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

Life’s splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. —Franz Kafka, Diaries

It's not often that you find a such a hopeful quote from Kafka. I like the excitement but it feels like the book is indicating it will eventually got mired in red tape.

Panicked divers who bolt for “sunshine and seagulls” risk a case of decompression sickness, or the “bends.” Severe bends can permanently handicap, paralyze, or kill a person. Divers who have witnessed the writhing, screaming agony of a bad bends hit swear that they would rather suffocate and drown on the bottom than surface after a long, deep dive without decompressing.

While that may be academically true, when confronted with the actual spectre of dying, most people will put off the inevitable, even for minutes or hours in that final panic—no matter the pain.

Narcosis and decompression sickness are the patriarchs on the family tree of deep-wreck diving dangers. A diver does not dare board a charter boat bound for a deep wreck unless he honors these perils.

Not that I'm a deep-wreck diver, but I remember well the nervousness of my first week-long live aboard trip, and the initial dive plans that were much deeper than I had ever been before.

The anchor line does not simply keep the boat stationary. It is the diver’s umbilical cord, the means by which he makes his way to the shipwreck and, more important, finds his way back. A diver cannot simply jump off the boat, drop through the water, and expect to land on the wreck. By the time he splashes, his boat likely will have drifted several hundred feet with the current, so that it is no longer over the wreck. Even if the boat remained directly over the wreck, a diver who jumped off and descended without using the anchor line as a guide would find himself a toy in the ocean currents that swirl in different directions at various depths. Those currents might blow him hundreds of feet from the wreck.

This also took me a few dives to reconcile — the anchor chain and the decompression chains where you hang out while waiting to surface.

The diver himself hears two primary sounds: the hiss of his regulator on his inhalation and the booming gurgles of his bubbles on his exhalation; together they are the metronome of his adventure.

Most divers stay exclusively outside the wreck. They come to touch the ship or search for loose artifacts or snap photographs. Their work is steady and conservative. The spirit of the ship, however, lies inside. That is where the stories have settled, where one uncovers the freeze-frames of final human experience.

Not for me. Compressed, dangerous, dark spaces are scary as hell.

If visibility were simply a matter of illumination, a diver’s headlight and flashlight would suffice. But a shipwreck is filled with silt and debris. The diver’s slightest movement—a reach for a dish, a kick with the fin, a turn to memorize a landmark—can stir the silt and disturb visibility. 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.

The things that separates the great from the adequate equates to lifespan in a dangerous sport, just like alpinism. Thing is, accidents can come for all.

On a deep-wreck dive, no one is ever truly safe until he is back on the deck of the dive boat.

Most alpine climbers that die, do so on the way down.

— 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 wrong. — The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous. The guy who doesn’t care anymore, who has said, “I’m already dead—the fact that I live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the accounting I give of myself,” is the most formidable force in the world. — The worst possible decision is to give up.

That last one sticks out as a sore thumb in this book. There are clearly a few people who should have given up.

He gained a reputation as one of the best shipwreck divers on the East Coast; some said he might be among the best in the world. One day Nagle paid him the highest compliment by saying, “When you die no one will ever find your body.”

The things we're proud of.

While the other divers intended to pick a spot and search for a tag or other piece of identification, Chatterton planned to swim the wreck, orienting himself according to his Chicago memories, looking for nothing but impressions. Only when he understood a wreck did he believe he could formulate a plan to approach it. The strategy made it likely that another diver would beat him to the sub’s identity, but Chatterton was willing to take the chance. He staked much of his diving on the principle that preparation came first, so he would not just start digging in hopes that he might get lucky.

Chatterton's discipline.

The Seeker arrived at the U.S. Coast Guard Station in Manasquan Inlet at about ten P.M. Each man aboard the boat was taken inside and asked to write an account of the incident, then was released.

This is apparently what happens when a diver dies. Interesting.

Chatterton splashed first and tied in the grapple. His plan was trademark: shoot video, forgo artifacts, return with knowledge. He often used video cameras, which picked up underwater nuances that were beyond the human eye, then watched the tapes topside, learning wreck topographies and planning his second dive. At home, he watched the tapes dozens of times more.

Chatterton's recon routine yields higher results than people who just start digging.

As the Seeker steamed home and many of the divers retired to the salon to sleep, Chatterton and Kohler found themselves sitting together atop a cooler. The trip had overwhelmed Kohler; it had brought together, in a single day, his passions for naval history, submarines, exploration, and artifacts. It had made him feel a part of history. For a while, he and Chatterton discussed the U-boat’s construction, its damage, those open hatches. Neither of them mentioned Atlantic Wreck Divers or Bielenda or the past. “You know, this was the most exciting dive of my life,” Kohler told Chatterton. “The whole thing was once in a lifetime. But the part I liked best was the time we spent in the water just looking at those dishes. For a while, you and I were the only two people in the world who knew this was a U-boat. The only two in the world.” Chatterton nodded. He understood what Kohler meant. He could tell that Kohler was not talking about diving now, he was talking about life, and he thought it would not be a bad thing to get to know this man better.

Camaraderie in shared mission.

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.”

Exactly like climbing. Loose crampon? Fix it. Tie-down unravelled? Fix it. Equipment malfunctions of any sort need to be dealt with.

Rascality was prized even above gluttony. Often, without warning the boat captain, the gang would yell, “Swim break!” and get naked and jump into the ocean, never letting go of their beer cans as they bobbed in the water. Members brought along guns and slung stuffed animals into the air for target practice. When a black-tie party boat passed, the gang would throw beer cans at the vessel and break into their trademark ditty: Cat’s ass, rat’s ass, dirty old twat; Sixty-nine douche bags tied in a knot; Cocksucker, motherfucker, dicky licker, too; I’m a fuckin’ scuba diver, who the fuck are you?

“I think we all know from our research that the stuff you hear about U-boats coming up on the beaches and the crewmen attending costume balls and buying bread at the local market are bullshit fantasy,” Kohler said, pacing the room and using his triangular pepperoni slice like a professor’s pointer. “But I’m going to confess something. You know the stories and rumors you read about how the Nazis tried to smuggle gold out of Germany at the end of the war? Or even the stories about how Hitler fled in a U-boat as Berlin fell? Well, think about it. If our U-boat was used for something like that, there sure as hell wouldn’t be any record of it, would there?” “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” Chatterton and Yurga called out from the couch. “Are you saying Hitler might be on our U-boat?” “I’m not saying anything definitive,” Kohler replied. “What I am saying is that we need to expand our thinking. We need to start conceiving of scenarios that might explain why no one in the world has a clue that this U-boat and these dead crewmen are in New Jersey. If we don’t consider every possibility, even ones that sound outrageous, the answer might slip right past us. Because I gotta tell you fellas, this mystery is already pretty damned outrageous.”

“He’s used trimix on some shallower dives this year. He says he’s ready. And I’ll be diving with him,” Yurga replied. Kohl adjusted his mask, bit down on his regulator, and flopped sideways off the gunwale. Chatterton and Kohler could not believe what happened next. Rather than bob to the surface as most divers do after the splash, Kohl plummeted like an anchor toward the ocean bottom. The topside divers knew at once what had happened: Kohl had not adjusted the buoyancy for his new trimix equipment. He had become what divers called a “dirt dart.” Dirt darts were in deep shit. The furious increase in water pressure that came with their plunge squeezed their suits into a second skin. Rapid compression caused their regulators to free-flow, exploded their sinuses and blood vessels, burst their eardrums, and induced vomiting and vertigo. And that was before they hit the bottom. “Oh, shit, he’s gone,” Kohler said. “Lew Kohl’s dead.” But Chatterton could see that Kohl had landed and was still breathing—he could see his bubbles. Chatterton’s mind slowed to 16 rpm, the speed of the Vietnam medic under pressure.

I remember flopping with out my tank turned on once. Scared the shit out of me but I could luckily reach the valve and turn it on while I was sinking slowly.

Chatterton smiled and allowed another diver to stay with Kohl for a while. He then moved to the back of the Seeker to help Yurga climb aboard. Still about two hundred feet from the stern of the boat, Yurga waved to Chatterton. Chatterton began to wave back, but his arm froze. Stalking Yurga from behind was an eighteen-foot monster. “Shark!” Chatterton yelled. “Yurga! Behind you! Shark!” Yurga whirled around just as the shark submerged. “What?” Yurga yelled. “I don’t see anything!”

If the diving doesn't kill you, the sharks might.

Driving home that night, Chatterton contemplated a final reason why he had determined to leave the remains undisturbed, a reason that seemed too personal to share with Kohler. 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. If he were to lower the bar now because he was frustrated, who would he be?

We all express our aesthetics within our passions and works.

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.

It's important to maintain that beginner's mindset and not let "experts" overly influence your path. Most great artists find a way of surpassing their mentors and teachers.

He imagined a time when he could run out for pizza or take his car for a spin without seeing the U-Who’s crushed control room before him, a time when he no longer wondered if he was who he hoped he was. The fantasy always felt good for a minute, but it always ended with Chatterton thinking, “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. Some people never get that moment. The U-Who is my moment. What I do now is what I am.” When he thought that, Chatterton would snap out of his brush with quitting, sit down at his desk in front of Horenburg’s knife, and start drawing sketches of the places on the U-Who he planned to go next.

It's funny that when you're in the moments, you want out, but when you're out of these moments you want that singular focus. Passionate people are just more interesting and accomplished.

“It was on a wooden spare-parts box, a little bigger than a shoe box,” Palmer said. “In what room?” Chatterton asked. “It was in the electric motor room.” The divers nearly leaped from their chairs. “The spare-parts boxes had to be labeled with the U-boat’s number,” Palmer explained. “That way, if a part was used during a mission, they could send the box to the warehouse, have it refilled, and know which U-boat to return it to.” Chatterton and Kohler sat frozen. Of all the places on the U-Who, the electric motor room was the only one that remained inaccessible, and the only one in which they had not imagined finding identifying tags. Now more than ever it was imperative that they move the massive steel escape trunk that blocked access to part of the diesel motor room and the adjoining electric motor room.

Tiny details lead to potentially large discoveries.

Chatterton torpedoed out of the diesel motor room and up toward the top of the wreck. Kohler, stunned by the sight of his friend without a regulator, gave chase behind him. Chatterton’s lungs screamed as his stage bottles came into sight. He kicked harder. Every cell in his body shrieked for oxygen and pulled at his jaws to breathe. He clenched his mouth shut. He reached the stage bottles. In a single motion, he grabbed a regulator from one of the bottles, stuck it in his mouth, and turned the valve. Fresh gas flooded into his lungs. Chatterton had come down to his final breath.

Shit.