Shadow Divers (39 page)

The plan took shape like this: Chatterton and Kohler would rig a three-ton chain fall to the escape trunk, which blocked the aft end of the diesel motor room. The chain fall, a heavy-duty, ratchet-driven hoist, was powerful enough to pull a car from a ditch. Divers almost never risked a move like this, even in shallow waters, as the dangers were myriad. The trunk could collapse on the divers, crushing or pinning them. The trunk could splinter, shooting shrapnel in all directions. The divers could become irreversibly winded by the physical exertion necessary to rig and move the trunk. The grated floor on which the divers would anchor themselves could cave in. The U-boat itself might collapse once the trunk was pulled free. The trunk could fall and block the divers’ exit. Chatterton and Kohler discussed these possibilities. They considered each of them real. They decided to proceed.

Chatterton borrowed a chain fall from the commercial diving outfit for which he worked. The divers booked several trips. Time and again, however, inclement weather forced them to stay onshore. The entire 1996 season passed. If this audacious plan was to happen, it would have to wait until 1997.

The winter passed slowly for both men. The diving appetites Kohler had suppressed for two years now roared in his daily life, yet he was helpless to do anything but wait until the weather warmed. Chatterton’s marriage continued to fossilize. His wife had taken a new job, further reducing their time together. They entered counseling. It didn’t work. In May 1997, as the dive season began, they hired a divorce lawyer, though they agreed to continue living together until the fall, when each of their summer activities would subside.

The death knell of Chatterton’s marriage broadsided him. One spring day, he called Kohler and said, “I’ve got to see you now.” Kohler left work and met his friend at the Watchung Reservation, where they walked by a waterfall and through some woods. Chatterton needed to know how Kohler had dealt with his pain, how he had managed to show up to work every day as his family was disintegrating. He asked detailed questions about heartache. Kohler mostly listened. He told Chatterton that he believed that time healed nearly everything, but he said little else. He knew that Chatterton needed to talk and to be around someone who loved him and cared about him, and Kohler did.

As New Jersey’s charter boat captains put their boats back in the water for the 1997 dive season, Chatterton and Kohler reviewed one of Henry Keatts’s books on wreck diving. In one chapter, they came across photographs of several tags that had been recovered from
U-853—
a World War II U-boat of exactly the same type as the
U-Who—
located near Block Island, Rhode Island. Most of the tags were generic and contained no meaningful writing. One of them, however, stunned the divers. It read,
U-853.
Chatterton and Kohler had recovered dozens of tags from the
U-Who.
None of them was marked with anything like this kind of identifying information.

Kohler rushed to the phone and called Keatts, whom the divers knew casually.

“Hank, in your book there’s a photo of a bunch of tags from
U-853.
Where on the submarine did those tags come from?”

“I’m not sure,” Keatts said.

“Where are the tags now? Who has the one that says
U-853
?”

“I think Billy Palmer pulled that tag.”

“Thank you very much,” Kohler said.

Billy Palmer was a hard-living, cigar-chomping, fiftyish captain who ran a small dive boat,
Thunderfish,
near Block Island. He was also a first-rate wreck diver. Chatterton and Kohler saw him every so often at the Boston Sea Rover show, and they had some friends in common. Kohler found Palmer’s Connecticut home phone number and placed a call.

“You still have those tags from the
853
?” Kohler asked.

“I got buckets of tags,” Palmer said.

“Buckets?”

“Yeah, buckets.”

“You happen to remember where you got the one that says
U-853
?”

“It’s been a long time, Richie. My memory’s a little cloudy.”

Kohler asked if he and Chatterton might drive up for a visit. Palmer told them he’d be happy to see them.

A day later, the divers knocked on Palmer’s door. He answered wearing an authentic Iron Cross award on a chain around his neck, one of the artifacts he had recovered from
U-853.
Chatterton and Kohler glanced at each other as if to say, “Is he serious with that Iron Cross?” but made no comment. Palmer gave them a guided tour of his house, much of which was filled with artifacts. The divers were itching to see the tags. Palmer took his time. Finally, he escorted them to his basement. There, dressed in a German sailor’s uniform, complete with hat and coat, and standing beside a ship’s helm, was a female mannequin Palmer introduced as “Eva.” Palmer passed out beers.

“So you’re interested in the tags?” Palmer asked.

“Yes, very much,” Chatterton replied.

Palmer lifted the glass on a display case. Inside were at least fifty plastic tags. One of them was stamped
U-853.
The divers sat dumbstruck.

“Can you tell us where on the wreck you found this one?” Kohler asked.

Palmer turned away from the divers and toward the mannequin.

“Eva,” he said calmly, “steer course zero-two-zero.”

The divers studied Palmer’s face. They could not tell if he was serious in addressing Eva. Palmer smiled pleasantly, the Iron Cross dangling against his shirt, and returned to the conversation.

“It was on a wooden spare-parts box, a little bigger than a shoe box,” Palmer said.

“In what room?” Chatterton asked.

“It was in the electric motor room.”

The divers nearly leaped from their chairs.

“The spare-parts boxes had to be labeled with the U-boat’s number,” Palmer explained. “That way, if a part was used during a mission, they could send the box to the warehouse, have it refilled, and know which U-boat to return it to.”

Chatterton and Kohler sat frozen. Of all the places on the
U-Who,
the electric motor room was the only one that remained inaccessible, and the only one in which they had not imagined finding identifying tags. Now more than ever it was imperative that they move the massive steel escape trunk that blocked access to part of the diesel motor room and the adjoining electric motor room. They stood up and thanked Palmer.

“That all you fellows want?” he asked.

They told Palmer that he had been a great help. They glanced again at Eva. They told Palmer it had been a real experience, and bid the man good-bye.

The divers booked a trip to the
U-Who
for June 1, 1997. Chatterton brought the three-ton chain fall and an aluminum support beam. For the first time in nearly four years, they were attacking the
U-Who
with a plan. As the
Seeker
neared the dive site, Chatterton and Kohler paced the boat’s rear deck.

“I’m so ready to go,” Chatterton said.

“We’re back,” Kohler replied.

The plan would be executed in two stages. On the first dive, Kohler would take precise measurements of the escape trunk. He and Chatterton would study those figures between dives, then rig the chain fall to the trunk and pull it out on the second dive. If all went well, they would have unfettered access to both motor rooms—and hopefully spare-parts boxes marked by identifying tags.

The weather and current waved a gentle welcome to the divers. Chatterton glided down the anchor line and tied the anchor into the wreck. Kohler followed, swimming through the gaping wound in the control room and heading aft. Just inside the diesel motor room, he came face-to-face with the escape trunk, a massive steel tube that lay fallen at a thirty-degree angle between the two giant diesel engines built on either side of the room. Wire splayed like Einstein’s hair from all parts of the trunk, some of it long enough to choke the life from a diver if he drifted too close. Kohler moved in slowly. Though he was supposed to measure the obstruction, he instead removed a crowbar strapped to his tank. When Kohler was a boy, his father had told him, “Give me a big enough lever and I can move the world,” a lesson that suddenly took over his brain. Kohler nudged the tool between the trunk and the engine; perhaps the huge steel tube had a bit of give. He surveyed his surroundings, taking stock of how he might lunge to escape if the trunk began to fall. He pushed on the crowbar. The trunk rocked and groaned, billowing silt mushroom clouds into the compartment and causing wire to rattlesnake toward Kohler’s face mask. Kohler went motionless and forced his breathing down. He was supposed to be measuring the obstruction. But now he was full of new ideas. He could muscle the trunk away. It could cost him his life, yes; there were a dozen ways he could die doing that. But he had been away from himself for too long. He owed the fallen crewmen a duty. He owed himself the attempt.

He moved the crowbar again. The trunk rocked in reply. The visibility was now less than a foot. He could lift this thing. Kohler looked behind him for an escape route, but that hardly mattered: if the trunk fell on him, it would pin him or strangle him or crush him through the rotting floor, and Chatterton—who was working forward in the sub to give Kohler space—would never hear him scream.

Kohler placed one hand under the lip of the trunk, the other on an engine block for purchase. He spread and planted his feet sumo wrestler–style on the steel beams that supported the engines, praying that he would not slip and plunge through the room’s grated floor. Then he reached inside himself for every muscle he had ever used, arm and stomach and neck muscles he’d first summoned as an eight-year-old boy gaffing forty-pound stripers from his father’s fishing boat. He lifted the trunk six inches off the ground. The metal ground against the steel engine blocks against which it had slept for a half century.

“Don’t fall backward,” Kohler told the trunk. “Don’t bury me here.”

He lifted harder. The trunk rose farther off the floor, and for a moment Kohler held it aloft, a lumberjack of the deep balancing a steel redwood. The floor creaked. His arms burned. He stepped backward. Now, able to glimpse himself clear of the front of the engines, he released the trunk, allowing it to plummet downward. As it fell, Kohler thrust the trunk away from him. It hit the floor and crashed to the left, raising storms of dark brown, oily silt and sounding thunder off the U-boat’s steel walls. Kohler held his breath and looked down. He was not trapped. He was not dead. He could see nothing, but he knew he had made the biggest, most important move of his career. He had moved the unmovable. The obstruction to the electric motor room had been felled.

Kohler would have liked nothing more than to swim between the diesel engines and into the electric motor room. But he was winded, and the visibility had dropped to zero. He and Chatterton would have to wait until the day’s second dive to move in. Kohler inched out of the submarine. On his way up the anchor line, he thought to himself, “This is the day.”

Topside, Kohler told Chatterton the story. Chatterton squinted and cocked his head.

“You did what?”

“I muscled it. It’s moved. We’re in.”

“We brought a three-ton chain fall to do that work. And you muscled it?”

“I felt it could be done. I had to make my move.”

Chatterton shook his head.

“You’ve got a set of balls on you, Richie,” Chatterton said. “Goddamn, that was dangerous. Goddamn, that’s balls.”

“Maybe it’s better if we don’t analyze exactly how dangerous it was,” Kohler said, following Chatterton into the salon. “Here’s the important thing: three hours from now and we’re into the electric motor room.”

Around noon, Chatterton and Kohler reentered the ocean carrying lift bags and goody bags for the spare-parts boxes they hoped to recover. A minute later they were inside the
U-Who.
The silt had cleared inside the diesel motor room, leaving a clear view aft. The divers could scarcely believe what they saw. Just a few feet past the escape trunk Kohler had moved lay another obstruction, this one a huge, crescent-shaped steel fuel tank that had once been bolted into the overhead pressure hull. Chatterton and Kohler stared at the tank, which had obviously fallen during the U-boat’s demise. They swam closer and inspected it. The tank appeared to be about twelve feet long and very heavy. It lay wedged diagonally between the diesel engines, with just a whisper of space between its top and the room’s ceiling, an even more severe obstruction than the escape trunk Kohler had just moved. The divers knew right away that even a three-ton chain fall could not move this mass. They looked at each other but did not have the energy to shake their heads. The net profit of Kohler’s triumph had been an extra four feet of access into the diesel motor room. The electric motor room—the room they needed—was still a million miles away.

The divers turned around and swam back to the anchor line. Their heads hung during their decompression ascents. On board the dive boat, they undressed in silence. Every so often, one of them muttered an obscenity.

For an hour during the ride back to Brielle, neither man said a word. They just sat on a large cooler and watched the dive site disappear. Then, as the sun set over the horizon, Chatterton turned to Kohler.

“I have a plan,” he said.

“I’m listening,” Kohler answered.

For the next five minutes, Chatterton described a vision, a three-dimensional epiphany for moving past the fallen fuel tank and into the electric motor room. After he finished, Kohler looked him in the eye.

“You’ll die,” Kohler said.

“I’m going to do it,” Chatterton said.

“You’ll die for sure.”

“I’m going to do it. But I can’t do it without you.”

“I won’t be part of that. I won’t watch you die.”

“I’m going to do it,” Chatterton said. “This is our last chance, Richie. More than I know anything, I know I’m going to do it. And I need you with me.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CIRCLE-RUNNER

Kristiansand, Norway, December 4, 1944

A
WEEK AND A HALF
after leaving Germany, Commander Neuerburg and
U-869
arrived in the southern Norwegian port town of Kristiansand, where they took on fuel and supplies. Brimming with provisions, the U-boat could now wage war anywhere in the Atlantic. Neuerburg’s first assignment was to crawl northward along the Norwegian coast, then break into the open Atlantic via the Iceland-Faeroes gap. He would receive further orders—war orders—when the submarine reached the open seas. Radio traffic between the U-boat and Control would be kept to a minimum; by this time in the war, even the slightest chatter from a U-boat could be intercepted by the Allies.

On December 8, the U-boat’s diesels belched to life and it pushed away from the Norwegian U-boat base. For three weeks, it crawled along Norway’s coast and then onward into the Atlantic, submerged virtually nonstop to avoid Allied air patrols and ships. On December 29, Control radioed its next order.
U-869
was to head for naval grid CA 53, the center of which was about 110 miles southeast of New York. Neuerburg had been issued perhaps the most prestigious assignment a U-boat could receive:
U-869
had been sent to wage war against America.

The U-boat pushed westward. Protocol required Neuerburg to radio a brief passage report to Control once
U-869
broke into the open Atlantic. Control, which had been plotting
U-869
’s presumed progress, had expected such a report no later than December 29. None was received. On December 30, Control requested a passage report. Again, it received none. Control became “concerned,” its officers reported in the diary, though they did not yet take the silence to mean that
U-869
had been lost. On January 1, 1945, Control requested a position report from
U-869,
this time in strong language. It received no reply. It repeated its requests. Still it heard nothing from the submarine. Now Control was worried.

Control did not know why it had not heard from
U-869.
Four possible explanations must have been considered. The first was that Neuerburg simply refused to use his radio for fear of Allied detection. That, however, must have seemed unlikely, as commanders would have been loath to ignore such urgent requests from Control. The second was that
U-869
’s radio equipment was malfunctioning, making reception and/or transmission impossible. The third was that atmospheric problems—known to be an issue in that area of the Atlantic—were wreaking havoc with the radios. The fourth was that the boat was no more.

For the next several days, and probably using increasingly urgent terms, Control demanded position reports from
U-869.
On January 3, Control noted its “considerable anxiety” at
U-869
’s silence. At around the same time, Allied intelligence studied its radio intercepts and made this assessment: “A U/Boat (
U-869
) now estimated in the central North Atlantic has been ordered to head for a point about 70 miles southeast of the New York approaches.”

By January 6, Control was likely mourning for
U-869.
In almost every case in which a U-boat was five days late in reporting to Control, that U-boat was lost. Still, Control beseeched
U-869
to answer. That day, in a broadcast that must have seemed a miracle inside Control,
U-869
radioed her position. Even as Control officials celebrated they scratched their heads.
U-869
was in naval grid AK 63, about six hundred miles southwest of Iceland. The U-boat, they wrote in their diary, “should have been considerably further southwest.” It was then that Control likely realized that Neuerburg had made a big and bold decision, one with which they probably were not pleased. Rather than use the Iceland-Faeroes gap—the most direct route from Norway into the open Atlantic—he had diverted much farther north, making a loop over Iceland before heading southwestward through the Denmark Strait. There could be no doubt as to why Neuerburg had spent the extra days and fuel going the long way: the Denmark Strait was less heavily patrolled by Allied airplanes and ships. Though a commander was allowed such discretion, Control never liked the move; every extra day spent in transit was an extra day spent away from the war. Neuerburg’s crew, on the other hand, was likely grateful to their commanding officer. He had made his first major war move, and it had been in the name of protecting his men. What no one knew—not Neuerburg, his crew, or Control—was that Allied code breakers had intercepted their broadcast and knew where they were.

Neuerburg’s decision to use the circuitous Denmark Strait sent Control strategists scrambling. They likely determined that he must have burned at least five extra days’ fuel going the long way, meaning that it would cost the boat one hundred days to stay perhaps fourteen days off New York, an unacceptable ratio. Control requested a fuel-status report. Again, it received no reply from
U-869
“in spite of continuous queries.” As Neuerburg had showed himself willing to use the radio, and as the radios appeared at least sometimes to be working, Control probably blamed atmospheric conditions for the lack of communication from
U-869.
Unwilling to wait any longer for a fuel-status report, Control radioed a new order to Neuerburg:
U-869
was to change course and head to Gibraltar, to patrol the African coast. By rerouting the submarine away from New York and to this closer operating area, Control could expect a longer patrol from
U-869.

Control would not have expected
U-869
to acknowledge receipt of this new order—it would have been too dangerous for Neuerburg to use his radio simply to confirm the directive. Control therefore presumed Neuerburg to have received the order and began plotting
U-869
to Gibraltar, calculating that the submarine should arrive there around February 1. Had Neuerburg received the order, it is certain that he would have followed it—while a commander had discretion in choosing his routes, he had no such option when receiving a direct order. Whether because of equipment or atmospheric problems, it is virtually certain that
U-869
never received the new order to Gibraltar. Neuerburg kept heading for New York.

The Allies, however, were interrupting almost everything. On January 17, their intelligence wrote, “The U/Boat heading for the New York approaches,
U-869
(Neuerburg), is presently estimated about 180 miles SSE of Flemish Cap. . . . She is expected to arrive in the New York area at the beginning of February.”

On January 25, American intelligence pegged the situation: “One U/Boat may be south of Newfoundland heading for New York approaches, although her location is uncertain due to a mix up in orders and Control assumes she is heading for Gibraltar.”

Then, in the chillingly matter-of-fact language of war, American intelligence announced its plans for
U-869:
“The
CORE
will begin sweeping for this U/Boat shortly prior to proceeding against the U/Boats reporting weather in the North Atlantic.”

The Americans would be sending a hunter-killer group to destroy
U-869.
They knew where the submarine was going.

All the while, Neuerburg and his crew continued their long push toward New York. U-boats went largely unmolested during travel in the open Atlantic—hunter-killer groups often waited for them to arrive in shallower waters closer to shore, where the U-boats could less easily run and hide. To pass the time, perhaps the crewmen organized a checkers tournament or a limerick contest or a lying competition, as had occurred on other U-boat patrols; a man could lose a day’s rations for overconfidence in such matters. Or perhaps they adopted a mascot—one U-boat had selected a fly for this purpose, which they named Emma and whose daily routines they followed with keen interest.

U-869
likely approached American coastal waters in early February. From that point forward, Neuerburg certainly would have kept the submarine submerged full-time, using the snorkel for the fresh-air intake necessary to run the diesel engines underwater. By now, the American hunter-killer group had begun its search for
U-869.
Neuerburg, who knew well the Allies’ ability to track and stalk a U-boat, must have navigated with extreme stealth—the hunter-killer group found only fathoms of empty sea.

Now
U-869
was in American waters and bearing down on the New York approaches. Neuerburg’s targets would be whatever enemy vessels he could find. The crew’s nerves must have been stretched taut against their knowledge of the odds against them. Perhaps a day passed, perhaps several days. Then, through the crosshairs of the U-boat’s periscope, Neuerburg must have spotted an enemy ship. At that point, he would have ordered his men to their battle stations. The men would have remained silent. From this point forward, every order would have been whispered.

As
U-869
crept forward at a speed of perhaps two knots, the crew likely heard the sound of water outside the submarine, the hum of the electric engines, and perhaps even the faint revolutions of the enemy target’s propellers in the distance. All else would have been quiet. Now
U-869
was ready to attack. At this moment, Neuerburg, Brandt, and the rest of the crew knew certain things. They knew that the war was being lost. They knew U-boats were not returning home. They knew that it was up to Neuerburg, not Control, to decide when
U-869
’s patrol had concluded.

No one knows what Neuerburg thought then. He kept the periscope raised. The men remained at their battle stations. Seconds later, Neuerburg whispered this kind of order inside the steel, cigar-shaped hull of
U-869:

“Tube one ready—fire.”