Executive Times
		2005 Book Reviews
		Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson
		Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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	Compelling Robert Kurson captures the energy, compulsion, dedication, and courage of deep sea divers in his book, Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Discovered Hitler’s Lost Sub. Thanks to Kurson’s persistence, we learn about diving, the divers, the wrecks, and the complicated relationships among the various characters. Kurson spent countless hours interviewing wreck divers John Chatterton and Rich Kohler and over the course of 400 pages, tells their story of finding the wreck of a U-boat and their struggle to find out its identity. Kurson’s research provides appropriate technical and historical information, but it’s his skill as a journalist that leads him to tell an engaging story about remarkable people. Here’s an excerpt, from Chapter 3, “A Shape of Power,” pp. 54-59: Between 1939 and 1945, Germany assembled a force of 1,167 U-boats. Each one, for its ability to stalk enemies invisibly, became the most perfect and terrible reflection of man’s first fear—that death lurks silently and everywhere, always. Some U-boats crept with impunity to within a few miles of American shores, close enough to tune in jazz radio stations and watch automobile headlights through their periscopes. In one month in 1940, U-boats sank 66 ships while losing only one of their own. Bodies of men killed aboard ships sunk by U-boats washed up on American shores during World War II. The sight was gruesome. The implication—that the killers could be anywhere but could not be seen or heard—was magnitudes worse. Of those 1,167 U-boats, 757 were either sunk, captured, bombed in home ports or foreign bases, or fell from accident or collision, Of the 859 U-boats that left base for frontline patrol, 648 were sunk or captured while operating at sea, a loss rate of more than 75 percent. Some were sunk by enemy vessels and aircraft that could not confirm the kills, others by mines, still others by mechanical or human failure. Because most U-boats died beneath the water’s surface, as many as 65 disappeared without explanation. In worlds of unsearchable water; U-boats made the perfect unfindable graves. This day, as the divers began to surface and board the Seeker, they rushed out of their gear and into debate. Each of them was giddy to have discovered a virgin submarine. Each of them already had a theory It could be U-550, a U-boat supposedly sunk in the far North Atlantic but never recovered. It could not be the American S-5; numerous divers had searched for and researched that sub for years and were certain it lay near Maryland. The crew could have escaped—a hatch looked to be open, though it was hard to tell. Something violent might have happened to the submarine—no one had seen the conning tower, the distinctively shaped observation post and entryway atop submarines that houses the periscopes and serves as the commander’s battle station. A refrain began to build: Where the hell was the conning tower? Then, Yurga. He had stopped, by chance, at a naval bookstore the day before to pick up some light reading for the trip. His choice: The U-boat: The Evolution and Technical History of German Submarines. When he produced the book after surfacing, the divers crowded over his shoulder to compare their memories to the book’s detailed schematic diagrams. Chatterton recognized the cylindrical bottles he had seen on the wreck. Yurga saw the flooding vents. This thing had to be German. This thing had to be a U-boat. As the divers continued their discussion and book study, Chatterton and Nagle drifted from the group and climbed into the wheelhouse. The crew pulled the anchor. Nagle set a course back for Brielle, fired the diesels, and pulled away from the site. Then he and Chatterton began a private discussion. This was a historic dive, they agreed, but discovery was only half the job. The other half, the everything half, lay in identification. Both men scoffed at divers who guessed at the identity of wrecks they had found, who didn’t understand the slovenliness of saying, “Well, we found a piece of china with a Danish stamp, therefore the wreck is Danish.” Were Nagle and Chatterton simply to announce that they had found a submarine, what would that really tell anyone? But to announce with certainty the identity of the submarine you discovered, to give the nameless a name—that is when a man writes history. To Nagle, there were also more worldly reasons for making the identification. Even in his broken-down physical state, the captain retained his appetite for glory. Identifying this submarine would guarantee his legacy as a dive legend and extend his reputation to the outside world, a place that didn’t know from the USS San Diego or even the Andrea Doria but always paid attention to the word U-boat. A find like this would make him famous. A positive identification would mean customers. In those rare instances when a dive charter captain discovered a shipwreck, he came to own that wreck in the minds of divers; they wanted to travel with the guy who’d found the missing, to attach themselves to history through the man who had looked inside it. Nagle and Chatterton believed it would take just another dive or two to pull a positive piece of identification from the wreck: a tag, a builder’s plaque, a diary, something. Until then, there was sound reason not to utter a word of the discovery to anyone. A virgin sub— especially if it were a U-boat—would attract the attention of rival divers everywhere. Some might attempt to shadow the Seeker on its next trip in order to pick off the location. Others might guess at the general vicinity of the location, then try to sneak up on the Seeker while she was anchored with divers in the water, unable to cut away and run. Once a rival had the numbers, he could rush in and steal the Seeker’s credit and glory; there would be no shortage of pirates looking to make their bones on such a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. But in the minds of Chatterton and Nagle, the gravest threat came from a single source, and neither man had to invoke the name to know against whom they had to guard this wreck with their lives. Bielenda. In 1991, the eastern seaboard featured only a handful of big-name dive charter boats. The Seeker was one of them. Another was the Long Island—based Wahoo, a fifty-five-foot fiberglass hull captained by fifty-five-year-old Steve Bielenda, a barrel-chested, cherubic-faced man who looked to be accordioned under his two-hundred-fifteen-pound frame. A 1980 Newsday feature had dubbed Bielenda “King of the Deep,” and he seemed unwilling to allow a day to pass without reminding those who would listen—and especially those who would not—of the coronation. From the moment Nagle entered the charter business, in the mid-1980s, he and Bielenda despised each other. No one, including the captains themselves, seemed certain how the hard feelings started, but for years they lobbed accusations at each other, verbal grenades filled with reputation-piercing shrapnel: Nagle was a drunk has-been who endangered his divers and berated customers; Bielenda was a do-nothing blowhard who was just following the money, going with the established wrecks, doing nothing new. Customers often found themselves forced to choose sides; a diver became either Stevie’s boy or Billy’s boy, and pity the soul who confessed to diving with both. “You’re diving the Wahoo next week?” an incredulous Nagle would ask customers. “What kind of fucking guy are you? He’ll break your balls and steal your money You’re cattle to him.” It was equally unpretty on the Wahoo, where the crew would join Bielenda in a dressing-down of anyone foolish enough to admit enjoying the Seeker. “Hose this guy off,” Wahoo crewmen were heard to say loudly of paying customers. “He stinks like the Seeker.” After one Wahoo customer admitted to a fondness for Nagle, he found the hardcover book he had brought along at the bottom of the boat’s bilge. By 1991, the Bielenda-Nagle feud had become notorious. To Nagle’s supporters, the foundation of Bielenda’s bitterness was basic: Nagle was a threat to Bielenda’s title. Nagle drank too much, sure, but he remained an explorer, an original thinker, a researcher; a dreamer; a man of daring. And he was, as his growing customer base noted, a bit of a diving legend. To many, Bielenda seemed to do little of what made Nagle great, little of the pioneering that should have been protein to a true king of the deep. Next to Nagle, Bielenda appeared to play it safe, a guy who would always sit out bad weather at the dock while Nagle challenged angry seas. As Nagle’s reputation for exploration grew, customers drifted to his boat. Bielenda’s business could easily withstand the migration; what he seemed unable to tolerate was the affront to his throne. It wasn’t Bielenda’s words, however, that worried Nagle as the Seeker bobbed above this mystery submarine. It was his certainty that Bielenda would stop at nothing to claim-jump the wreck. He had heard stories about Bielenda—that if you crewed for him on the Wahoo, you might be expected to give him a choice of whatever artifacts you recovered; that he half-jokingly told customers that should they ever recover the Oregon’s bell while diving from the Wahoo, they had better be prepared to gift it to the King of the Deep or swim the thirteen miles back to shore with the artifact; that Bielenda had friends, and they seemed to be everywhere—in the Coast Guard, on other charters, on fishing boats, in the Eastern Dive Boat Association, of which he was president. Nagle was convinced that if word leaked of the U-boat discovery, Bielenda would head straight for it and his goals would be threefold and deadly: identify the wreck; raid the artifacts; take the credit. Chatterton figured that even if the Wahoo didn’t jump the wreck, other divers looking to make their bones would try. Secrecy, therefore, would have to be paramount. “The Seeker is booked for the next two weeks,” Nagle told Chatterton. “Let’s come back on the twenty-first, a Saturday We invite only the guys on this trip, no one else, not a goddamn other person, because these guys took a shot and that’Il be their reward. We make a pact. Nobody on the boat breathes a word to anyone. This is our submarine.” “I’m with you,” Chatterton said. Chatterton left Nagle to steer in the wheelhouse and walked down the steep white stairs to the rear deck. He called the divers together and asked them to step into the salon for a meeting. One by one, the divers gathered on bunks, on the floor, by the toaster, under the Playboy centerfolds, their hair still slicked with salt water, a few clutching pretzels or Cokes. Chatterton addressed the group in his booming, Long Island—tinged baritone. “This is a huge dive,” he said. “But finding it isn’t enough. We need to identify it. We identify it and we rewrite history. “Bill and I have made a decision. We’re coming back to the wreck on September twenty-first. It’s a private trip—only you guys are invited. No one else comes. There are a lot of great divers out there, guys who are legends, who would kill to come with us. They aren’t coming. If you decide not to attend, your bunk stays empty ‘But we gotta keep this thing secret. Word gets out that we found a submarine and we’ll have two hundred guys crawling all over our asses out here,” Chatterton paused for a moment. No one made a sound. He asked the men to swear an oath of secrecy. Every diver on the boat, he said, had to swear silence about what they had found this day If others asked what the men had done today, they were to say they dove the Parker. He told them to eliminate the word submarine from their vocabularies. He told them to say nothing to anyone until they identified the wreck. ‘This must be unanimous,” Chatterton said. “Every one of you guys needs to agree. If even a single guy in this room isn’t comfortable keeping this secret, that’s cool, that’s fine, but then the next trip becomes catch-as-catch-can, an open boat, anyone welcome. So I gotta ask you now: Is everyone in?” Deep-wreck charters are not communal events. The divers’ presence together on the boat is a matter of transportation, not teamwork; each devises his own plan, seeks his own artifacts, makes his own discoveries. Deep-wreck divers, however friendly learn to think of themselves as self-contained entities. In dangerous waters, such a mind-set enables them to survive. Now Chatterton was proposing that fourteen men become a single, silent organism. Agreements like this simply did not occur on dive charters. For a moment there was silence. Some of these men had only just met on this trip. Then, one by one, the divers went around the room and spoke. “I’m in.” “Me, too.” “I’m not saying shit.” “Count me in.” “My mouth is shut.” In a minute it was done. Every man had agreed. This was their submarine. This was their submarine alone. Whether you have an interest in WWII, diving, action stories, or in human nature, you’ll find much to enjoy on the pages of Shadow Divers. Steve Hopkins, March 23, 2005
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	ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the April 2005 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Shadow Divers.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com www.hopkinsandcompany.com