Shadow Divers

by Robert Kurson

  “Next trip and I haul the boxes,” Chatterton said. “I feel it. The next trip is the one.”

  The next charter to the U-Who was scheduled for a week later, on August 31, 1997. Chatterton spent the intervening days studying the videotape he had shot. In one of the spots he saw what appeared to be a stack of three or four boxes. Now he really knew the next dive would be the one.

  At home, Kohler went to war with himself. His friend and partner had come within a minute of drowning. Worse, on Sunday Chatterton planned to go back in and recover the spare-parts boxes. Kohler knew that the electric motor room was jungled in the worst, most ravenous scream of wires, tubes, jagged metal, and silt. He also knew Chatterton’s heart. His friend would breathe his tank dry on Sunday before he would exit without his answer. His friend would die inside that wreck on Sunday.

  Kohler decided to quit. Whatever satisfaction he might derive from delivering an answer to the crewmen’s families and to history would be smothered by his helpless proximity to a drowning friend.

  Yet whenever he picked up the phone to deliver his resignation, he ended up putting the receiver back on its cradle. There might be, he thought, one scenario worse than watching his friend die in the wreck, and as Sunday drew near he knew that worst scenario to be allowing his friend to die while he stayed home and waited for the news.

  On Saturday evening, August 30, 1997, the Seeker jockeyed away from her dock and pointed toward the U-Who. Chatterton and Kohler spoke little; each knew that today was the day.

  The next morning’s weather was perfect and calm. Over a bowl of cereal, Chatterton asked Kohler if he was ready to receive the spare-parts boxes he expected to recover and pass over the top of the fallen fuel tank. Kohler nodded. An hour later, they were on the wreck. Chatterton took off his tank, extended it in front of him, and, stretched horizontally like Superman, moved through the crack between the obstruction and the ceiling. Kohler turned on his flashlight and lifted it to the space, a beacon for Chatterton’s return.

  Visibility was good inside the diesel motor room. Chatterton reattached his tank and glided through the rectangular hatch that led into the electric motor room. The scene was just as his videotape had depicted it. He looked to the right. There, stacked in a free-standing pyramid, were four increasingly large boxes of spare parts, each fused to the next by decades of marine encrustation and rust. The smallest of them was slightly larger than a shoe box. They were exactly what Chatterton had come for.

  Chatterton inched toward the boxes. Lying at a thirty-degree angle against the top box was what appeared to be a five-foot-tall section of pipe, one that had likely broken from the room’s machinery and fallen atop the box. Chatterton pushed gently against the boxes. The pipe was wedged hard against them, and nothing moved. He thrust his palms, football lineman–style, into the stack. Nothing. The pipe, he could now see, had pinned the boxes in place. He reached for his knife and tried prying the pipe away. It did not budge. Silt billowed overhead, reducing the visibility to near zero. Chatterton turned back and exited the compartment. He now understood the final element of his plan. He would have to take drastic action.

  Topside, Chatterton briefed Kohler.

  “The boxes are fused together and pinned down by this huge pipe,” Chatterton said. “But those are the boxes, Richie. If there are identifying tags on this wreck, they’re on those boxes.”

  “That’s great,” Kohler said. “But if nothing’s moving, what can you do?”

  “A sledgehammer. I’m taking a short-handled sledgehammer down there. The boxes are mine.”

  Slinging a sledgehammer at 230 feet was perhaps the best way for a diver to blow through his gas supply. Kohler did not bother to object. Chatterton was on a mission being directed from somewhere deeper than good advice.

  “I’ll find you the sledgehammer,” Kohler said.

  Chatterton and Kohler splashed four hours later. Like pulling off a T-shirt, Chatterton removed his single tank and pushed it, the sledgehammer, and himself through the crack between the fallen fuel tank and the ceiling. Inside, he reattached his tank and swam for the electric motor room. Kohler noted the time on his watch. He grumbled a half prayer. Several of the words were please.

  Chatterton moved swiftly into the electric motor room. The compartment remained brown and cloudy from his earlier dive, but he could still see the boxes and the pipe through the silt. His approach would be simple: he would use the sledgehammer to knock the pipe loose, then pry the boxes free from one another with a crowbar.

  Chatterton crept to within two feet of the pipe. He spread his hands wide across the sledgehammer’s handle—using the tool in the water required a different technique from on land, one in which the diver pushed from the chest rather than swung with the arms. He anchored his left knee on the ground in front of the boxes and his right foot across the aisle on solid machinery. Then, in a short, violent forward explosion, he thrust the sledgehammer’s head into the section of pipe fused to the boxes. The compartment thundered with the impact as pieces of encrustation flew from the pipe and hailstormed the room in rust. Chatterton stayed motionless. When the pieces settled to the bottom, he stood, amazed at the sight. The pipe had not moved. And the pipe was not a pipe. Naked and shiny without its encrustation, the object flashed its true identity to Chatterton. This was a five-foot-tall pressurized oxygen tank. This was the colossal big brother to the miniature version that had destroyed Chatterton’s garage. It was a miracle that the tank had not just exploded.

  “I need to make a decision,” Chatterton said to himself.

  He flashed through his options; they numbered exactly two. He could turn and leave the compartment. Or he could take another swing at the giant oxygen tank, which he would have to strike on the cap—its most dangerous spot—in order to shake it loose.

  “If the thing blows, I won’t hear anything,” Chatterton thought. “I’ll be dead and in a billion pieces.

  “If I leave now, I can leave in one piece.”

  He stepped forward and found purchase with his feet.

  When things are easy a person doesn’t really learn about himself.

  He spread his hands across the sledgehammer’s smooth, long handle.

  It’s what a person does at the moment of his greatest struggle that shows him who he really is.

  He lifted the sledgehammer against his chest.

  Some people never get that moment.

  He breathed deeper than he had ever breathed.

  The U-Who is my moment.

  He thrust the head of the sledgehammer toward the cap of the oxygen tank.

  What I do now is what I am . . .

  The sledgehammer bashed into the tank. The room thundered. Silt flew everywhere. Chatterton waited for the sound of a million sticks of dynamite. He heard only the whoosh of his bubbles leaving his regulator and the clank of falling metal. He peered through the silt. The tank had dropped away from the boxes. He was alive.

  “Oh, Christ,” he said aloud.

  Chatterton moved toward the boxes, pulled the smallest one free, and stuffed it into his mesh bag. He checked his watch—he had five minutes remaining. He swam out of the electric motor room and up toward Kohler’s flashlight beam. Though the box was heavy, he managed to hoist it through the gap to Kohler, who passed it to another diver to take to the surface and inspect for tags. By all rights, Chatterton should have exited the diesel motor room then, while he still had three minutes of time remaining. He could not. It was possible that the first box did not contain a tag. There were other boxes inside the electric motor room. He needed to retrieve a second box. Kohler desperately flashed his light. Chatterton turned around.

  A minute later, Chatterton found the second box. This one, however, was even heavier than the first and could not be picked up and swum to Kohler. Instead, Chatterton began to roll it end over end out of the electric motor room. The visibility dropped to zero. Chatterton shined his flashlight on his gauges but could see nothing—the room had gone entire
ly black. He pushed the box farther, huffing and puffing just to move it another foot closer to Kohler. He pressed his watch against his face mask. He could make out only the vague outline of his timer. He had already stayed longer than planned. He abandoned the box.

  “I’ve gotta get my ass out of here,” he thought.

  Chatterton swam to the top of the electric motor room so that he could use the ceiling topography to feel his way out of the pitch-black compartment. His navigation was perfect, delivering him to the hatchway that led to the diesel motor room. He was now just a few kicks away from Kohler. He swam forward. Suddenly, his head jerked back. A wire noose had caught around his neck. Chatterton was being strangled.

  He tried swimming backward gently. He could not move. In that small bit of motion, the equipment on his back had become tangled on dangling electrical cables. He was now fully sewn into the wreck. Chatterton knew he did not have time to relax and reverse the process, as was necessary in such a predicament. He knew he would have to fight. From his waiting post, Kohler checked his watch. Chatterton was not just late. He was crazy late.

  Chatterton pulled at the wire noose around his throat and managed to muscle it off his neck. His breathing quickened even more. He reached up and clawed at the cables that had snared his equipment. Nothing gave. He could not move. He tore harder at the restraints. They hissed in protest and would not loosen. He pulled at them with all he had. Finally, they dropped away. Now free, he dug hard for Kohler, knowing that the slightest additional entanglement would kill him. A moment later he was there. All that remained was for Chatterton to remove his tank and swim through the gap. He took a breath as he reached for the tank. Only the tiniest trickle of gas came through the regulator. Chatterton knew this sensation. He was a breath from going empty.

  Chatterton ripped off his tank and shoved it through the crack near the ceiling, then lunged through the space himself. As he reached the other side, he inhaled, but nothing came from his tank. He was entirely out of gas.

  Chatterton spit the regulator from his mouth. His only remaining hope lay in reaching his stage bottles. But they were outside the compartment and on top of the wreck, a swim of at least fifty feet. He dared not risk buddy-breathing with Kohler, as even a slight delay or mix-up in communications could be deadly. Chatterton, his mouth now totally exposed to the ocean, kicked with force and equanimity. He had seen guys die flailing. He was near death. He would not flail.

  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.

  A few seconds later, Kohler arrived at his side. He looked Chatterton in the eye, then pointed to his chest, sign language for “You just gave me a heart attack—now I’m the one who’s going to die instead of you.” The divers began their long decompression hang. For nearly two hours, Chatterton thought only of the terrible risks he had taken during the dive. Often, he said aloud, “I can’t ever let that happen again.” He had long since forgotten the spare-parts box he had recovered, which Kohler had passed to another diver for tag inspection topside.

  Near the end of their decompressions, Chatterton and Kohler saw another diver, Will McBeth, swim down the anchor line. McBeth handed Chatterton a slate just like the one on which Chatterton had written “SUB” during the discovery trip six years earlier. This time, however, the slate said something different. This time, it read:

  The U-Who now has a name—it is U-869. Congratulations.

  In his younger days, Kohler might have jumped for joy and slapped Chatterton on the back. Chatterton might have pumped his fists in triumph. Today, they looked into each other’s eyes. Then, simultaneously, neither one before the other, each extended his hand. The divers shook. Today, they had found something important. Today, they had their answers.

  EPILOGUE

  CHATTERTON AND KOHLER identified U-869 in 1997. To this day, mysteries remain. Why did U-869 continue to New York after being rerouted to Gibraltar? How did U-869 meet her end? How did the crew die?

  The answers to these questions will probably never be known; the U-boat sank with all hands and without witnesses. It is possible, however, to construct a most-likely-case scenario. That scenario looks like this:

  The cataclysmic damage to U-869’s control room was almost certainly caused by a strike from its own torpedo. U-boats such as U-869 carried two types of torpedoes in 1945. Normal “pattern” torpedoes were programmed to run a specific course toward their targets and used a gyroscopic steering mechanism to get there. Acoustic torpedoes were more advanced, homing in on the sound of an enemy ship’s propellers. Both types of torpedoes, however, occasionally turned back on their own U-boats. Those torpedoes became known as circle-runners. U-boats recorded several instances in which circle-runners passed beneath or above them. An acoustic circle-runner could be especially dangerous, as it chased the sounds of its own submarine’s electric motors, pumps, and generators. To avoid being hit, U-boat commanders were ordered to crash-dive immediately after firing an acoustic torpedo.

  Commanders often had advance warning of circle-runners. Torpedo propellers spun at several hundred revolutions per minute and produced a distinct, high-pitched whir-whine audible at great distances to the U-boat’s radioman, and then to the entire crew as the weapon drew closer. When a commander got such a warning, he was often able to dive or otherwise change course to avoid the circle-runner. History will likely never know how many of the sixty-five still-missing U-boats met their ends by circle-runners. By its nature, a circle-runner gives little warning and bears no witness.

  Under ideal conditions—calm seas, good underwater sound propagation, early detection, and fast reporting—Neuerburg might have had thirty seconds or more to respond to the circle-runner. In worse conditions or if the radioman hesitated (or both), he would have had less time.

  The torpedo would not have blown up instantly upon striking U-869. Instead, there would have been perhaps a one-second delay between contact and detonation as the pistol on the weapon’s nose clicked and triggered the explosion. That click—an unmistakable sound to submariners—could be heard even when a torpedo struck a distant target. It would have sounded just long enough before detonation to register in the awarenesses of the crewmen.

  Most German torpedoes carried between 620 and 780 pounds of high explosives. Based on damage to the wreck, the circle-runner likely impacted just below the conning tower, in the center of the submarine. Men located in the boat’s control-room area—including Neuerburg and Brandt—would have been blown apart and nearly vaporized by the explosion. Men in adjoining rooms likely also died immediately from the concussion or from being hurricaned into machinery. Rippling sheets of air pressure would have rampaged toward both ends of the 252-foot-long submarine, probably slingshotting some crewmen off ceilings and walls and one another, crumpling others like marionettes. Steel doors were blown open. So strong was the blast that it bowed the steel hatch leading into the diesel motor room and blew the steel hatch off the torpedo-loading tube in the forward torpedo room, the compartment farthest from the blast’s epicenter. The force of the explosion was easily strong enough to blow open the overhead hatches—hatches Chatterton and Kohler once speculated had been opened by crewmen attempting to escape the sinking sub.

  With the U-boat now open to the ocean, torrents of icy water would have rushed inside. A merciless process of replacing air with water in the sub would have begun, and it would have happened with great sound and violence. Bodies would have been rag-dolled off machinery and other structures. Rushing air would have sounded and impacted lik
e a tornado to anyone still alive. Machinery and parts and clothes and tools would have flown at right angles in the furious columns of air rushing from the sub, some of which would have been expelled as ocean debris. No one could have held on. Corpses—some of them likely missing heads or limbs—would have begun a crooked float to the surface.

  It probably took the U-boat less than thirty seconds to fill with water. The submarine would have sunk to the ocean bottom in less than a minute. If anyone had survived the explosion and somehow made it out of the boat and to the surface, he likely would not have lasted more than an hour in the icy waters. The enemy target ship, now as far as ten minutes away, its own engines running, wind and water lapping at its sides, would almost certainly have never heard or seen a thing.

  The most likely explanation for the communications problems between U-869 and Control involves atmospheric conditions, though it is possible that the boat also experienced mechanical problems with its radios. Though Neuerburg might have been hesitant to broadcast for fear of exposing his position to Allied eavesdroppers, the submarine placed itself in no danger by receiving messages from Control. That U-869 continued to New York after Control ordered her to Gibraltar makes it virtually certain that Neuerburg never got the rerouting orders.

  The fate of U-857—the submarine that had been hunting targets on the American East Coast in April 1945 and was believed for months by Chatterton and Kohler to be the U-Who—remains a mystery. It is still thought lost to unknown causes.

  The Harbor Inn—a.k.a. the Horrible Inn—no longer exists. Standing in its place in the Brielle, New Jersey, parking lot adjacent to the Seeker is the upscale Shipwreck Grill, which serves its nattily dressed customers lobster bisque and honey-roasted salmon with Dijon lobster sauce. Older divers who drop in for a bite swear that if they stay long enough they can still hear Bill Nagle calling for another Jim Beam.