Shadow Divers: Death and Discovery at 230 Feet

During World War II, Nazi U-boats, in a campaign of terrorism using stealth, mines and torpedoes, sank more than 3,000 ships. The Allies struck back with depth charges, radar and, after breaking the Enigma code, limited and ended the U-boat threat. By the end of the war, more than 50 percent of the fleet had been destroyed and 30,000 German seamen sent to watery graves.

Robert Kurson’s Shadow Divers: The True Adventures of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II tells the story of two deep-sea divers who become unlikely friends after discovering an unidentified German U-boat and some of those seamen in deep waters off the Massachusetts coast.

John Chatterton and Richie Kohler both become obsessed with finding the identity of U-Who, a wreck most divers avoid as hazardous and off-limits. Those fears aren’t idle ones: three men die during the examination of the wreck over a six-year period beginning in 1991, and Kurson’s underwater adventure chapters resonate with the experience of diving dangerous wrecks at depths where narcosis dulls the senses and one mistake can bring on a particularly terrifying death.

The underwater scenes are great, but the real story begins after Chatterton and Kohler begin to unravel the secret of which boat U-Who actually was and why it had been destroyed where it was found. The community that deep dives old wrecks are mostly concerned with recovering artifacts, and Kohler was part of a group of divers who prided themselves on how much they could take out of ships.

Both find skulls and bones and other personal memorabilia inside the U-boat, but even after several years of diving, nothing that can prove its identity. They comb wartime documents, read books on U-boats and their activities, tour the captured U-boat on display in Chicago and sought the services of every government office and historian, especially on the German side, they can find before finally stumbling onto the answer. Shadow Divers has as much as I can ask for in a book: a great story, a great adventure and a great mystery.