Gibraltar area was not received by the boat.’”
“The navy sent a hunter-killer group for U-869 but they never got her, never even spotted her—we’d know it if they had. U-boats didn’t get away from hunter-killer groups in 1945, John. This Neuerburg must have been some commander.” For a moment there was silence on the line. “We didn’t find U-857 at all,” Kohler finally said. “We found U-869.” “We found U-869,” Chatterton said. “It was U-869 all along.”
Navy intelligence was unimpressed with the attacks and the flimsy evidence produced. They graded each of the attacks “G—No Damage.” But, Chatterton could see as he read the reports, postwar assessors soon changed the grade from “G” to “B—Probably Sunk.” “Why would they have done that?” Lander asked. “I’ve seen this before,” Chatterton said. “The postwar assessors were scrambling to account for lost U-boats. One of those U-boats was U-869.
a U-boat crew was a Schicksalsgemeinschaft—a community bound by fate.
he believed U-boat service to be a Himmelfahrtskommando—a command to report directly to heaven.
A soldier who criticized Hitler or the war effort could be charged with Wehrkraftzersetzung—the undermining of military authority—and tried before a war tribunal. No one knew exactly whom to trust.
To Chatterton, quitting the U-Who now would have been tantamount to quitting himself. For years, he had lived and dived according to a single set of principles, a belief that hard work, perseverance, thoroughness, preparation, creativity, and vision made the diver and the man. He had overlaid his life philosophy onto scuba and had become one of the world’s great wreck divers. He had overlaid his diving ethos onto his daily existence and found himself leading an honorable and gratifying life.
As if to exact revenge against the U-Who, Chatterton turned his creative fury to the hunt for other shipwrecks. In July 1994 alone, he discovered and identified the tanker Norness—the first ship sunk by a U-boat on the American side of the Atlantic during World War II—and discovered the Sebastian—a World War I–era passenger liner sunk by fire and storm eight miles east of the Andrea Doria.
“When things are easy a person doesn’t really learn about himself. It’s what a person does at the moment of his greatest struggle that shows him who he really is.
torpedoes, however, occasionally turned back on their own U-boats. Those torpedoes became known as circle-runners. U-boats recorded several instances in which circle-runners passed beneath or above them. An acoustic circle-runner could be especially dangerous, as it chased the sounds of its own submarine’s electric motors, pumps, and generators. To avoid being hit, U-boat commanders were ordered to crash-dive immediately after firing an acoustic torpedo.
The most likely explanation for the communications problems between U-869 and Control involves atmospheric conditions, though it is possible that the boat also experienced mechanical problems with its radios.
The Harbor Inn—a.k.a. the Horrible Inn—no longer exists. Standing in its place in the Brielle, New Jersey, parking lot adjacent to the Seeker is the upscale Shipwreck Grill, which serves its nattily dressed customers lobster bisque and honey-roasted salmon with Dijon lobster sauce. Older divers who drop in for a bite swear that if they stay long enough they can still hear Bill Nagle calling for another Jim Beam.
The Seeker, the dive boat conceived and built by Nagle and used to discover and dive the U-Who, continues to run charters. Its current owner, Danny Crowell, goes to the Stolt Dagali, USS Algol, and many other popular wrecks. Crowell rarely runs to U-869. “I’d go if people were interested,” he says. “There’s just not that many of those kind of divers around these days.”
Since Chatterton pulled the identifying tag from the wreck in 1997, however, the U-boat has surrendered no important artifacts. Still, Chatterton and Kohler believe that there’s a remote chance that Commander Neuerburg’s diary survived and lies buried in silt and rubble. Were that diary to be recovered with its writing intact, history would have a first-person insight into the boat’s doomed patrol.
In November 2000, PBS’s Nova series aired Hitler’s Lost Sub, a documentary about the mystery U-boat.
Chatterton was diagnosed with metastasized squamous cell carcinoma of the tonsil, likely a result of his exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam.
On September 11, 2001, as terrorist-hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers, Chatterton was overseeing a commercial dive job under the World Financial Center, directly across the street from Tow...
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In September 2002, Chatterton quit commercial diving after a twenty-year career to pursue a history degree and teaching certificate at Kean University in Union, New Jersey.
