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August 8 - August 10, 2022
In the 1970s and 1980s, scuba equipment was still rudimentary, not much advanced past 1943, when Jacques Cousteau helped invent the system of tanks and regulators that allowed men to breathe underwater.
There were a lot of impossible places to go when the world was as big as Chatterton and Nagle saw it, but for God’s sake you had to try. You were required to try. What were you doing alive, these men thought, if you didn’t go and try?
As a diver descends even deeper, say to 170 or 180 feet, he might start to hallucinate, until lobsters begin beckoning him by name or offering him unsound advice.
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.
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?”
Brennan, with his long hair, Fu Manchu mustache, and “It’s cool, dude” sensibility, might have passed for a Grateful Dead roadie if he hadn’t been such a meticulous diver.
Then, Yurga. He had stopped, by chance, at a naval bookstore the day before to pick up some light reading for the trip. His choice: The U-boat: The Evolution and Technical History of German Submarines.
Soon enough, “Doc” had developed a reputation more important than any medal or honor could confer. Doc, the men said, was a crazy motherfucker.
One day Nagle paid him the highest compliment by saying, “When you die no one will ever find your body.”
He swam toward the fallen conning tower, which lay beside the submarine like a mobster gunned down beside his car.
“Always answer the first problem immediately and fully,” they said, “or you’re fucking dead.”
One morning, a man phoned Chatterton claiming to have sunk a U-boat from a blimp in 1942. A month earlier such a claim would have sounded like another bit of lunacy to Chatterton. But in his research, Chatterton had learned that blimps had been a formidable force in keeping U-boats submerged and in escorting ships along the eastern seaboard; that at one point during World War II more than fifteen hundred pilots had manned blimps considerably larger than the current versions used for advertising; that the blimps carried sophisticated antisubmarine technology; and that a blimp had even fought it
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Civil Air Patrol historian who had contacted Nagle through a newspaper reporter. Chatterton had heard of the CAP; they were a group of civilian pilots organized in 1941 by New York’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and others to fly small, privately owned airplanes to help defend coastal shipping. On any given night, a deli counterman or an accountant or a dentist might patrol the skies along the New York and New Jersey coasts, hunting U-boats with a pair of minibombs jury-rigged under the plane’s wings.
“We are the United States Navy, sir,” Cavalcante said. “We know a good bit about what lies in the ocean. But we cannot necessarily reveal that information. You understand that, Mr. Chatterton, correct?”
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.
What will it mean if life tests me and I do not try to strike a blow?
Packer wiped the gauge’s body. It nearly crumbled in his hands. As with the torpedo room tags, this instrument had been constructed with the cheap metal porridge used by Germany during its late-war raw-materials shortage.
At home, Helmuth collected American jazz records, a music form forbidden by the Nazis, and tuned to enemy BBC radio for news of the war—another wartime offense.
On his first trip to the site, Chatterton found a wreck. He cleared sea anemones from the fantail, where his research indicated he would find the ship’s name. There, he began to uncover brass letters—C-A-R-O-L-I-N-A. In a single day, he had found and identified the SS Carolina, for decades the most coveted prize among Northeast wreck divers.
“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.
Then spring began to dab warmth into the air and Marks said it would be a shame if a man turned his back on his passion.
In 1997, less than a month after he identified U-869, Chatterton and Kathy divorced. A year later, as a member of an elite expedition to Greece, Chatterton became the first person ever to dive HMHS Britannic, the sister ship to the Titanic, using a rebreather.
