Shadow Divers (18 page)

The Federal Republic of Germany retains ownership of the submarines, regardless of whether the present position of the wreck is within national territorial waters or not. Sunken German warships are principally defined to be “tombs of a seaman’s grave.” Diving and exploring the wreck is therefore not permitted without government approval, which has been denied in each case to date. To keep a wreck a tomb, the FRG prohibits any violation to a World War II sub and will enforce this condition through legal means.

Chatterton called the phone number on the stationery and was transferred to Leonhard. Chatterton told him that he had received the letter and would be grateful for assistance with documents and research. Leonhard said he would be happy to help. Chatterton then popped his big question.

“Do you know the identity of the wreck?”

Leonhard said that the German government often relied on a man named Horst Bredow at the U-boat Archive in Cuxhaven-Altenbruch as a repository for such information. He offered Chatterton the contact information. Then Leonhard reiterated what he had written in the letter—that Germany did not permit diving on sunken U-boats.

“Which U-boat is it?” Chatterton asked.

“The one you found,” Leonhard replied.

“Yes, but what is the specific U-boat designation?”

“I do not know.”

“What about the exact location?” Chatterton asked.

“I do not know that, either.”

“I’m going to be honest with you,” Chatterton said. “I want to be respectful. You don’t know what wreck this is, and therefore you can’t lay claim to it. My goal is to identify the wreck, to put a name on the tombstone. I’m going to continue diving it until that happens.”

“You understand our position, Mr. Chatterton. We do not want divers descending on this U-boat and scattering any human remains that might be on board and desecrating the wreck,” Leonhard said. “We cannot and will not allow that.”

“I understand that and I don’t intend to allow that to happen,” Chatterton said. “It’s my first priority to be considerate and respectful. You have my word on that.”

By now, Chatterton understood Leonhard’s position. The man could not formally grant a diver permission to explore a war grave. He sensed, however, that Leonhard—who had kept an even and pleasant tone throughout the conversation—would not make official trouble for him so long as he treated the wreck with respect. The men thanked each other for their time and ended the call.

About a week after the first U-boat story appeared, Chatterton began to compile several promising leads. One of the first came from Harry Cooper, the founder and president of Sharkhunters International, a thousands-strong group based in Florida and “dedicated to preserving the history of the U-Bootwaffe,” as their motto read. Chatterton had seen the group’s text-crammed, exclamation point–filled newsletters—homemade-looking publications that mixed interviews, intrigue, history, editorials, criticism, and even the occasional classified ad. Despite the wild look of its mailings, Sharkhunters counted American historians, former U-boat commanders and crewmen, professors, U.S. naval veterans, and other experts among its members. Cooper urged Chatterton to join Sharkhunters, saying that the group had deep and far-reaching contacts he believed could help solve the mystery. Cooper asked questions no one yet had: Does your wreck have saddle tanks? Does your wreck have two stern torpedo tubes or only one? The answers could easily be gleaned while diving, Cooper explained, and would reveal much about the U-boat’s type and the year it might have sailed. Chatterton resolved to inspect the wreck for that information on the next dive and report back to Cooper with the answers.

One morning, a man phoned Chatterton claiming to have sunk a U-boat from a blimp in 1942. A month earlier such a claim would have sounded like another bit of lunacy to Chatterton. But in his research, Chatterton had learned that blimps had been a formidable force in keeping U-boats submerged and in escorting ships along the eastern seaboard; that at one point during World War II more than fifteen hundred pilots had manned blimps considerably larger than the current versions used for advertising; that the blimps carried sophisticated antisubmarine technology; and that a blimp had even fought it out with a surfaced U-boat, a battle that had resulted in injury to the U-boat and the blimp plummeting from the sky. So Chatterton listened.

“I’m an old man and my mind ain’t so good,” the man said. “I don’t remember all the details. But I know I sunk a U-boat from a blimp.”

“Go ahead, sir, I’m listening. I really appreciate the phone call.”

“Well, I was based out of Lakehurst, New Jersey. I attacked the U-boat close to there. I sunk it with a depth charge. I’m sorry, but that’s all I remember. I hope that helps.”

Chatterton recorded the man’s story on his legal pad and made a note to research any reports his contact at the Naval Historical Center might find for him about blimp attacks on U-boats in the area of the wreck.

Another morning, Chatterton drove to the Naval Weapons Station Earle in Monmouth County, New Jersey, and showed a videotape of the wreck to experts in weapons, ordnance, and demolition. They watched the tape again and again. They talked among themselves and used technical words and physics terms in their discussions. They arrived at this consensus:

—  the damage to the U-boat’s control room looked to be caused by explosion rather than by collision;

—  the shape and direction of the damaged metal indicated that the explosion likely occurred from outside the submarine; and

—  the damage was likely caused by a force far greater than a depth charge, the weapon used so often by Allied forces against U-boats.

Chatterton took notes on everything. He asked the men if they might be kind enough to fashion a guess as to what had caused such cataclysmic damage.

“We can’t be certain,” one of the men said. “But if we had to guess, we would guess it was damaged by a direct torpedo hit.”

A direct torpedo hit? Driving home, Chatterton turned the idea over in his mind a hundred times. Who would have fired such a torpedo? An account of an American submarine that had sunk a U-boat would have made every history book, yet there had been no such incident anywhere close to the wreck site. Could another U-boat have mistakenly sunk a friend? It had happened before, but mostly among U-boat wolf packs—groups of U-boats that hunted enemy ships together—and there was simply no record of a wolf pack anywhere near the wreck site. One thing was certain: the idea that a U-boat had limped from some other location with such an injury—as Nagle and some divers left room to believe—seemed impossible. To Chatterton, whatever had blown up that U-boat had done it at just the place in the ocean where the divers had found it.

The
Star-Ledger
story was barely a week old and already Chatterton had gathered reams of information from sources great and small. The best, however, were still to come.

One arrived in the form of a meeting at Nagle’s house attended by Nagle, Chatterton, and Major Gregory Weidenfeld, a Civil Air Patrol historian who had contacted Nagle through a newspaper reporter. Chatterton had heard of the CAP; they were a group of civilian pilots organized in 1941 by New York’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and others to fly small, privately owned airplanes to help defend coastal shipping. On any given night, a deli counterman or an accountant or a dentist might patrol the skies along the New York and New Jersey coasts, hunting U-boats with a pair of minibombs jury-rigged under the plane’s wings. So patchwork was the weapon system that pilots were sometimes told not to land with the bombs still attached, as the explosives might trigger from the jolt; instead, they were often advised to drop the bombs whether or not they had spotted a U-boat. Weidenfeld explained that over the course of the war the CAP had detected more than 150 subs and had dropped depth charges on several of them.

“We sank two U-boats,” Weidenfeld said. “But we never got credit for either of them.”

“I’ve read about those incidents,” Chatterton said. “You guys believe the navy didn’t want to credit civilians.”

“That’s right,” Weidenfeld said. “The navy didn’t want to acknowledge it because it would have terrified the public to think that average civilians were needed to fight the U-boats, and that the U-boats were coming so close to our shores. Anyway, one of the kills was off the Florida coast. The other was in New Jersey.”

Chatterton got out his pen. Weidenfeld told the story.

“On July 11, 1942, two of our pilots in a Grumman Widgeon spotted a U-boat about forty miles off the coast just north of Atlantic City. The guys chased the U-boat for four hours until it began to rise to periscope depth. When it finally surfaced, they dropped a three-hundred-twenty-five-pound depth charge, and the bomb exploded—they could see an oil slick streaking on the surface where the sub had been. They dropped the other depth charge right into the oil slick. It was a kill, absolutely. The pilots are both dead now. But I’ve been working for years to get my guys credit for this. I think you found their U-boat.”

Chatterton was enthralled by the account. Weidenfeld had provided an exact date and a location only about twenty-five miles from the wreck site. If Chatterton could find a list of U-boats lost in American waters in July 1942—even if the boat was recorded sunk some distance away—he might find a way to explain its movement to the wreck site and solve the mystery. He thanked Weidenfeld and promised to do all he could to resolve the question of whether the lost sub was the one the Civil Air Patrol had killed nearly fifty years ago. A day later, Professor Keatts said of the story to the
New York Post,
“This is the most reasonable account I’ve heard so far. It could very easily be the same U-boat.”

At around the same time, another unusual phone call came in, this one from a collector of Nazi memorabilia. This hobbyist, however, made no offer to buy artifacts.

“Among other things I collect photos of U-boat commanders,” the man told Chatterton. “I correspond with a lot of these guys. One of them is Karl-Friedrich Merten, the eighth-most-successful U-boat ace of World War II. He read your story in a German newspaper with great interest and has some information he would like to share with you by mail if you’d be kind enough to provide your address.”

“Absolutely,” Chatterton replied.

Over the next several weeks, letters arrived from Germany. In them, Merten thanked Chatterton and the divers for their efforts. He also told a singular tale.

His colleague Hannes Weingärtner had also been a U-boat commander, and like Merten had been promoted to training flotilla commander, a prestigious land-based position. Weingärtner, however, still had battle in his blood and in 1944, at the advanced age of thirty-five, walked away from the desk and back down through the hatch of a U-boat. His assignment: to take
U-851,
a Type IXD2, or “U-cruiser,” U-boat designed for the longest-range patrols, to the Indian Ocean to carry supplies to Far East German bases and deliver cargo to the Japanese navy.

The assignment, Merten speculated, might not have been what Weingärtner had in mind. He believed Weingärtner to have been “a submariner of the first hour,” meaning that the man’s early war roots and instincts—to aggressively hunt and kill enemy ships—had never withered.

“I had the impression that Weingärtner considered the position of the U-boat war not very different from his last command [of] Sept. ’39,” Merten wrote. “I don’t know the text of his patrol order, but
U-851
was certainly not destinated [
sic
] for the Indian Ocean but for the U.S. coast.”

To Merten, it seemed reasonable that the tameness of Weingärtner’s assignment might have coaxed his colleague toward New York.

“I myself am pretty sure that the wreck you have found will be that of
U-851,
” Merten wrote.

The words “I myself” danced off the air-mail stationery and into Chatterton’s imagination. In Merten’s letter, he now possessed genuine inside information delivered direct by a U-boat ace, a theory that bypassed textbooks and historians and got right to the heart of the matter. Merten knew his friend, and now Chatterton knew Merten, and for this Chatterton could not remember a time when he felt more excited.

As with all the information Chatterton had gathered, he told Kohler nothing of his contact with Merten. Though he had admired Kohler’s enthusiasm aboard the boat, he still viewed him as just another guy along for the dive, a man whose artifact lust likely precluded any appetite for history or artistry. Instead, he shared his findings with Yurga, who continued to study the hard-core technical aspects of U-boat construction and layout, and who provided sound scientific counterpoint to whatever theories Chatterton entertained.

Through it all, a thrilling idea had begun taking shape in Chatterton’s thinking. In the course of two weeks he had contact with a U-boat ace, a blimp pilot, a historian, and the president of a U-boat club. Each gave accounts of history unavailable in books and sometimes at odds with books. To Chatterton, who had hungered since childhood for better explanations, for the chance to see for himself, this stretching of history’s canvas was a revelation.

While Chatterton continued to field phone calls, Kohler studied U-boats like an undergraduate before a final exam. He dedicated every free moment to understanding the U-boat—its construction, its evolution, its command chain, its lore. Much of his study was driven by an overriding motivation: to position himself to haul tonnage from the wreck. In his diving lifetime, he could not recall a moment like the one he’d experienced when he’d first laid eyes on Chatterton’s Nazi china. As he’d held that dish in his hands he’d understood that he had possession of something transcendent. He hadn’t been able to enunciate it to himself at the moment, but he’d known what he was feeling. In a single piece of china, every quality that made a shipwreck artifact great—history, symbolism, beauty, mystery—seemed to come together to a brilliant point.

As the days passed and Kohler delved deeper into his U-boat studies, he found himself paying closest attention to those books about the lives and times of the U-boat man, and this surprised him because his mission was so forcefully committed to identification and artifact recovery. Reading about men did not seem like book work to Kohler. Instead, he found himself transported; he could feel the inside of a U-boat not just as a machine but as the backdrop to a human being’s life. He could feel the grueling and claustrophobic conditions under which these soldiers waged war, the coldness of a live torpedo next to a man’s sleeping face, the smell of six-week-old underwear, the spittle in the expletives of men crammed too close to one another for too long, the splatter of a single icy condensation droplet on the neck of an enlisted man finishing a six-hour shift. Technical information interested him, yes, but technology did not make his heart pound—nothing did—like the idea of a U-boat man waiting helplessly while Allied depth charges tumbled through the water toward his submarine, the ominously dainty
ping
.
.
. ping
.
.
. ping
.
.
.
of Allied sonar a prelude to imminent explosion. For years, Kohler had believed the U-boats to be nearly invincible. Now he began to learn of “Sauregurkenzeit” or “Sour-Pickle Time,” the year when Allied ingenuity and technological and material superiority reversed the course of the U-boat war so decisively that U-boats sometimes went weeks without sinking a single enemy ship, when the hunters became the hunted. One source said that no fighting force in the history of warfare had taken the casualties the U-boat men had and still kept fighting. As October wore on, Kohler found himself wondering if any crewmen were still aboard the mystery U-boat, and he wondered also if their families knew that they were there.