“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.
As Chatterton continued to field the rush of phone calls and letters, he got word of a black plan. Bielenda had secured the exact location of the U-boat wreck site. He was planning to hit the wreck any day. Worst of all, the numbers were said to have come from Nagle.
The plan, as Chatterton heard it, was this: Bielenda had organized a dedicated mission to the wreck site to recover Feldman’s body. Another captain had offered his boat and fuel for the trip; Bielenda was to supply the divers, who would search the area for the corpse. Chatterton doubted that Bielenda or the others would make even a perfunctory search for the body; it had been a month since the accident, the tides had been strong, and Feldman had never been inside the wreck in the first place. He called Nagle at home. He heard ice clinking in a glass.
“Ah shit, John. I gave up the numbers,” Nagle admitted.
The way Nagle explained it, he had received a late-night phone call from another dive boat captain and longtime friend. Nagle had been drinking. The captain had announced that he had three sets of numbers and knew one of them to be the U-boat’s location. Nagle listened as the captain recited the numbers. The captain was right—one of the sets was correct. Nagle suspected, even in his drunken haze, that Bielenda had wrung the general location from his Coast Guard cronies, then had asked this captain to check his voluminous book of numbers for anything close. Now the captain, who was supposed to be Nagle’s friend, was leaning on him to reveal the exact location. Ordinarily, Nagle would have chewed off the captain’s head for the attempt. But in his stupor, still guilty over Feldman’s death and the Seeker’s inability to bring the diver home, Nagle mumbled something about location number two “possibly” being correct.
“I knew I was fucked as soon as I hung up,” he told Chatterton.
Shortly after Chatterton spoke to Nagle, his own phone rang. Bielenda was calling. He told Chatterton that he had organized a mission to recover Feldman’s body. He invited Chatterton to come along.
Chatterton’s face flushed. For a moment he entertained the idea of accepting the invitation, certain that Bielenda would skip the rescue aspect of the mission and allow the divers to go straight into the U-boat for artifacts. He demanded to know Bielenda’s true intentions. Bielenda insisted that the mission was dedicated to recovering Feldman’s body. Chatterton pressed, asking where the Wahoo captain intended to look for the body. Bielenda told him that he would search around the wreck. This was too much for Chatterton, who believed that Bielenda’s only intention was to dive the U-boat. He called Bielenda back and told him what he thought of the plan. Bielenda protested, but Chatterton would hear none of it. Spewing out a stew of expletives, Chatterton told Bielenda he wanted nothing to do with the so-called recovery mission and hung up.
A few days later, Bielenda and several divers made the trip. Some of the divers did, in fact, make a good-faith search for Feldman. Others just dove the wreck. No one saw a corpse. According to one of the divers on the trip, many went home that night with an overriding impression: This wreck is lunatic dangerous. This wreck is going to eat people.
Word of the recovery mission reached Chatterton and Kohler a day later. They had a single question for their sources: Did anyone on the trip identify the U-boat? The answer was that no one had come close. Neither Chatterton nor Kohler was surprised. But each of them suspected that Bielenda would be coming back. So long as Nagle and the Seeker remained in the spotlight, they believed, the pirate flag of Bielenda’s intention would fly at full mast.
On a Monday in early November, just after the recovery mission, the skies bathed New Jersey in sunlight. The sight rejuvenated Nagle, and he called Chatterton.
“We can make it to the U-boat one more time,” Nagle said. “We can go Wednesday. We can identify this thing Wednesday. Are you in or out?”
“Have I ever been out?” Chatterton asked.
Nagle and Chatterton made phone calls. The trip was planned for November 6, 1991. Since Feldman’s death, some of the divers from the discovery trip had decided not to tempt the U-boat again. Everyone else was in. Two empty bunks remained for Wednesday. Nagle called some legends.
Tom Packer and Steve Gatto were perhaps the most formidable deep-wreck diving team on the eastern seaboard. In a sport in which the buddy system was often shunned for its potential dangers, Packer and Gatto seemed to exist as a single organism, intuiting the other’s moves and needs in ways usually reserved for identical twins. Many in the wreck-diving community referred to the team as “Packo-Gacko” for the unity with which they negotiated their dives. Packer had been part of Nagle’s team when that crew took the bell off the Doria. Gatto had recovered the Doria’s helm a few years later. They rarely gave up on a wreck without getting what they had come for. They told Nagle they were coming to identify the U-boat.
The divers gathered on the Seeker for a head count near midnight. Again, Kohler had arrived decked out in his gang colors—denim jacket, skull-and-crossbones patch, “Atlantic Wreck Divers” logo. Chatterton shook his head at the sight. Kohler
shot back his own look, one that said, “You got a fuckin’ problem?” Neither spoke a word. Memories of Feldman still arched over the Seeker. Each diver answered “Yeah” or “Yo” when his name was called, then made his way to the salon without much of the usual carousing and joking.
Lying in their bunks on opposite ends of the salon, Chatterton and Kohler mentally rehearsed their dive plans. Chatterton would use his first dive for two purposes. First, he would follow the advice of Harry Cooper of the Sharkhunters club and inspect the submarine for saddle tanks, the externally affixed compartments primarily used for fuel in Type VII U-boats, the most common of the German fleet. If he had time, he would also look to see if the submarine contained two stern torpedo tubes, the narrow cylinders by which the fired weapon left the boat. Cooper had suggested that a U-boat so configured was likely one of the larger Type IX models, while the Type VIIs contained just a single stern torpedo tube.
For his part, Kohler had the eagle and swastika in his crosshairs. Every day for six weeks he had imagined recovering a Nazi dish of his own, of reaching into a mystery and pulling out a witness to a time when the world could have gone either way. He would not tolerate another day without ownership of such history. He was going straight for the dishes.
Chatterton dressed early the next morning. He, Packer, and Gatto would set the hook, then dive the wreck first. They would enjoy pristine visibility but would create silt and sediment clouds for subsequent divers, making artifact recovery more difficult. Kohler got wind of the plan. He stormed the stairs to the wheelhouse, where Chatterton was shooting the breeze with Nagle.
“Bill, what the hell is going on with this guy?” Kohler asked, pointing to Chatterton.
“What’s wrong, Richie?” Nagle asked.
“He’s gonna fuck the viz for me. I’m going forward for dishes. He went first last time. Let me go first today.”
Shadow Divers Page 18
