Shadow Divers

by Robert Kurson

  In late November, Brandt sent another letter to his family. It read:

  By the time you receive my letter I will already have started my journey. . . . I am so glad I heard from Norbert—this way I have certainty. I wish Hans-Georg a happy birthday. I hope to be back home for his confirmation. I also wish all of you a merry and blessed and healthy Christmas and New Year. Christmas is a family celebration; even if this time it is only in my thoughts. By thinking of each other we can remember how nice it used to be. Please don’t forget me as you fold your hands, as we carry each other, let us look forward to our “Wiedersehen.”

  As Brandt wrote his letters and U-869 prepared for its maiden war patrol, Neuerburg made a final visit home. He had joined the U-boats for just such opportunities and since 1943 had made the most of them. Upon returning home he always removed his uniform and changed into civilian clothes, in order to turn back into a “Mensch”—a human being. Often he took his three-year-old son, Jürgen, sailing with him, towing him behind the boat in a safety ring and allowing him to pretend to be captain of the ship. On other occasions—to his wife’s horror and his son’s delight—he placed Jürgen in a small wagon attached to his bicycle, then pedaled as fast as he could. He loved to photograph Jürgen and his year-old daughter, Jutta, and he sent one of Jürgen’s shots to a baby-powder company for advertising consideration. At night, he and Erna, who had spent much of their marriage separated by his training, listened to music, talked, and fell more deeply in love. He never discussed training or the upcoming mission, except to say that U-869 was manned by a fine and cohesive crew and that he admired First Officer Siegfried Brandt, not just for his professionalism but for the way in which he had become friend and comrade to the men. As he and Erna counted down the days until the U-boat’s first patrol, they added entries to their “Baby Daybook,” a diary they kept for Jürgen and Jutta. His final entry, written to Jürgen before U-869 left on patrol, concluded this way:

  A few days ago, mean “Tommy” [the English] dropped a lot of bombs and it was very loud. You were very quiet and you hid your little head under Mommy’s coat. Jutta used to laugh during explosions but she too was very still. It was a terrible night and as you said, many houses were destroyed. In our house too there was a terrible mess. Since then you don’t like to sleep alone and you want to go nighty-night with Mommy. Even you, my little rascal, are becoming aware of this terrible war.

  Soon, Daddy will have to go out to sea with his U-boat, and our most ardent hope is that we will all see each other again soon, in good health and in peaceful times. Then hopefully you will again wait for me with Mommy and Jutta and cry out in a happy voice: “Mommy, there comes Daddy!”

  May this time not be very far away. May a protecting hand keep you my dear ones from terrible things, protect and shield you till a sunny and carefree time reunites us again. Then the sun will shine again on you, my children, and especially on your parents who live only with and for you and indescribable happiness will make our life again worth living.

  With much love,

  Daddy

  In mid-November, U-869 stood just days away from her war patrol. As was customary, the crew created an insignia and motto as an emblem for the boat. Perhaps inspired by the movie Snow White, which the crewmen had recently seen together, they chose as their motto “Heigh-ho!,” then wrote the words over a drawing of a horseshoe and the number 869. Beneath it, they inscribed a lyric from a popular song by the Swedish singer Zarah Leander. It read, “I know one day that a miracle will happen and a thousand dreams will come true.”

  U-869 was scheduled to depart for war around December 1, 1944. In the hours before the boat was to leave, one of Neuerburg’s friends, a physician, made a quiet offer. He would write a note to the naval authorities stating that Neuerburg had taken sick and was too ill to command the U-boat. Erna urged her husband to accept the offer—she knew the U-boats were not returning from their patrols. Neuerburg thanked the doctor. He also knew that U-boats were not returning. He had a duty to Germany and to his men. He refused the note.

  As Neuerburg said good-bye to his family, Erna noticed that he had left something behind.

  “You have forgotten your gold pocket watch, Helmuth,” she said. “Take it with you.”

  “No,” Neuerburg said. “You keep it and count the minutes until I return home.”

  At around the same time, torpedoman Franz Nedel and a group of his U-869 comrades traveled to his parents’ house for a farewell party. His fiancée, Gila, threw her arms around Nedel. His mother went to the kitchen to serve food and drink. Ordinarily, Nedel and his friends already would have been talking and singing and enjoying their free time. Instead, they sat in the living room, still in uniform, and stared straight ahead, saying nothing. Gila’s smile slowly faded away at the sight. She looked at the men. One of them began crying, then another, then all of them.

  “What is wrong?” Gila asked, rushing to Nedel’s side and taking his hand.

  For a moment, the men could do nothing but cry. Nedel said nothing. Finally, one of the other men spoke.

  “None of us is coming back,” he said.

  “What do you mean by that?” Gila asked. “Of course you’re coming back.”

  “No, we’re not coming back,” said another.

  The men could see Gila’s face flush as she strained to contain her tears.

  “Well, Franz will come back, but none of us will,” said another.

  “That makes no sense,” she protested. “If Franz comes back, you will all come back.”

  The men shook their heads and kept crying. Nedel’s mother was devastated by the sight. Still, she pulled herself together and stepped forward.

  “Come on, boys, lie down and get a good night’s sleep—you will stay here. Gila will stay here. You will feel better in the morning.”

  The next morning, the men dressed and rode the train with Engelmann and Nedel’s mother back to U-869’s dock. Gila did not let go of Nedel’s hand during the hours-long trip. No one mentioned the events of the previous night. No one said much of anything. At the gate, the women were given permission to accompany the men to the U-boat so that they might wave good-bye. U-869 was to leave on its war patrol that day.

  To reach the submarine, the women boarded a tiny boat that took them to a small island. There, Gila saw U-869 for the first time—a magnificent and proud machine in which her future lay. Nedel took her hand.

  “Gila, please wait for me,” he said. “You won’t be sorry. I will take good care of you.”

  “Of course I’ll wait,” she said.

  “Pray for me when I leave.”

  “Of course I will.”

  Gila and Nedel’s mother stood near the boat. They were joined by only two or three other family members. The men lined up in rows on the U-boat’s deck, just as they had during its commissioning nearly a year ago. A four-man band made its way to the dock and played a melancholy German folk song. The U-boat began to move away from its dock. Nedel and the other crewmen stayed on the deck and waved, though most of them had no family or friends to wave to. A few minutes later, the U-boat disappeared into the overcast horizon.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE U-BOAT IS OUR MOMENT

  SINCE 1991, CHATTERTON AND KOHLER had believed in history. Every book, expert, and document listed U-869 as sunk off Gibraltar. Now, two and a half years later, the intercepted radio messages between U-869 and U-boat Control virtually proved that the New Jersey U-boat was U-869. The divers dug deep into their filing cabinets for U-869’s crew roster, one of several dozen such lists Chatterton had copied at the U-boat Archive in Germany. Kohler, who understood the German rank and position abbreviations, called Chatterton and read him the basics.

  “There are fifty-six crewmen listed,” Kohler said. “A guy named Neuerburg was the commander. He was born in 1917, which would have made him, what, twenty-seven years old? The first officer was, let’s see . . . Brandt, Siegfried Brandt; Christ, he was only twenty-two. Here’
s our friend Horenburg, the Funkmeister, age twenty-five. There were four Willis aboard and three Wilhelms. Hey, there was even a Richard. And a Johann. That’s like Richie and John.”

  “How young did they go?” Chatterton asked. Kohler did some computations.

  “There are twenty-four teenagers,” he said. “The youngest was Otto Brizius. When U-869 left on war patrol, he was seventeen.”

  “We’ve been swimming past these guys and bumping into their bones for three seasons and never had a clue who they were,” Chatterton said. “Now we know their names.”

  Word of the radio intercepts flashed through the U-boat community. To many experts, the mystery of the New Jersey U-boat was now solved: originally ordered to New York, the submarine had missed her rerouting instructions to Gibraltar and had continued on to New Jersey, where she had sunk.

  Chatterton and Kohler also believed the mystery to be solved. But they were not prepared to close the book on U-869. The wreck still had not surrendered evidence that conclusively proved her identity. The most ornery skeptics might still argue that the U-Who was, in fact, U-857, as the divers had earlier theorized; U-857 had, after all, gone missing on the American East Coast and remained unaccounted for. They could argue that Horenburg’s knife had been stolen or misplaced and had ended up on U-857 as that submarine lay tied up near U-869 in Norway before its battle patrols. However unlikely this scenario, it presented a sobering reality for Chatterton and Kohler. Until, say, a tag marked U-869 or a builder’s plaque engraved with a hull number was recovered from the U-boat, no one could conclude with absolute certainty that the wreck was U-869.

  Chatterton and Kohler made a decision. They would return to the wreck.

  Their fellow divers recoiled at the idea. Three men had died diving the U-boat. Others had come close. No accessible areas remained to be explored.

  “You guys know it’s U-869,” their colleagues protested. “No one’s disputing it. You rewrote history. Why risk your lives?”

  Chatterton and Kohler responded identically: We need to know for ourselves.

  To Chatterton, quitting the U-Who now would have been tantamount to quitting himself. For years, he had lived and dived according to a single set of principles, a belief that hard work, perseverance, thoroughness, preparation, creativity, and vision made the diver and the man. He had overlaid his life philosophy onto scuba and had become one of the world’s great wreck divers. He had overlaid his diving ethos onto his daily existence and found himself leading an honorable and gratifying life. He could not walk away from the U-Who just short of certain.

  To Kohler, the U-Who had evolved from an artifact site into a moral obligation. Alone among the divers he felt it his duty to give names to the fallen crewmen and closure to their families. Like Chatterton, he was now certain that the U-Who was U-869. But he could not announce to the Neuerburg or Brandt or Horenburg families that he was “pretty sure” their brothers and sons died off New Jersey, that U-869 had “probably” sunk in American waters rather than off Africa. He, too, penciled in summer dates to dive the U-Who. He could not leave question marks hanging over these men any more than he’d been able to accept seeing dead bodies left behind in the water during his boyhood boating trips with his father. He would search for a tag or some other indisputable proof. He would give the dead their rest and the families their names.

  A final motivation drove Chatterton and Kohler back to the U-Who, one upon which they agreed to the last detail. They were making history, and they intended to do it correctly. Time and again during their research, they had been astonished to discover that historians had been mistaken, books fallible, experts wrong. The U-Who was their chance to personally imprint history. They would not do it in a less than perfect way.

  As spring signaled the start of the 1994 dive season, Chatterton set his mind to breaking new ground on the U-Who. The previous season had been the divers’ most productive, yielding excellent artifacts and access to unexplored areas. But it had also left Chatterton at a loss. Every accessible compartment on the submarine had been combed over several times. Every idea about where to find an identifying tag or marking had been tested. He drew blueprints on coffee-shop napkins but found their lines identical to those he had sketched in 1991. He recommitted to seeing order in garbaged piles of randomness, but he could not envision fresh territory inside the sub in which to use this skill. April, traditionally a month of optimism and anticipation for Chatterton, began to darken for his inability to conceive a new plan. Every so often at night, while his wife slept beside him, Chatterton would lie on his back and stare at the ceiling and wonder why his art—this way of seeing a wreck in ways others could not fathom—was failing him when he needed it most.

  Those were the times Kohler seemed divinely sent. Chatterton would hear the phone ring or receive a fax or see the Fox Glass truck in his driveway, and it would be Kohler—pushing, cajoling, stroking, insisting, wisps of disgust blended into his thickening Brooklyn accent as he cocked an eyebrow at Chatterton’s lament.

  “Look, John,” Kohler would say. “I don’t mean to be impolite or nothing, but I gotta ask: What the hell is wrong with you? What’s happening to you? Nothing stops us! We’re the guys! I’ll go to the U-boat today. It’s April. It’s forty goddamned degrees and I’ll go. And I’ll drag your ass down there and we’ll think of a plan while we’re hanging on the anchor line if we have to. Someone’s gonna pull a tag from that wreck. You wanna sit here and cry while one of Bielenda’s boys does it? You wanna watch some greenhorn get it stuck to his fin and come out and be the guy? We’re going to do it. We’re the guys.”

  “Thanks, Richie,” Chatterton would say. “You’re exactly what I need right now.” Then Chatterton would reach for a pen and a napkin and start another blueprint.

  As the Atlantic warmed itself, Kohler’s longing for his family deepened. He had never fully appreciated the depth of pleasure he took in full-time fatherhood, nor the undergirding importance of that role to his self-image. For years, he had considered himself a diver. Now, as his children began to know a new life and new adult figures in their new home, Kohler realized that he considered himself a father most of all. “I can’t live without my kids,” he told himself. “I love my kids more than diving. I love my kids more than anything. I’ll do anything to get them back.”

  Kohler began to contemplate the impossible. He called Chatterton. They met at Scotty’s. Kohler stared into his martini glass and told Chatterton that any reconciliation with Felicia would require him to give up diving. Chatterton glared.

  “Ultimatums don’t work,” Chatterton said. “Marriages don’t work when one person says, ‘You and I will be fine together as long as you do what I say.’ She wants you to give up diving? That alone shows that Felicia doesn’t understand what you’re made of. Diving is in your soul. How do you ‘agree’ to give up your soul?”

  “It’s for my family,” Kohler said. “If I have to give up diving to save my family, I’ll do it.”

  “That’s great, Richie,” Chatterton said, his face reddening. “You’re on the verge of putting the final pieces of the U-boat puzzle together, and you’re going to walk away.”

  “If I leave diving, I know it’s going to affect you, too.”

  “Forget about me!” Chatterton exploded. “Being a diver is who you are.”

  For a minute, neither man spoke.

  “This is a long road, John,” Kohler said finally. “I love my kids. They’re already learning to live without me. I gotta really think this through.”

  Chatterton began to hear from Kohler less often. In those moments of doubt when Chatterton could not contemplate where to go next on the U-boat, those moments when Kohler had always seemed to materialize and light a fire under him, now there was silence. At his office late one summer night, Kohler sat at his desk and pulled out a loaded nine-millimeter pistol. He was a diver; it was who he was. He needed his children and his family. He was a father; it was who he was. He put his finger on the trigge
r and drew the gun closer. A million images sped through his brain like a film that had come loose from the projector’s sprockets. Should he shoot himself in the temple or the mouth? He was a diver; it was who he was. Would it hurt? A man needs his family. Children should know their father. He lifted the gun. He looked at a photo of his children on the corner of his desk. If he killed himself, they would grow up with only Felicia’s account of who he was—a one-sided account. They would never really know him, and his bloody head would just be proof of what she inevitably would tell them, that Daddy was a loser who’d left his family. He looked deeper into the photo. I want to smell my daughter’s hair. I want to teach my son to ride a minibike. I miss them. He put the gun back in the drawer.

  A short time later Kohler called Felicia. He told her he wanted his family back. She gave him two ultimatums. First, he would have to join her for marriage counseling. Second, he would have to give up diving.

  He told Chatterton the news that night at Scotty’s. Kohler had never seen his friend so disgusted.

  “I agreed to it, John,” Kohler said. “I was getting so kooky that if she’d asked me to paint my ass pink and walk backwards I would have done that too. I missed my family.”

  “You’re walking away from diving?”

  “I’m walking away from diving.”

  “It’s not you, Richie. It’s a big, goddamned, colossal mistake.”

  Kohler stared into his martini. Chatterton had become one of his best friends. But this night he thought, “John is not the gentlest person on these issues.”

  A month later, Kohler and his family reconciled and rented a house in suburban Middletown, New Jersey. At his office, across from the desk at which he had contemplated taking his life, he packed his U-boat work—the research, photos, documents, theories, artifacts, correspondence, translations—into a file cabinet and locked the drawer. He did not call Chatterton to tell him this part. That day, Kohler began his new life as an ex-diver.