Although the weather was flat calm, the current was intense. Even the strongest and most experienced divers like John Reekie and Steve Berman were having difficulties dealing with the sea conditions. After their third dive, Chris and Chrissy wanted to do something even more distinctive than recover artifacts. “Come on, Mom, dive with us,” Chrissy begged his mother. “We’ll be the first mother-father-son team to dive the Doria!”
Sue had spent a lot of time watching the water rush past the dive boat. “The current’s just too strong, Chrissy. I don’t have a good feeling about trying to dive in these conditions.”
“You can do it,” Chris said. “That’s what you always tell me.”
Chrissy nodded vigorously. “Yeah, Mom, we can go down, take you around the anchor line, and then you can come back up. You don’t have to do a long dive. Just a few minutes.”
“Yeah, we don’t want to dive real long on the outside of the wreck. That would mess up our dive,” Chris threw in, pointing to Chrissy.
“Let me get this right,” Sue pondered aloud. “You want me to dive with you in conditions I don’t feel comfortable with, but you want to make sure I don’t mess up your dive? No thanks.”
No amount of persuasion would change Sue’s mind. Chris and Chrissy were disappointed at a missed opportunity to be in the record books as the first family to dive the Doria.
Although she had put so much time and effort into helping organize the expedition, she did not want to get injured, or worse. Two experienced divers had already run into problems because of the strong current. One of those divers suffered severe decompression sickness and Sue had watched as he was evacuated by helicopter to a recompression chamber. The other diver missed only a few minutes’ decompression and did not suffer symptoms because a registered nurse on the expedition had brought saline solution and had administered it intravenously, which helped rehydrate him and ensured that his blood could efficiently carry both oxygen throughout his body and nitrogen to his lungs for elimination; the oxygen he breathed also helped clear nitrogen before bends symptoms developed.
Chris and Chrissy Rouse returned triumphant from the Andrea Doria expedition bearing bags of booty, tangible evidence of their visit to the Mount Everest of scuba diving. Their chests swelled with pride as they displayed their trophies and related their adventures to the divers at Underwater World. In spite of other people saying that they were destined for trouble because of the deep, long dives and the exotic gas mixtures they used when diving, they had proved that they were masterly divers, that they belonged among diving’s elite. And they hadn’t even brought their black cloud with them, eluding the silt of misfortune that had fogged their earlier efforts.
For most divers, recovering artifacts from the Andrea Doria would have been the highlight of a career, allowing them to sit back, relax, and enjoy their triumph. For Chrissy Rouse the Doria was another stepping-stone: He knew that he was well on his way to far more glorious accomplishments that would make him a diving superhero.
One month after their successful dives on the Doria, the Rouses headed to Quebec to dive the Empress of Ireland, an ocean liner that many divers thought was even more treacherous than the Andrea Doria, even though the Empress lay shallower, in the St. Lawrence River, off Rimouski. Just as top mountaineers consider K2 a far more difficult mountain than the higher and more famous Mount Everest, so divers deem the Empress a deceptively dangerous shipwreck.
The black cloud of misfortune returned to the Rouses even before the Empress expedition left the dock: Upon arriving in Rimouski, Chris had to busy himself with obtaining parts to fix the failing brakes on his van. Chris did not speak French, and most of his day was spent trying to explain to auto parts dealers what it was he needed. When he obtained the parts, Chris set himself the task of repairing the brakes himself. At two in the morning, after laboring for hours, he crawled out from underneath his vehicle, confident that he and his son could drive home safely after their dives. Now Chris could dive the Empress with peace of mind.
The Rouses’ forays to the Empress carried with them a literal black cloud of their own making. The interior of the ocean liner was collapsing dangerously, and an extremely fine patina of silt covered everything. When they entered the wreck, their exhaled breathing gas immediately reduced the visibility to only a few feet, as the bubbles disturbed the rust and silt precariously coating the inside of the wreck. And then Chrissy introduced another challenge to the dive. The Rouses had not run a guideline from outside the wreck, as they usually did. Their plan called for them to venture just a short way inside to see if they could spot a passageway that might lead farther. When Chrissy entered the wreck, he got excited when he saw an unobstructed side passage. Instead of signaling his intentions to his father, or waiting until they got back to the dive boat so they could discuss plans for a more ambitious dive, Chrissy took out his guideline reel and tossed toward his father the line with its heavy brass clip attached. Chrissy did not bother to wait and see if his father had grabbed the line; he just plunged deeper into the wreck, assuming that his father would secure the guideline that would lead them both out of the wreck even in the blinding cloud of silt.
Chrissy’s action surprised his father. Left behind in the billow of rust and sea-dust, Chris could not see to grab the line, and as Chrissy swam farther into the wreck, the guideline was pulled with him. The shiny brass clip bounced along the bottom and Chris desperately swam after it, like a large fish after a trolling lure. Eventually, Chris managed to grab hold of the clip, and he secured the line onto some wreckage lying in the passage. But now, visibility was very close to zero, and the line was tied off some distance into the wreck. Chris knew that they would have to exit the unfamiliar wreck blindly, without benefit of a guideline for the last thirty feet. If they made a wrong turn, they would get trapped inside the wreck.
When Chrissy came back, Chris was able to grope his way free of the wreck, with his prodigal son tagging along. After they had decompressed for over an hour in the 38-degree water, they climbed back on board the dive boat that Reekie had chartered for this expedition. Chris had barely spat his regulator out of his mouth when he started screaming at Chrissy. “Hey, asshole, who taught you to dive like that? You could have gotten us both killed!”
Chrissy bobbed his head and rolled his eyes. “What are you moaning about now, you old geezer?”
Chris quickly unbuckled himself from his diving tanks and then stood over Chrissy, who was slowly undoing the various straps and buckles that held all of his equipment attached to his body. Chris’s face was red with anger. “Get serious! You don’t just toss the guideline back like that. That’s not the proper protocol. Nobody ever taught you to dive that way. I made sure you got the best training in the world, and now you take stupid chances like that?”
“Well, I knew you were backing me up, and that you’d get the line and tie it off,” said Chrissy, defensive but sheepish.
“I barely grabbed the line after chasing you down that hallway. What if I didn’t get to it? Where would we have been then?” Chris let out an exasperated breath, shook his head, and slumped his shoulders as if the thought of what could have happened deflated him.
But Chrissy had regrouped. “What do you mean?” Chrissy fired back. “It’s your responsibility to get the line and tie it off! You screwed up! Don’t try and blame this on me!”
“What? I oughta knock some sense into you. Just think about it and you’ll see that I’m right! Whose son are you, anyway?”
The battle raged back and forth as John Reekie and Steve Berman looked on. Both divers expected the Rouses to bicker as they always did, but this incident went far beyond the divers’ usual playfulness. Reekie and Berman knew how serious Chrissy’s action inside the wreck had been; neither diver wanted to be faced with having to recover their friends’ bodies, and they were alarmed. Why was Chrissy diving so recklessly?
Other divers also wondered about the Rouses. Evie Dudas, a fixture in the sport diving world, wa
s on an expedition with them for the first time, although she had heard through the grapevine about the Rouses’ enthusiasm, skill, and persistent bickering. Evie owned a dive shop in Pennsylvania, a few hours’ drive from Revere, where Chris and Chrissy lived. A widely admired diver, she had been diving since 1963, became an instructor in 1970, and bore the distinction of being the first woman to dive the Andrea Doria, in 1967. But her life had also been marred by tragedy: In 1968, she suffered a case of the bends that left her completely blind while she was still in the water and gave her severe vertigo. Her recompression chamber treatment brought her eyesight back almost immediately, but it would take her two months to recover her balance. Fourteen years later, in 1982, she suffered the loss of her husband in a diving accident. John Dudas, whom many considered one of the finest wreck divers in the world, died during a solo dive on what for him was a routine exploration on a wreck off the New Jersey coast. Though it was in only 160 feet of water, Dudas had not been deeper than 80 feet in the previous two years. No one could figure out what killed him. His death left the seven-weeks-pregnant Evie to raise their three young children alone and prepare for the arrival of another child to feed and care for.
The Rouses’ bickering alarmed Evie. But something else disturbed her even more: Chris seemed to Evie overly critical of Chrissy. She had to suppress her motherly instinct when she rode in the Rouses’ van back to the hotel from the dive boat and Chris denounced every brake, acceleration, and turn Chrissy made. Evie was not raising her children that way, and she thought that the very public criticism that Chris constantly leveled had to be humiliating to Chrissy. Like Steve Bielenda a few months before, Evie Dudas noted that Chrissy was nervous and agitated when he was around his father. Evie’s gut reaction was to be concerned for the Rouses in the underwater environment, which she knew firsthand could be cruel and unforgiving.
What Evie and the other divers did not know about was Chrissy’s childhood learning disability, or the wandering attention he exhibited as an adult. Nor did they know that Chris had not allowed Chrissy to drive when he was first eligible at sixteen years of age because he felt that Chrissy was not bringing enough maturity and focus to the task. When Chrissy was a teenager, what most alarmed Chris about Chrissy’s carelessness was where he placed his tools when he worked with his father. A wrench would be thrown on the ground, or put to the side somewhere and then forgotten about. A misplaced tool on the ground was one thing, but a tool left lying on a diesel engine could mean disaster if the tool got caught in a motor’s moving parts. No matter how many times Chris explained to his son the necessity of putting tools back in the same spot so that they could be easily found, the young man forgot the lesson. To Chris, it seemed that Chrissy spent more than half his time looking for tools he had misplaced.
At first Sue thought Chris was being too harsh in denying Chrissy permission to drive, but she agreed with him when Chris described Chrissy’s behavior to her, and when Sue herself thought about how inattentive Chrissy was around the house. Driving was clearly not something for which sixteen-year-old Chrissy was ready. But when he was seventeen, Chrissy did get his license; his parents could not keep him from driving because the prohibition would hold him back socially, just as when Chrissy had been taking a few special classes in school and other children teased him. Once he had permission to drive, Chrissy could go out with his friends and—more important—could also date more easily. Now, at twenty-two, Chrissy was still prone to lapses of attention while driving, as Chris and Sue found out when Chrissy had several car crashes. Chris wanted to make sure his son stayed focused behind the wheel.
Was Chrissy’s increased recklessness on the Empress the result of his attention deficit disorder? Many people would dispute that, pointing out that someone who had difficulty focusing on book learning often excelled at a physical activity, as Chrissy did at diving. But if Chrissy was now losing focus underwater—for whatever reason—why would Chris still engage in deep, dangerous diving with his son? Did it represent a father’s hope that his boy could overcome his disability and excel at something, and his denial of the problem?
In spite of the Rouses’ bickering, Chris’s constant criticism of Chrissy, and the treacherous nature of the Empress of Ireland, the Rouses did not run into problems underwater from which they could not extricate themselves. They successfully conducted eight dives on the Empress. With the Andrea Doria and the Empress of Ireland now safely behind them, Chris and Chrissy sought a new challenge. The U-boat Bill Nagel and John Chatterton had discovered the previous autumn remained unidentified, still calling to divers to uncover its mystery. Diving it was worthy of the Rouses.
The U-Who had been discovered only one year earlier, on Labor Day, 1991, by a group of sport divers. The discovery of the wreck was more of an accident than the result of purposeful research. The dive charter boat Seeker, out of Brielle, New Jersey, had headed for a possible shipwreck location revealed to the boat captain by a commercial fisherman.
Given Captain Bill Nagel’s penchant for drinking, it might be said he was fated for the find, because it was rumored the U-boat crews numbed the horrors of war with legendary drinking bouts, such as those depicted in the popular German movie Das Boot/The Boat. Why wouldn’t they drink to excess? Their war machine was a cramped space ill-suited to accommodate anywhere from forty-eight to fifty-seven men, all sharing one toilet. Shaving and showers were luxuries. During the first two years of the war, lucky U-boat crews patrolling warm waters could, on occasion, surface in relative safety and crew members could take turns swimming and even fishing. But mostly, they had to endure the stench of machinery and their unbathed comrades as they stalked enemy ships. On land, they drank to quell their fear and dull their senses.
The ships the U-boats stalked before and shortly after the United States first entered the Second World War in 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, were easy prey—primarily the freighters carrying oil, aviation fuel, ammunition, planes, tanks, guns, food, clothing, and other wartime necessities to the British. Merchant ships sailed individually up and down the coast, silhouetted against a well-lit shore, where wartime blackout rules were not yet in effect: Entire communities had protested that blackouts would deprive them of tourist income, and the seaside towns were kept ablaze with light. To make matters worse, ship sailing schedules, cargoes, and destinations were still being announced over public airwaves. All the U-boat commanders had to do was tune in to the frequency, decide which ships would offer them the best targets, and then maneuver into position to wait for the ship; they called this period of the war “the Happy Time.”
The Happy Time resulted in 495 ships sunk in the first six months of 1941. During the whole of World War II, U-boats sank a total of 2,603 merchant ships in the Atlantic. Thirteen and a half million tons of shipping was lost; 30,248 merchant seamen died. Allied naval vessels also fell victim to the stealthy marauders: 175 were sunk.
U-boats themselves didn’t have it easy, even during the Happy Time. At any moment, they could be spotted by patrolling warships or airplanes, and then they would turn into the hunted, their crews enduring hours of mental anguish during depth-charge attacks, as large drums of explosives and bombs sought their target. A direct hit by a depth charge or bomb, or an accumulation of detonations close to the U-boat, would crack the steel skin of the vessel, allowing tons of water to flood the ship and crush and entomb the warriors inside. It took luck and every bit of a U-boat commander’s skill and cunning to escape an attack like that.
One enterprising commander, after hours spent under relentless attack, came upon a novel idea. He had one of the torpedo tubes filled with a combination of oil, the body of a crew member who had already died, sailor’s clothes, and, for good measure, his own white captain’s hat. The crew then fired the debris out of the tube, where it floated to the surface. Seeing what looked like remnants from a “kill,” the attackers withdrew, thinking they had done their job. This U-boat lived to hunt another day. Others weren’t so luck
y.
As the war progressed, Allied technological advances gained on the U-boats and rapidly surpassed them. First, underwater sonar allowed naval vessels to “see” the U-boats as they tried to use their greatest weapon, the cloak of the ocean, when they snuck up on merchant ships, or stole away after an attack. Next, airplanes were equipped with extremely powerful searchlights that lit up the night sky and sea’s surface like daylight. Because U-boats had to surface to run their diesel engines, which recharged their batteries, and to refresh the stale air inside their steel hulls, many of them would be found at night on the surface, where they were most vulnerable, and bombed into fragments.
Another new device, a forward-firing explosive bomb called a hedgehog, would be fired simultaneously in large numbers to form a wide circle in the vicinity of a suspected U-boat. Hedgehogs would explode only on contact, obviating the need to preset the depth at which they would explode, as in the case of depth charges. Kills against U-boats rapidly increased as the war went on. Of the 1,162 U-boats commissioned during World War II, 784 were lost, most with all hands. The U-boat branch of the German Navy lost 28,000 out of a total of 40,900 men, and 5,000 were taken prisoner. Herbert A. Warner was one of the few men who survived active duty during most of the U-boat war and he rose through the ranks to become a captain, with command of his own U-boat; his autobiography bears the fitting title Iron Coffins.
In the murky, greenish-brown haze that passes for water clarity along the ocean bottom off the New Jersey coast lies the boat the Rouses were determined to identify. They would probably need several dives to circumnavigate the 251-foot-long U-Who fully and safely. But once they penetrated the interior and made their way amid the shards, bones, and rust, Chris and Chrissy could be the ones to identify the mysterious submarine. They would be not just heroic divers but parties to history.
The Last Dive Page 31