Shadow Divers (17 page)

For a while, Kohler had no problem using the
Wahoo.
But recently Kohler had clashed with Bielenda, one time nearly coming to blows. Now Kohler needed a new boat to get to the
Doria.
He had dived several times with Nagle on the
Seeker—
to the
Durley Chine,
the
Bidevind,
and the
Resor—
and had long admired Nagle’s legend. And while Nagle had a reputation for crudeness and impatience, he had always treated Kohler with respect. Kohler signed up for several
Seeker
charters in 1990 and 1991. Though Chatterton was practically running Nagle’s business by then, he and Kohler never found themselves together aboard the boat.

In the fall of 1991 Kohler heard word of the virgin U-boat discovery. The news stopped his life. For days, he was a blur of longing and desire, pacing the floors at home and at work, distracted from family and friends, unable to sort out the details of his yearning. Then Brennan called and said, “You’re in,” and the words lifted Kohler back to the days when his father told stories of Mr. Segal and he became proud of his last name and the way Germans built machines, and it carried him across the thousands of pages he had read about World War II and the courage of men and steel nets stretched across New York, and it ferried him over the sailboat he and his pal Don had designed to circle the world, above the navy man who had promised a submarine, beyond the gear he had used to penetrate alien worlds, and he knew that he had to be part of this virgin U-boat because for twenty-nine years it had been part of him.

CHAPTER SEVEN

HORENBURG’S KNIFE

T
HE SWASTIKAS
on the dishes Chatterton recovered from the U-boat reached through time and chokeholded his imagination. A person could spend a lifetime studying Nazis and U-boats, and in the end it was all just information. The dishes were heavy. The swastika’s angled arms rubbed rough against a person’s fingertips; even with closed eyes one could detect the infamous shape. No one had cataloged or curated or even touched this china since the U-boat fell; the dishes had traveled from Hitler’s Third Reich directly to Chatterton’s living room, and for that unbroken path they still seemed treacherous on his mantel.

If there were a few in the diving community who still had not heard of the mystery wreck after Feldman’s death, that changed with the discovery of the dishes. Now it seemed that every conversation in every dive shop along the eastern seaboard involved the U-boat and its possible identity. Chatterton and Nagle were certain that such attention would grind against Bielenda’s ego; the King of the Deep could not abide pretenders to his throne, and while he likely did not yet know the sub’s location, they believed it would be only a matter of time before he wrestled it from his Coast Guard connections and set sail to raid their wreck. Ordinarily, the
Seeker
would have been back to the submarine the next week—the men were sure that with another dive or two the U-boat would surrender her name. But it was now hurricane season, the time of year when windows of opportunity were measured in hours rather than months. Landlocked, Nagle renewed his vow to get sober and work his body back into diving shape for next season. Chatterton returned to his research. If he could not penetrate the wreck from the ocean, he would try to get inside it through history.

While a few of the divers had thumbed library books looking for insight into the wreck, Chatterton continued to research as he had from the beginning—by submitting written requests to an archivist at the Naval Historical Center in Washington, D.C. The NHC was the Fort Knox of naval war records, and it was from the archivist’s expertise that Chatterton hoped to mine hidden nuggets. But replies took weeks, and when they did arrive they consisted of one-page general-information synopses. If Chatterton was going to penetrate beneath history’s crust, he would have to make the research more personal and immediate.

Chatterton was not the only man engaged in serious investigation. From his home in New Providence, New Jersey, Kohler barrel-rolled into his collection of U-boat books, devouring titles past midnight even when his glass company demanded that he be fresh before dawn. Mornings, he used one eye to shave and the other to choose additional titles from his Naval Institute Press catalog, then wrote checks to the company for sums he hoped his wife would never notice. He introduced himself at a German-American club on Route 130 in Burlington, New Jersey, where he told the elderly membership the story of the mystery U-boat and recruited volunteers to help him translate the German books he had purchased.

One day he called a dive charter captain who had once mentioned knowing a U-boat crewman. He asked the captain to seek out this U-boat man and see if he had any suggestions that might help identify the wreck. The captain spoke to the veteran and then called Kohler.

“Search the boots,” the captain said.

“Huh?”

“Search the boots. If you can find boots on the wreck, look inside them. The guy says they all wrote their names inside their boots so no one else would wear them. They hated when other guys wore their boots. And they put their watches and jewelry in their boots, too, and some of that stuff also had their names.”

Kohler resolved to search the boots. None of the other divers would think to look inside a rotting old boot; they would likely swim past footwear in search of more dishes or a builder’s plaque or some other glamorous artifact. If he could, Kohler would search every boot he saw.

Then Kohler hit upon another idea, this one maybe his best. He had heard that a retired U-boat commander, Herbert Werner, lived in America. But Werner was not just any commander. He had written
Iron Coffins,
a memoir that had become a classic in the genre. Kohler poked around library white pages until he hit gold. Werner not only lived in America, he lived in ever-loving New Jersey. Kohler got his number and, trembling, dialed one of the great U-boat commanders.

A man answered in a light German accent.

“Hello, I’m looking for Mr. Herbert Werner,” Kohler said.

“This is Herbert Werner.”

Kohler’s heart raced. He might have the answer to the U-boat mystery before he hung up the phone.

“Sir, my name is Richard Kohler. I’m a diver. My colleagues and I found a U-boat off the New Jersey coast. Sir, the reason I’m calling—”

“Everything I have to say I said in my book,” Werner stated in an even and measured tone. “I have nothing more to say.”

“But if I can just ask—”

“Good-bye,” Werner said pleasantly, then hung up.

Kohler held the receiver to his ear for a minute before he could bring himself to replace it.

Weeks had passed since the dishes came out of the wreck. The divers had put in dozens of hours of research, and one fact screamed above all the rest: no U-boat had ever been recorded sunk within one hundred miles of the wreck site. To Chatterton, it seemed as if his research with the archivist at the Naval Historical Center was moving backward. And he and Nagle could virtually hear Bielenda warming up the
Wahoo
’s engines. Chatterton hit upon an idea: Why not put out news of the U-boat discovery to the world? Surely there were historians or experts or governments who knew the wreck’s identity; why not expedite the research by going to those who know? The
Seeker
would still enjoy the glory and fame of discovery, Bielenda and others would be precluded from claim-jumping the wreck, and the mystery would be solved through the
Seeker
’s research. There was risk in the idea—namely that someone else would get credit for making the identification. Chatterton decided he could handle that scenario. He pitched Nagle on writing a press release. Nagle loved the idea. “Put my name and phone number at the bottom,” he told Chatterton.

At the local library, Chatterton found a book on how to write press releases. At home that night, he came up with this:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—OCTOBER 10, 1991

DIVERS DISCOVER MYSTERY U-BOAT OFF NEW JERSEY COAST

Captain Bill Nagle and the divers from the Brielle, New Jersey charter vessel
Seeker
have located a World War II German U-boat sunk only 65 miles from the New Jersey coast, at approximate latitude 40, longitude 73.30. The wreck lies upright and is essentially intact, though it shows damage from an apparent depth charge attack.

The U-boat is in 230 feet of water, making it accessible to only a select few experienced deep wreck divers. The submarine was located on Labor Day, during a
Seeker
expedition to identify undiscovered wrecks. On a subsequent trip to the wreck,
Seeker
crew member John Chatterton recovered two china dishes from deep within the wreck, each emblazoned with the Nazi swastika and dated “1942,” proof of the sub’s origin.

The items recovered from the wreck prove it is a World War II German U-boat, but which one? No German submarines were ever reported sunk within 150 miles of this location, and German records contain no accounts of U-boats being lost in New Jersey waters. Divers from the
Seeker
will continue to cautiously probe the wreck to discover its identity, and unravel the mystery of why it is where it is. A small piece of naval history may have to be rewritten.

Contact: Captain Bill Nagle

Kevin Brennan gave Chatterton a black-and-white photo of one of the dishes to include with the release. Chatterton made a list of all the media outlets he knew, a total of ten names, including local newspapers, the Associated Press, UPI, and diving magazines. He mailed a press release and photo to each address.

A day passed without a reply. Then a few days. Chatterton checked Nagle’s phone several times. He called the phone company and asked that they check Nagle’s line. The phone was working fine. Finally, Chatterton called Nagle.

“Well, that didn’t work,” he said.

“Looks like it,” Nagle grumbled.

Several days later, Nagle’s phone rang. He referred the call to Chatterton. It was from a reporter at the Newark
Star-Ledger,
an important New Jersey daily newspaper. The man sounded weary and uninterested. His questions dripped with skepticism, as if he were being forced to interview yet another Billy Bob who had discovered a spaceship in his backyard.

“So, you supposedly found some mysterious U-boat, huh?” the reporter asked.

Chatterton said that he had. The man asked more questions. To each, Chatterton provided a detailed answer. By the end of the conversation, the reporter asked if he might visit Chatterton’s home. A day later he was there taking notes and handling the china. He said he thought the story might be good enough to run on page one.

The next morning, Chatterton walked in bathrobe and slippers to the end of his driveway and picked up the
Star-Ledger.
At the bottom was a headline:
U-BOAT WRECK FOUND OFF POINT PLEASANT.
Alongside the story was a photo of Nagle and Chatterton inspecting the dishes. Chatterton ran inside and called Nagle. The story summed it all up: the dangers of deep-wreck diving, the ominous presence of U-boats in American waters, Feldman’s death, the ongoing mystery of the sub’s identity. It also quoted Professor Henry Keatts, an author and U-boat expert. “They have definitely found a German U-boat,” Keatts told the paper. “The mystery is how it ended up where it is today. . . . None is supposed to be in this area.”

The
Star-Ledger
story unleashed a media frenzy. That evening, Nagle’s and Chatterton’s phones rang nonstop with interview requests from radio, television, and print reporters. International media ran the story of the mystery U-boat discovered off the New Jersey coast. CNN sent a crew. Television reporters had Nagle and Chatterton hold the dishes up, swastika side out, while they interviewed the pair aboard the
Seeker.
Even the tabloid
Weekly World News
ran a front-page item:
NAZI SUB CAPTURED BY U.S. NAVY SHIP!
The story, fantastical even by that publication’s standards, told not only of the New Jersey U-boat but of a second U-boat, one that had sailed from Germany into a time warp and had only surfaced today, its still-youthful crewmen convinced that Hitler ruled Germany. It quoted a “Washington-based Navy officer” who said, “I don’t know all that much about time warps, but that seems to be the only explanation for this whole situation.”

Chatterton’s phone, which had sat silent for two weeks after the press release, now rang so relentlessly it threatened his sleep and his meals. His mailbox overflowed. Packages were delivered to him addressed simply “John Chatterton—Diver—New Jersey.”

Many of the contacts came from people who claimed to know the identity of the U-boat or the explanation for its sinking. Sons, mothers, brothers, and grandchildren swore that loved ones had attacked and sunk a U-boat on a secret mission that the government still refused to acknowledge. Others called claiming to have classified U-boat information. Still others told of seeing U-boat crewmen swimming onto American shores to buy bread or attend dances. One elderly caller told of meeting an old German man while fishing as a teenager. “The guy looked at the spot on our chart we’d been fishing and said that’s where he’d lost his U-boat,” the man told Chatterton. “It was at the same spot you found your wreck.” Several widows called saying that their husbands had sunk U-boats but had never received credit. A scholarly-sounding man called and said that the mystery could be solved simply by wiping the dirt from the conning tower, as U-boats had their numbers painted prominently on the side.

One man called and spoke in a heavy German accent.

“I am looking for ze diver who found ze U-boat,” the man said.

“Okay, that’s me,” Chatterton said.

“Vat ken you tell me about ze diver who died?”

“Well, he was a pretty good diver. It was a terrible accident.”

“His name vas Feldman?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you spell det?”

“F-E-L-D-M-A-N.”

“Vas Feldman a Jew?”

Chatterton hung up after that.

On another day, he received a call from a different man with a thick German accent.

“Your bubbles are disturbing ze sailors’ slumber,” the man said before hanging up abruptly.

Chatterton researched many of the stories he heard, even the ones that seemed loopy. Stories of U-boat men mixing into the American population turned out to be the product of terrified imaginations; on only a few occasions did men move from U-boats to American soil, and in those cases the men were saboteurs and spies. U-boat conning towers did sport the U-boat’s number, as is evidenced in photographs, but only before World War II began; after that, any such markings were erased or painted over. So far, none of Chatterton’s leads had inched him any closer to knowing the mystery submarine.

Kohler, too, was receiving phone calls. His name had been mentioned in some of the newspaper stories, and like Chatterton, he heard from family members seeking credit for a supposed U-boat kill a relative had made fifty years ago. He also began to hear from collectors.

“Are there human remains on the boat?” one man asked.

“We don’t know that yet,” Kohler said.

“I’d like to buy a Nazi skull.”

“I don’t do that.”

“I’ll give you two thousand dollars for a skull.”

“I told you, I don’t do that.”

“What the hell do you mean you don’t do that? We
won.
Are you some kind of Nazi lover?”

So-called collectors, Kohler found, got angry fast. He learned to hang up on them even faster.

Not every contact with Chatterton came from family or fanatics or conspiracists. Early on, he received a letter from the German embassy in Washington, D.C. It was written by Dieter Leonhard, a captain in the German navy. The letter began cordially, acknowledging Chatterton’s discovery and offering assistance in researching the wreck. Farther down the page, however, Leonhard made plain Germany’s position: