The underwater environment presented its own perils. An Allied ship that suspected there was a submerged U-boat in its vicinity could use sonar—the broadcast of sound waves—to sniff it out. Once sonar echoed off the submarine’s metallic form, a U-boat was tagged for death—unable to outrun the enemy while underwater, a fish in a barrel if it chose to surface and fight it out with its guns.
U-boats relied on radio to communicate with German headquarters. Allied brains pounced on the dependence. They developed a radio detection system known as “Huff-Duff” (for HF/DF, or high-frequency direction finding) that allowed Allied ships at sea to fix the position of U-boats. Now a submarine using its radio—even to report the weather—was as much as announcing its location to the enemy. The Allies wasted little time dispatching hunter-killer groups to U-boats so exposed.
Perhaps the deadliest Allied breakthrough came in the form of code breaking. Since the war’s beginning, the German military had encrypted its communications through a cipher machine known as Enigma. A boxy, typewriter-like device capable of millions of character combinations, Enigma was believed by the German High Command to be invincible, the strongest code ever created. Allied code breakers estimated the odds against a person cracking Enigma without knowing the code to be 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. They tried anyway. Building on years of pioneering work by Polish cryptanalysts, and with the help of a captured Enigma machine and key documents, teams of cryptographers, mathematicians, Egyptologists, scientists, crossword puzzle experts, linguists, and chess champions spent months attacking Enigma, even building the world’s first programmable computer to aid in the effort. The mental strain and pressure could have overwhelmed them. They kept at it. Months later, with the help of covert intelligence, they cracked it—one of the great intellectual achievements of the twentieth century. By late 1943, the Allies were using intercepted Enigma messages to direct hunter-killer groups to unsuspecting U-boats. Dönitz suspected that Enigma could be compromised, but was constantly assured by experts that Enigma was unbreakable. The Allies continued to read the German mail. U-boats continued to die.
By spring 1943, the fangs of Allied technology had encircled the U-boats, leaving no safe areas in the ocean. In May of that year, forty-one U-boats were destroyed by Allied forces, a disaster that came to be known as “Black May” and which Dönitz described as “unimaginable, even in my wildest dreams.” The “Happy Time” had yielded to Sauregurkenzeit, or “Sour-Pickle Time.” The hunters of the early war had now become the hunted.
By early 1945, U-boats stood a greatly reduced chance of inflicting damage or even surviving. Younger crews replaced the elite, handpicked service that had threatened in the early war to dominate the world. Allied bombing devastated German cities. France had been lost. The Russian army had crossed onto German soil. Aboard a U-boat, surrounded by killers who might know its every move in advance, a U-boat crewman could not even dream of safe haven back home. His Germany was falling.
As Chatterton and Kohler digested the late U-boat war, each discovered a new pride for Allied ingenuity and tenacity, for the ability of the United States to dig deep into its instinct for freedom, rise up against one of history’s most terrifying threats, and pound it down until the world was safe again. Yet neither of them could put out of his mind the crewmen lying dead in their wreck. They did not speak to wives or coworkers or friends about these thoughts. Instead, they made a plan to meet at Scotty’s.
The conversation that night was different from the others the divers had shared over dinner. Before, Chatterton and Kohler had talked in broad terms—about research, theories, strategies—large thoughts about solving the U-Who mystery. Now, educated in the hopelessness of the late U-boat war, they found themselves thinking on a smaller scale, a scale that envisioned the lives of men with whom they had become intertwined.
Over and over, they asked each other, “How could these men have kept fighting?” Part of the answer, for Chatterton and Kohler, lay in 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.” To the divers, such a band of brotherhood seemed about the most noble of human instincts, and as they nursed after-dinner coffees, that instinct seemed also to describe their friendship.
There was another answer, one that each of the divers had been contemplating but about which neither spoke. 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. This, more than anything, is what moved the divers about the late-war U-boat man. Despite knowing his efforts would be futile, he had gone to sea determined to strike a blow. As the divers said good night that evening, each wondered if he might not be moving toward the same kind of test. The U-Who had already killed three divers. Chatterton and Kohler could back out now and abandon their search for conclusive identification—they already were certain of the sub’s identity. But as each man drove home that night he wondered: What will that say about me if I quit? What will it mean if life tests me and I do not try to strike a blow?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A MISSED SIGNAL
IN LATE MAY 1993, as the residents of Brielle rubbed winter from their eyes, the divers booked the Seeker for the season’s first U-boat trip. By now, Chatterton and Kohler had taken to calling the wreck U-857 and even announcing their finding to dive show audiences. Many people asked the divers why they planned to continue searching such a dangerous wreck now that they had deduced its identity. The divers responded that until they pulled proof from the wreck, everything else was mere opinion. They had not come this far, they said, to stand on mere opinion.
The first U-boat trip of 1993 was scheduled for May 31, Memorial Day. As Chatterton and Kohler drove their cars to the Seeker’s dock, neither could remember having felt so content. Chatterton had made every important discovery inside the wreck and had gone places on the submarine no other diver had. He had been relentless in his research until his thinking had produced a solution even the world’s great U-boat minds did not dispute.
Kohler felt a similar satisfaction. Two years ago, he had been a ferocious tonnage king and Atlantic Wreck Divers fundamentalist. He’d lived to haul shit and raise hell in between. But as he’d come to know the U-boat and feel its crew, as he’d watched Chatterton dedicate entire dives to shooting video for later study, as he’d done original research that had corrected written history, the jaws of habit had loosened and he’d come to feel himself not just a diver but an explorer, a pass-holder to the landing place of his childhood dreams.
Not everyone celebrated this evolution. During the off-season, some of Kohler’s Atlantic Wreck Divers mates had lashed out at the betrayal. “So, you’re diving with your new buddies, are ya?” they’d ask when Kohler found time to make their charters that spring. “How’s it feel diving with that asshole who put up the grate on the Doria?”
For a time, the criticism hurt Kohler. These friends had delivered him into deep-wreck diving; their guidance had kept him alive. Chatterton could see how deeply the barbs cut Kohler. He spoke up on those occasions.
“Your friends have plans this season,” Chatterton told Kohler. “Diving the Oregon again. Diving the San Diego again. What do they want, another plate from the Oregon? Another bowl like the one they got twelve bowls ago? That’s bullshit, Richie. That’s against the spirit of diving. You don’t buy it. If you did, you wouldn’t be diving the U-boat.”
Kohler always answered the same way: “You’re right, John. Things have changed for me.”
Things had changed so much, in fact, that Kohler had dedicated part of his off-season to converting to trimix. He had seen Chatterton’s and Yurga’s diving transformed by the safety and benefits offered by the new gas. And he believed the Rouses had died for a onetime decision to breathe air. Kohler had committed himself so fully, in
fact, that he had given up smoking so he could optimize his abilities underwater.
The parking lot at Brielle looked emptier than usual to the arriving divers, though none found himself surprised. If Feldman’s death had suggested the U-Who’s reputation as a death trap, the Rouses’ demise had cemented it. Word in the diving community had it that there were a thousand ways to die on this wreck, that if the depth didn’t kill you the sub’s dangling steel or anarchy of wires would. The trip was expensive—$150 just for the ride. Mantel-worthy artifacts were virtually nonexistent. The media had long since gone home. Divers capable of this depth wanted prizes, and they wanted to live. Most said “No thanks” to the U-Who.
On board the Seeker, the gathered divers shook hands and compared off-season notes. Near midnight, a skeleton wobbled from the Horrible Inn toward the Seeker. No one spoke. The figure drew closer, feet dragging the dirt parking lot as it approached the pier. “That’s Bill,” someone whispered.
Nagle’s face was yellow from jaundice and splotched with purple bruises. His hair was oily and his T-shirt grimy. He weighed perhaps 120 pounds, skin dripping from his legs, the remaining bump of his potbelly the only evidence of a man of former appetites. Under his arm he carried the cowboys-and-Indians sleeping bag he had used since boyhood, the one he’d brought along when he had taken the bell off the Andrea Doria in the days when he ruled the world.
The divers screwed on their best faces. “Hiya, Bill,” someone said. “The Seeker’s looking beautiful, Bill,” said another. As the boat left the dock that night, everyone on board gave thanks that Chatterton and Crowell—two capable and sober captains—were also on hand.
As the Seeker steamed for the U-Who, the divers made a final review of their strategies. Packer and Gatto, perhaps the country’s finest wreck-diving team, would penetrate the diesel motor room. In addition to housing the submarine’s massive diesel engines, this compartment contained gauge panels, telegraphs, and other equipment possibly engraved with the U-boat’s identity. Until now, the diesel motor room had been inaccessible, its entrance blocked by massive air-intake ductwork that had fallen from the upper casement of the submarine. Packer and Gatto, however, had prepared to forcibly remove the obstruction, even if it required using a rope and several lift bags, a risky operation in close quarters. Such access would yield an additional benefit. By gaining entry to the diesel motor room, the divers would also have a clear shot into the adjoining electric motor room, the only other remaining compartment inaccessible to divers.
Chatterton’s plan was simpler. He would return to the wreck’s forward section—the radio room, sound room, commander’s quarters, and officers’ quarters—areas he had already explored. Once there, he would become nearly motionless.
“This is a matter of seeing,” he told Yurga on the boat. “This is a matter of looking at a big pile of garbage until one little thing in the pile starts to look a little different than the rest. I’m looking for a glimmer of order in the chaos. I think if I just start digging, I’m never going to see more than the pile. But if I just stay quiet and look long enough, I think I’ll see something.”
Kohler’s plan was similar. His off-season research had uncovered dozens of photographs in which U-boat crewmen held lighters or pocket watches or wore hats emblazoned with a U-boat number or logo. Like Chatterton, he believed important items would be located in the forward part of the wreck, where the crewmen had slept and stored their personal effects. Unlike Chatterton, however, he was willing to dig, trusting his hands to become his eyes in the black silt clouds raised by his activity, willing to reach anywhere he was certain did not contain human remains.
The morning sun was a brilliant alarm clock. As they had the previous season, Chatterton and Kohler splashed together. Kohler inhaled his trimix, the voodoo gas he had sworn would kill its heathen users. He continued living. At 100 feet Kohler checked his mind for narcosis, and Chatterton checked Kohler checking himself. No drums. At 200 feet Kohler stopped on the anchor line to process the scene. On air at this depth, his vision would have already narrowed. “Unbelievable,” he thought. “This is the difference between watching a portable kitchen TV and going to a movie theater.” He flashed Chatterton an okay sign. Chatterton grinned. The two divers wriggled inside the wreck and swam forward toward the sections where so many crewmen had died, the section where vision would be key.
Kohler penetrated farthest, landing in the noncommissioned officers’ quarters, the place he knew as a boneyard. Chatterton settled into the commander’s quarters. He had not said much to anyone, but he believed that he stood a chance of recovering the ship’s log, the KTB, in this area. Artifacts with legible writing had survived shipwrecks older than this one, and the KTB would be the ultimate find: a first-person account of the sub’s mission, targets, hopes, fears, and dying. If the KTB still existed, only quiet eyes would find it. Chatterton began to go still.
At first, the wreckage in the commander’s quarters appeared as the junk pile Chatterton expected. He settled in and absorbed the scene. Still, junk. As minutes passed and he stayed locked on the scene, however, specks of order began to dance in and out of the chaos.
“That shape is not random,” Chatterton thought as he reached forward into the pile of rubble. He pulled out a pristine leather boot.
“That speck of metal is smoother than the rest,” he considered as he pushed his hand into another wreckage heap. He pulled out a signal flare.
“That brown is not from nature,” he speculated as he fidgeted his hand into a mound of splintered wood. He pulled out a crewman’s escape lung—complete with small oxygen tank, breathing apparatus, and vest.
In twenty minutes, Chatterton had salvaged three prime artifacts he had overlooked on earlier dives to these forward rooms. Each likely contained writing. The escape lung seemed the most promising. In Germany, Horst Bredow had urged the divers to recover this device—a mini–scuba tank and rubberized mouthpiece used by submariners to exit a sinking U-boat—because crewmen often wrote their names inside them. As Chatterton made his way up to the Seeker he found himself unusually proud, though for most of the hour he could not put his finger on why. At 20 feet, when he saw the dive boat swaying above him, he understood. In detecting beauty camouflaged in wreckage, he had done the very thing that had made Nagle great, and it had always been his dream to dive like Bill Nagle. When Chatterton climbed aboard, Nagle dragged himself over to inspect the artifacts. Chatterton could smell his body odor and see the dirt in his hair. He put his arm around Nagle and asked the captain to help him undress. It was a good feeling, Chatterton thought, to still dream to dive like Nagle.
Kohler followed Chatterton onto the boat and threw off his tanks. He had recovered only some pieces of a coffeepot, so he rushed to the dive table to join in the inspection of Chatterton’s finds. The divers placed the leather boot, the flare, and the escape lung in a bucket of fresh water and sloshed them around. Nagle removed the boot first and dabbed a towel at the grime. The divers crowded in, each of them looking for a name or initials or other writing. The boot was barren—its owner had written nothing.
Next, Nagle pulled the shotgun shell–shaped flare from the bucket. This is what the crewmen would have fired into the air from a pistol in case of distress. He rubbed it in soft, genie-lamp circles. German writing appeared in answer. The words, however, provided just a manufacturer’s name and the flare’s gauge size.
Only the escape lung remained. It consisted of a brownish rubberized canvas life vest, a black corrugated rubber tube, an orange rubber mouthpiece, and a thermos-sized aluminum oxygen cylinder, from which crewmen could breathe in emergencies. Of the three artifacts, it was in the worst condition. Much had eroded in the ocean environment. The oxygen bottle was dented in the middle and bent out of alignment. Nagle wiped at the apparatus. Mud fell away. There was no writing. Nagle rubbed further. This time, from the handle of the mouthpiece, a tiny eagle and swastika materialized.
“Is there a name written anywhere?�
� Kohler asked.
Nagle wiped some more.
“No name,” Nagle said. “Looks like it coulda belonged to any of ’em.”
Chatterton’s hopes drifted off the Seeker and evaporated in the midmorning breeze.
“Zero for three,” he said. “This wreck is one tough S.O.B.” He took the escape lung and placed it in his cooler. “May as well take it home, clean it, and let it dry,” he told Yurga. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll see some writing if I let the canvas dry completely.”
At the ladder, Packer and Gatto surfaced with promising news. The fallen ductwork that had blocked entry to the diesel motor room had disappeared during the off-season, a gift from a winter storm. Inside, the team had seen several instruments and pieces of equipment, any one of which might be engraved with the U-boat’s number. Another dive and they would have time to begin inspection.
“How much of the diesel motor room did you see?” Kohler asked.
“Not much,” Packer said. “We only got about ten feet inside. There’s another huge obstruction that blocks the rest of the way. You still can’t reach the electric motor room. But I think we got in far enough to hit it big.”
“Congrats,” Chatterton said. “I think you guys have done it.”
Rough seas and plummeting visibility cut short most of the second dives. As Nagle pulled up anchor and coaxed the boat to life, many of the divers fantasized aloud about the wonders Packer and Gatto would yank from the diesel motor room when next they got the chance. At first Chatterton led the discussion, recounting the treasures he had seen in the same room on U-505 in the Chicago museum. But as the divers kept talking, Chatterton fell quiet, looking instead at his cooler and imagining the tattered escape lung inside, wondering if there might be order inside that broken artifact, and wondering about this U-boat in which nothing was exactly as it seemed.
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