Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

by Robert Kurson

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.

But deeper than that he was a believer, and as Chatterton watched Kohler reach for a handshake, he knew that 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.