Shadow Divers (22 page)

Dudley stepped forward. He was the only one in the room not smiling.

“Dr. Allard, I’m sorry, we can’t do that,” he said. “As you know, the U.S. has filed a complaint against France in international court over the Confederate ship
Alabama.
The heart of that case is that the French are diving on an American warship we argue has protection for being a war grave. We can’t at the same time be diving a German war grave in America. Our position in court would be weakened.”

Allard contemplated the argument for a moment.

“Well, you’re right, Bill,” Allard said. He turned to Chatterton. “I’m disappointed. But if we can’t actively go out there and help you with the diving, Mr. Chatterton, we can still provide you with whatever you need in terms of research assistance here.”

Allard stood and removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves.

“In fact, let’s start right now. Bill, would you get the pamphlet explaining our resources for Mr. Chatterton?”

Dudley escorted Chatterton to his office. He closed the door behind himself, turned, and looked Chatterton in the eye.

“I don’t like you,” Dudley said. “I don’t like divers who touch things on shipwrecks.”

Chatterton knew what was unfolding. Some scholars despised divers for their willingness to disturb shipwreck artifacts. Chatterton had resolved this with himself long ago. If he were to discover, say, a Viking ship from a thousand years ago, he would surrender it to archeologists; there are things to be learned and preserved from a Viking ship. But a World War II vessel about which everything is known and meticulously documented? Chatterton believed he was on good paper with Allard and Cavalcante and the NHC. He would not force the issue with Dudley.

“Okay, that’s fine,” Chatterton said.

Dudley returned with Chatterton to Allard’s office, where the men thanked Chatterton for bringing “a genuine mystery” to the NHC. Vaeth and Cavalcante then showed him to the archives, where they introduced him to Kathleen Lloyd, an archivist and Cavalcante’s right-hand person, who would assist Chatterton in whatever way possible. Chatterton thanked Allard, then disappeared with Lloyd and Vaeth into a research area filled with active-duty military personnel, authors, veterans, historians, and professors. There, Lloyd told Chatterton about four critical research tools available to him. Each struck Chatterton as a revelation. They were:

1. Anti-submarine Warfare Incident Reports (ASW): A daily chronology of underwater contact between Allied forces (ships, airplanes, blimps, Civilian Air Patrol, armed guards aboard merchant vessels, etc.) and enemy vessels believed to be submarines. Reports could include battles, chases, sightings, sonar contacts—anything related to the hunting of U-boats. If a report told of a battle, a more detailed account—called an “attack report”—could be referenced.

2. Eastern Sea Frontier War Diaries (ESFWD): A daily chronology of interesting activity or observations made by Allied personnel along the American eastern seaboard. Such activity could include anything from the appearance of an oil slick to a mysterious puff of smoke to the discovery of a life jacket. Unlike the ASW reports, these reports did not have to involve submarines.

3. BdU KTBs: A daily summary written by German U-boat Control (BdU) detailing U-boat activity around the world. These contained a U-boat’s orders, its radio communications to headquarters, and its engagements. Only BdU KTBs written before January 16, 1945, survived the war; those from later months were destroyed by the Germans.

4. Individual U-boat Files: Dossiers of U.S. Navy–compiled information on specific U-boats. These might contain files on the U-boat’s type, its orders, its patrols, intercepted communications, intelligence reports, photographs, and survivor interrogations, as well as biographical information on its commander.

Lloyd suggested that Chatterton begin by searching the ASW incident reports, checking for any Allied underwater engagements in the area of the mystery wreck site. If he found any incidents near the wreck site, he could request detailed files about those incidents. He could also check the incident’s time frame against the German U-boat diaries to see which subs had been sent to America then. She brought him the first boxes of reports labeled 1942. Vaeth smiled and wished him luck.

“I’m going to look at every piece of paper in this place if I have to,” Chatterton said.

With that, Chatterton sat down and opened the first box of 1942 ASW incident reports. He began at January 1 and skimmed the page for latitudes and longitudes within a fifteen-mile radius of the wreck site.

Several hours later he finished with 1942. He had scanned more than a thousand incidents. None of them had occurred within a fifteen-mile radius of where the mystery U-boat lay. He was due home that night. He called his wife and told her he would be staying another two days. The next morning, he was first in line at the archives, asking for 1943.

Chatterton made his way through every incident report for the entire war. In four years, not a single Allied force had engaged a submarine within a fifteen-mile radius of the wreck site.

Chatterton asked Lloyd if he might next inspect the Eastern Sea Frontier War Diaries—these would yield information about
anything
that might have happened in the wreck area, whether or not it dealt with U-boats. She presented him with another mountain range of files. As he’d done with the incident reports, Chatterton bulldozed through the war years, hunting for any speck of activity near his wreck site. Two days later he was finished. During the war, not a single incident—not a piece of flotsam, a washed-up life jacket, the body of a sailor, an oil slick, even a puff of smoke—had occurred anywhere near the wreck site. It was as if that section of the ocean, where several dozen crewmen lay dead in this mystery U-boat, had vanished from existence during the war.

Chatterton asked Lloyd if he might spend the final few hours of his trip browsing some of the archive’s other files. Soon he was lost behind a great wall of binders and boxes. While others around him tore into the masses of information, Chatterton was more feline in their company. He studied the labels without opening containers, flipped through research guides to learn what lay inside, orienting himself to the archive’s myriad offerings so that he could return with vision and with a plan. In this way he negotiated research as he negotiated a shipwreck, by small initial penetrations designed to set up the later home run. As Chatterton lifted boxes and unlooped the strings from manila envelopes, he was twelve years old again and back in that fantastical house he had discovered after a day’s hitchhiking, surrounded on all sides by stories and the dust of history. It was only when Lloyd tapped his shoulder and said, “Mr. Chatterton? Mr. Chatterton? We’re closing now . . .” that he realized that he had forgotten to go home. He thanked her for all the help over his three-day stay and made his way to the parking lot, believing that he could come back to this wonderful place and find his answer, that he could learn to see into those records, which had so far denied him, that he could do it tomorrow if only he had the time.

Two weeks later, Chatterton and Yurga landed in Germany. The divers bought a large bouquet of mixed flowers, then headed to the U-boat Memorial in Möltenort, near the port city of Kiel. Here, listed on eighty-nine bronze plaques, were the names of the thirty thousand U-boat crewmen killed in action in World War II, each according to the submarine on which he died. Freezing rain needled into their necks and made mascara of the ink on the pages of notes they had brought along. For three hours the men traced their fingers down plaques to the letter
H
in search of Horenburg. They could find only one—Martin Horenburg, the
Funkmeister
who had perished with his crew on
U-869
off Africa, just as the experts had said.

That night, still chilled after a scalding shower, Chatterton placed a call to Merten, the U-boat ace with whom he had been corresponding. He knew that Merten had recently taken ill, but he hoped the eighty-six-year-old commander might be well enough to receive visitors and brainstorm about the mystery wreck. A young person answered the phone and apologized—Herr Merten could welcome no visitors; the once-great U-boat ace was sick and did not wish anyone to see him in such a weakened condition.

That left Bredow’s U-boat Archive in Cuxhaven-Altenbruch. By this time, Chatterton had come to understand more about this unusual private repository. A U-boat veteran, Bredow had converted his own home into the archive, cramming files, photos, records, mementos, artifacts, and dossiers next to his kitchen and beside his appliances. Only a massive anchor in his yard distinguished Bredow’s from the other homes on the block. The operation had come to be viewed by the German government and by historians as the country’s premier U-boat archive, especially for information about the men who’d fought the war. Bredow possessed one-of-a-kind items, including letters, diaries, and photographs. His was a living museum focused on the men. When serious researchers looked to solve mysteries, it was to Bredow that Germany often referred them.

Chatterton and Yurga rang the doorbell as the clock struck 9:00
A.M.
A short, balding, bespectacled sixty-eight-year-old man with a white beard opened the door and said in a heavy German accent, “Ah! Herr Chatterton and Herr Yurga—welcome to the U-boat Archive. I am Horst Bredow.” Above Bredow’s shoulder were file cabinets standing sentry over the house, artifacts laid on felt in glass cases, and dozens of framed photographs of U-boat crewmen in more hopeful days. As the divers stepped inside, they could barely remove their coats for their nerves—they believed themselves moments from the answer to their mystery.

“Everything you see here I have built from a single piece of paper!” Bredow exclaimed, spreading his arms. “All the answers you are seeking are here. You need go no other place.”

Chatterton inhaled deeply. Bredow was about to identify the wreck.

“But first, before I give you the answer, I shall show you the archives,” Bredow said.

Chatterton nearly burst from his skin. Instead, he and Yurga managed to say, “Oh, that sounds . . . wonderful.”

For the next ninety minutes, Bredow took the divers through every room in the house. For ninety minutes, the divers continued to say, “Oh, very nice,” and “Oh, how interesting,” fighting to stay in their shoes while Bredow rambled on, in no hurry to present the solution.

Finally, Bredow sat behind a desk and asked the divers to sit across from him. He took a narrow, typewritten scrap of paper from inside a drawer. Chatterton’s heart raced. Bredow pushed the paper across the table, facedown.

“Here is your answer,” Bredow said.

Chatterton’s hands shook as he received it. He turned over the paper. On it, Bredow had typed the names of seven U-boats.

Chatterton went numb. Yurga could not move. This was a list of U-boats lost off the American East Coast—a list available in public library books. One of the U-boats listed was a Type VII and therefore could not be the mystery sub. Others had been sunk several hundred miles from the wreck site. Still others had yielded survivors or other ironclad evidence of their identity. One,
U-853,
off Rhode Island, had been dived for years. These were the U-boats the divers had eliminated first.

Chatterton took a deep breath. “There are problems with all these boats, sir,” he said. “It cannot be any of these.”

“It must be one of those boats,” Bredow said. “Your location must be wrong.”

“No, sir,” Chatterton said. “The location we gave you is very accurate. We have returned to it many times.”

Bredow’s forehead furrowed into narrow trenches. His cheeks turned red.

“You can look through my files if you like,” Bredow said gruffly. “I do not know what else to say.”

Chatterton and Yurga excused themselves to another room, out of sight of Bredow, and put their heads in their hands. With little left to do, the divers began to copy crew lists of every Type IX U-boat sent to America’s eastern seaboard. Two hours later, they had done all they could. They were leaving virtually empty-handed.

On the way out, Bredow offered a bit of personal advice.

“If you can recover an escape lung from the wreck, perhaps the owner has written his name on it. We used to do this quite often.”

Chatterton thanked Bredow for the tip and wished him a good day. In the hotel lobby that night, Chatterton bought a postcard and addressed it to Kohler. On it, he wrote, “We know more than they do. We must go back to the wreck.” Kohler received it a few days later. He showed it to his wife.

“This postcard really means a lot to me,” he told her. “It was a very personal thing to do, not typical for Chatterton’s personality. I think we’re going to be working together for a long time. I think we’re becoming a team.”

After Chatterton returned to the States, he phoned Yurga and Kohler and called a meeting at his house. It was time to take matters into their own hands.

It took Kohler all of eight minutes to reach Chatterton’s place. The two had lived five miles from each other for years and had never known it. In Chatterton’s living room, he and Yurga briefed Kohler on the Germany trip, each competing to do the best impression of Bredow’s confounded expression when told that his list did not solve the mystery.

“I gotta say, this is a mystery like you read in a book,” Kohler said. “A German U-boat comes to our doorstep in New Jersey. It explodes and sinks with maybe sixty guys onboard, and no one—no government or navy or professor or historian—has a clue that it’s even here.”

Chatterton recounted his research in D.C. “I went through the entire war, page by page,” he said. “My glasses were sideways on my face. The room started spinning. Not a single thing happened anywhere near our wreck site during the entire war. Nothing.”

A pizza and a six-pack of Cokes arrived. Kohler paid and forgot to ask for change. No one risked reaching for plates for fear of interrupting the flow. The divers were grooving now.

“I think we all know from our research that the stuff you hear about U-boats coming up on the beaches and the crewmen attending costume balls and buying bread at the local market are bullshit fantasy,” Kohler said, pacing the room and using his triangular pepperoni slice like a professor’s pointer. “But I’m going to confess something. You know the stories and rumors you read about how the Nazis tried to smuggle gold out of Germany at the end of the war? Or even the stories about how Hitler fled in a U-boat as Berlin fell? Well, think about it. If our U-boat was used for something like that, there sure as hell wouldn’t be any record of it, would there?”