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

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.

When he is fully geared up, a good wreck diver looks like a German car engine; more ordinary divers resemble the interior of a child’s toy chest.

“Fix the first problem fully and calmly before you even think about the second problem.”

He pays attention when a charter captain like Danny Crowell passes around a bucketful of broken dishes and bent silverware and tells his customers, “I want you people to see this stuff. This is what a guy died for. We found it in his bag. Look real hard. Touch it. Are these pieces of shit worth your life?”

Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you.

It had been a year since he had seen the dead woman in the water, but Richie had never stopped wondering how people could be left in the water when they had loved ones at home who needed to know where they were.

Richie’s father was right: always swing while the other guy is telling you how he’s going to kick your ass.

it occurred to him that Kohler’s overarching instinct was dead-on, that if one did not accept written history as gospel, worlds of possibility opened.

As Chatterton and Kohler pored over the body counts, they found themselves hoping for a better ending, not for the Nazis or for Germany but maybe for a crewman or two, for one of these kids whose shoes were still lined up neatly on the mangled U-Who,

the crewmen observed Neuerburg’s intensity and wondered if his heart might not belong to the National Socialists. No one, however, wondered about his commitment.

“U-boats are my avocation,” he said. “Perhaps it would be boring if I were to earn money from it.