Kurson - Shadow Divers

CONTENTS

FOR AMY, the answer to my lifes search
FOR NATE, already a seeker

Lifes 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

AUTHORS NOTE

A few years ago, a friend told me a remarkable story. Two recreational scuba divers had recently discovered a World War II German U-boat off the New Jersey coast. The fifty-six-man crew was still aboard. No government, expert, historian, or navy had a clue as to which submarine it was, who the sailors were, or why it was in New Jersey.

My first reaction was that the story sounded too amazing to be true. Still, it awakened childhood memories in me. For years, my grade school classes had taken field trips to Chicagos Museum of Science and Industry to see its two centerpiece exhibits: a working coal mine and U-505, a German U-boat captured in 1944. Most kids preferred the coal mine, which featured moving cars and live explosions. I was drawn to the submarine. This eel-shaped fighting machine, with its furious interior of pipes and wire and gauges and weapons, seemed more terrifying than any bomber plane or Sherman tank. Seeing it resting there, just yards from the banks of Lake Michigan, I imagined this invisible hunter stalking the shoreline where I swam. This U-boat, I thought, could have come to within a mile or two of my house.

I called John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, the two New Jersey divers, and asked if I might fly out to hear their story. We met at Chattertons house, where he had parked his vintage Royal Enfield motorcycle next to Kohlers late-model Harley. Chatterton was a commercial diver who did underwater construction jobs around Manhattan. Kohler owned a glass-repair business. They dove for shipwrecks on weekends. Each seemed, in every respect, a regular guy.

I promised not to take much of their time. Fourteen hours later, I was still listening. They told of discovering not just a U-boat but mystery, adventure, high-seas rivalries and bitter feuds, and membership in an obsessed culture of immensely brave men. They also told me of an intellectual odyssey, one in which they had made themselves into expert researchers, pored over original documents, learned bits of German, hunted clues abroad, constructed original theories, challenged professional historians, and ultimately rewritten a page of history long presumed to be gospel.

Sounds like a novel, huh? Kohler said to me in his thick Brooklyn accent as he fired up his Harley. Driving to the airport that night, I could scarcely believe my luck. In Chatterton and Kohler, I had found two ordinary men who had confronted an extraordinarily dangerous world and solved a historical mystery that even governments had not been able to budge. Any one of the elements of their story raised intriguing possibilities. Taken together, they made for a once-in-a-lifetime writing opportunity. I could no more turn my back on a chance to write the divers story than they could have turned their backs on the chance to identify the mystery U-boat. In that sense, Chatterton, Kohler, and I already had something in common.

So this is their story. All of it is true and accurate. Nothing is imagined or interpreted, and no literary liberties have been taken. The book is rooted in hundreds of hours of interviews with Chatterton and Kohler, plus countless more hours with divers, historians, experts, relatives, and other witnesses to the events described herein. Dialogueeven that from World War IIis taken directly from interviews I conducted with people who were there and witnessed the events. Everything was checked against multiple sources whenever possible.

While researching the dangers of deep-shipwreck diving, I was struck by a remark the divers made about depth. The mystery U-boat, they said, lay in such deep, dark waters that occasionally they could do little more than dive at shadows. It occurred to me then that there were shadows cast throughout the storyby the fallen crewmen, by World War II, by the seeming infallibility of written history, by questions the divers came to ask about themselves as men. For six years, Chatterton and Kohler were shadow divers. For six years, they went on a remarkable journey. I wrote this book to take you there with them.

CHAPTER ONE

THE BOOK OF NUMBERS

Brielle, New Jersey, September 1991

BILL NAGLES LIFE CHANGED the day a fisherman sat beside him in a ramshackle bar and told him about a mystery he had found lying at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Against his better judgment, that fisherman promised to tell Nagle how to find it. The men agreed to meet the next day on the rickety wooden pier that led to Nagles boat, the Seeker, a vessel Nagle had built to chase possibility. But when the appointed time came, the fisherman was not there. Nagle paced back and forth, careful not to plunge through the pier where its wooden planks had rotted away. He had lived much of his life on the Atlantic, and he knew when worlds were about to shift. Usually, that happened before a storm or when a mans boat broke. Today, however, he knew it was going to happen when the fisherman handed him a scrap of paper, a hand-scrawled set of numbers that would lead to the sunken mystery. Nagle looked into the distance for the fisherman. He saw no one. The salt air blew against the small seashore town of Brielle, tilting the dockside boats and spraying the Atlantic into Nagles eyes. When the mist died down he looked again. This time, he saw the fisherman approaching, a small square of paper crumpled in his hands. The fisherman looked worried. Like Nagle, he had lived on the ocean, and he also knew when a mans life was about to change.

In the whispers of approaching autumn, Brielles rouge is blown away and what remains is the real Brielle, the locals Brielle. This small seashore town on the central New Jersey coast is the place where the boat captains and fishermen live, where convenience store owners stay open to serve neighbors, where fifth graders can repair scallop dredges. This is where the hangers-on and wannabes and also-rans and once-greats keep believing in the sea. In Brielle, when the customers leave, the towns lines show, and they are the kind grooved by the thin difference between making a living on the water and washing out.

The Seeker towers above the other boats tied to this Brielle dock, and its not just the vessels sixty-five-foot length that grabs ones attention, its the feelingfrom her battered wooden hull and nicked propellersthat shes been places. Conceived in Nagles imagination, the Seeker was built for a single purpose: to take scuba divers to the most dangerous shipwrecks in the Atlantic Ocean.

Nagle was forty years old then, a thin, deeply tanned former Snap-On Tools Salesman of the Year. To see him here, waiting for this fisherman in his tattered T-shirt and thrift-shop sandals, the Jim Beam he kept as best friend slurring his motions, no one would guess that he had been an artist, that in his day Nagle had been great.