Shadow Divers

by Robert Kurson

  The divers looked first at navy files for the sinking of the U-857 off Boston, which gave this account: While patrolling Cape Cod on April 5, 1945, U-857 fired a torpedo at the American tanker Atlantic States, wounding but not sinking her. American warships were dispatched to the area to hunt and kill U-857. Two days later, one of those warships, the destroyer USS Gustafson, obtained a sonar contact on an underwater object near Boston. It fired several Hedgehog bombs into the ocean toward the contact. Crewmen reported hearing an explosion shortly thereafter, and then smelling oil.

  And that was it. No evidence of a U-boat had floated to the surface. No blobs of oil had been spotted on the surface. The divers could not believe what they read next. Navy assessors who analyzed the Gustafson’s attack had written the following conclusion:

  It is considered that although a submarine, known to have been in this area, may have been lost, it was not lost as a result of this attack. It is therefore recommended that this incident be assessed “E”—probably slightly damaged.

  “Wait a minute,” Kohler said. “The grade on this attack report says B—probably sunk.”

  “Yeah, but look here,” Chatterton said, pointing to the report. “The original grade of ‘E’ is crossed out. Someone changed it to a ‘B.’”

  The divers knew what the alteration meant.

  “Son of a bitch,” Kohler said. “The postwar assessors upgraded this report!”

  Chatterton and Kohler had only recently learned about the postwar assessors. As navy investigators, it was the assessors’ task after the war to make a final report on the fate of all U-boats. In most cases the evidence was clear-cut and the assessors’ job simple. In rarer instances, when a U-boat could not be accounted for, the assessors stretched for an explanation—they were loath to leave question marks in the history books.

  “That must have been what happened here,” Chatterton said. “The Gustafson never sank U-857. The U-boat survived the Hedgehog attack, continued past Boston, then sank somewhere else. After the war, the assessors needed an explanation for the loss of U-857. So they looked at this really dubious attack by the Gustafson and said, ‘Let’s upgrade it from an “E” to a “B.”’ They didn’t care that the original navy assessors knew the Gustafson hadn’t sunk a submarine. They just wanted U-857 accounted for so they could move on with their business.”

  For a moment the divers could only shake their heads.

  “Well, if the Gustafson didn’t sink U-857 off Boston,” Kohler finally asked, “what happened to that submarine?”

  “We gotta figure that out for ourselves,” Chatterton said.

  The divers checked various German documents. An hour later they had their answer.

  According to German diaries, U-857 had been ordered to proceed south along the American East Coast. She had last attacked a ship off Cape Cod. That meant New York and New Jersey lay two hundred miles away—to the south.

  Neither Chatterton nor Kohler could move. Here was a U-boat that fit every criterion they had established, had possibly been docked beside Horenburg’s sub, had likely survived the Gustafson, and was believed by the Germans to be on her way toward New Jersey.

  “It’s gotta be U-857,” Chatterton said.

  “I think we’ve got our U-boat,” Kohler said.

  The divers, however, still had to inspect the box of files for U-879. Again, they found history mauled.

  Over the last half century, various assessors had ascribed three fates to U-879: they first pronounced her lost without a trace; then sunk off Halifax in Canadian waters; then sunk off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. As the divers studied further, they recognized that the current assessment by German naval historian Axel Niestlé—that U-879 had been sunk off Cape Hatteras—was correct. But the lesson was stark and by now familiar: written history was fallible. Sloppy and erroneous assessments had been rushed into the official record, only to be presumed accurate by historians, who then published elegant reference works echoing the mistakes. Unless a person was willing, as Chatterton and Kohler were, to ditch work and sneak off to Washington, chisel away at mountains of opaque original documents, sleep in fleabag motels, eat street-vendor hot dogs, and run outside every two hours to shovel quarters into a parking meter, he would presume the history books to be correct. As they left Washington for New Jersey that night, Chatterton and Kohler celebrated their detective work—original research that virtually proved that the U-Who was U-857. Along the way, each marveled at how easy it was to get an incomplete picture of the world if one relied solely on experts, and how important it would be to further rely on oneself.

  Now armed with abundant evidence that their wreck was U-857, Chatterton and Kohler determined to use the rest of the 1992–93 off-season to complete the proof.

  For his part, Chatterton placed a classified ad in Proceedings magazine, a publication of the U.S. Naval Institute, seeking information on the sinking of U-857 by the USS Gustafson. Several Gustafson crewmen, now in their seventies, replied to the ad. Chatterton interviewed them about the day they attacked the U-boat off Boston. While the accomplishment had been a source of lifelong pride, none could offer any more evidence of the sinking today than they had in 1945. They had fired Hedgehogs and smelled oil. And that was it.

  Chatterton did not have the heart to inform these men, soldiers who had gone to hunt U-boats in defense of America, that the sinking of which they had been proud for so long had likely never happened.

  During one interview, a crewman invited Chatterton to their upcoming “Greasy Gus” reunion. He asked Chatterton to speak about his research. As Chatterton considered the invitation, he was struck by the oddest thought. He had run to fallen men in Vietnam bulletstorms. He had swum under a thousand pounds of dangling steel inside a crushed submarine. But contemplating speaking before these elderly men at their celebration, he found himself afraid. He felt sure that he could not attend their reunion and tell these men that the story they had told their grandchildren about sinking the U-boat was wrong, that history had been mistaken, that the Greasy Gus had missed. Chatterton thanked the crewman for the invitation but told him he would be unable to attend.

  For his part, Kohler set out in search of the grandmaster of U-boat knowledge. For decades, Robert Coppock had been caretaker to Britain’s U-boat records—including captured German records—and he still worked for the Ministry of Defence in London. According to an archivist Kohler had met, no one had a more comprehensive understanding of U-boat records than did Coppock. And no one had deeper connections into the sometimes murky world of U-boat historians, thinkers, and theorists.

  “He still works his job?” Kohler asked.

  “Since forever,” the archivist replied.

  Kohler called London the next day.

  An English-accented woman speaking over pillows of static answered the telephone.

  “Scotland Yard. Can I help you?”

  Kohler believed he had misdialed, but did not dare hang up; the idea of being connected to the legendary crime-fighting headquarters was too thrilling to abandon. For a moment he just listened to the static, imagining men scurrying in deerstalker hats crying, “It’s murder!”

  “This is Scotland Yard. Is anyone on the line?”

  Kohler finally said, “I must have the wrong number. I was trying to reach Mr. Robert Coppock at the Ministry of Defence.”

  “One moment and I’ll connect you to Mr. Coppock,” the woman said.

  Kohler was beside himself waiting for Coppock. This was the first time he had ever spoken to anyone with an English accent. Across the Atlantic, in a cavernous office lined with floor-to-ceiling gray filing cabinets, institutional furniture, and frosted windows, the silver-haired Coppock settled in among his U-boat history and took the phone. Kohler introduced himself.

  “Ah, yes, the diver from New Jersey,” Coppock said. “I know of you, sir. I have been following your adventure with great interest. I find the mystery most intriguing.”

  Coppock asked detailed questions of
Kohler—about the divers’ research, the U-Who, the contacts they had made, about Horenburg. Kohler answered them all, flattered that Coppock spoke to him as a colleague rather than as a guy from Brooklyn late to replace a window at a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, which he was. When Coppock asked if the divers had fashioned any theories, Kohler laid out the case for U-857.

  Coppock listened intently, then agreed that Kohler had made a persuasive argument for U-857 as the New Jersey wreck. He asked if Kohler would like him to consult his records and sources and look into the matter further.

  Kohler nearly blurted, “Hell yeah!” Instead, he managed, “Yes, sir, I’d be grateful for that kind of help. Thank you very much.”

  As he sped to fix the window at KFC, Kohler called Chatterton from his truck.

  “John, I talked to Coppock. The guy must be seventy-five years old but he’s totally on the ball. And he works at friggin’ Scotland Yard!”

  “What’d he say?” Chatterton asked. “You’re killing me here—”

  “I laid out the case for U-857. He said it sounded ‘persuasive.’ He really liked it. He’s going to look into it on his end.”

  “Beautiful,” Chatterton said. “What an amazing adventure we’re on.”

  “That’s what it is,” Kohler said. “An amazing adventure.”

  Shortly after Kohler spoke to Coppock, the divers contacted Horst Bredow and Charlie Grutzemacher in Germany and made the case for U-857. Each of the archivists absorbed the evidence, pulled out his own records, asked a few questions, then agreed—the U-Who almost certainly was U-857. Kohler redialed Scotland Yard (really Great Scotland Yard, a different place from the fabled police station) to follow up with Coppock. This conversation was brief. Coppock told Kohler that he had consulted records and considered further the divers’ theory. As before, he believed it likely that the divers had discovered U-857.

  As the early months of 1993 wore on, Chatterton and Kohler continued to meet for steaks or pizza. They no longer speculated, however, about the U-Who’s identity; that question was settled. Instead, they began to imagine how the U-boat had met its end. By now, they had conferred with several munitions experts. All evidence pointed in a single direction: the U-boat had been destroyed by a massive explosion, the kind most likely caused by a torpedo.

  But whose torpedo? If an Allied sub had fired on the U-boat, there would have been a record of the incident. If another U-boat had fired and inadvertently hit the sub, that too would have been recorded. Could one of the U-boat’s own torpedos have exploded accidentally from within? Impossible, as the blast damage showed a strike from outside the sub. That seemed to leave a single explanation. The divers had read about occasions in which a torpedo’s steering system malfunctioned, causing the weapon to reverse direction in the water and head back toward its own submarine. Those derelict torpedoes were called “circle-runners” and had turned on several of their own U-boats.

  “Imagine you’re Rudolf Premauer, commander of U-857,” Kohler said to Chatterton one night at Scotty’s. “You’ve made it through icy waters and past swarms of Allied aircraft all the way from Norway to the United States. You’ve narrowly escaped a hunter-killer group off Boston and now you’re in New Jersey, a few miles from Manhattan. You spot a target steaming in the distance. You order your men to their battle stations, climb into the conning tower, and raise the attack periscope. You’ve got your target locked. You give the order—‘Fire torpedo!’ The torpedo flies out the tube. Everyone’s silent and hopeful, waiting for an explosion in the distance. Nothing happens. Then, from the sound room, the radioman says, ‘Circle-runner! We have a circle-runner! Our torpedo is bearing down on us!’ Premauer orders the sub to crash-dive; it’s their only hope. Now it’s a race, the U-boat against her own torpedo, and there’s only one question: Can the U-boat submerge before the torpedo strikes? The men are doing everything humanly possible to drop that boat. Do they have twenty seconds? Five seconds? They don’t know. They give it everything they’ve got. Too late. The torpedo hits. Seven hundred pounds of TNT. It’s too goddamned late.”

  “And that explains why there’s no incident report from the area,” Chatterton said. “It’s probably night. It’s winter. When the torpedo hits the U-boat, no one on the target vessel is going to hear it because it occurs underwater, and even if they do hear a muffled explosion, hell, it’s wartime—muffled explosions are everywhere. The U-boat sinks and no one has a clue she went down.”

  For a minute, each diver poked at his food but said nothing.

  “Imagine the feeling that radio guy has the moment he realizes the torpedo’s coming back,” Kohler said.

  “Imagine the certainty that either your life will end violently in a few seconds or the circle-runner’s going to miss,” Chatterton said. “There’s no middle ground. You know it’s one or the other.”

  The next morning, Chatterton searched through the piles of crew lists he had copied at Bredow’s archive in Germany. On the bottom was that of U-857. He scanned the roster, fifty-nine men with names like Dienst and Kausler, Löfgren and Wulff. Some of these men were nineteen or twenty years old. The senior radioman was Erich Krahe, born on March 14, 1917. If a circle-runner torpedo had killed this U-boat, perhaps he had been the first to realize it was coming. Kohler searched his books for photographs of twenty-five-year-old commander Premauer. Chatterton and Kohler still had two months before the start of the 1993 dive season, time enough to learn about the last year of the U-boat war, the year that had delivered the men they had discovered.

  By 1993, Kohler had built a collection of U-boat books worthy of a university library. Now he spread those books on his living room floor like a kid’s baseball-card collection and divided them in half. He would lend Chatterton one pile for study and keep the other for himself. Between them, they held in their hands the story of the men who’d waged the final campaign of the U-boat war, the men who lay dead in their wreck.

  Chatterton and Kohler settled into their reading chairs at home and began with page one: primitive submarines had existed during the American Revolution. Each fidgeted with page two: the torpedo was invented by an English engineer in 1866. Neither waited around for page three. The divers needed to know what had happened to their men. They flipped their books to the final chapters. They found hundreds of pages soaked in blood.

  By the war’s end, more than thirty thousand U-boat men out of a force of about fifty-five thousand had been killed—a death rate of almost 55 percent. No branch of a modern nation’s armed forces had ever sustained such casualties and kept fighting. The U-boats had kept fighting. But it was worse than that. The late-war U-boat man, it turned out, had had it perhaps deadliest of all.

  A U-boat sent to war in early 1945—as U-857 had been—stood only a 50 percent chance of returning from its patrol. A crewman’s statistical life expectancy in that period was barely sixty days. Those ordered to American or Canadian waters almost never came back. Over the years, the divers had read dozens of war books, but none had affected them as deeply as the final pages of these volumes. As Chatterton and Kohler pored over the body counts, they found themselves hoping for a better ending, not for the Nazis or for Germany but maybe for a crewman or two, for one of these kids whose shoes were still lined up neatly on the mangled U-Who, and when the divers could not find hope for the late-war U-boat man, they called each other and agreed that they had never turned a book’s pages like this because they’d never before felt as if they had been reading about men they knew.

  By nearly every account, the late-war U-boat man had not just fought through the final hours of World War II but had done so nobly and bravely, all the while knowing the grim odds against his survival. The Allies had predicted mutinies aboard these doomed U-boats. That never happened. The Allies had expected surrender from these doomed U-boats. That never happened, either. In January 1945, even as the Allies hunted and killed U-boats with unflinching regularity, Churchill summoned top military commanders and warned them of the “much mo
re offensive spirit” displayed by U-boats at sea. It was this idea—that the beaten U-boat man was doing more than just trying to survive—that kept Chatterton and Kohler reading.

  In October 1940, at the peak of what German submariners called the “Happy Time,” U-boats sank sixty-six ships while losing only one of their own. The U-boats enjoyed a second “Happy Time” in early 1942 with Operation Drumbeat, a surprise attack on American ships off the U.S. East Coast. In that offensive, U-boats pushed up against American shores so closely that crewmen could smell the forest from their decks, watch automobiles drive the parkways, and tune in American radio stations playing the jazz so many of them loved. The first weeks of Drumbeat were a slaughter as U-boats torpedoed unprotected ships. Body parts, oil, and wreckage washed up along the eastern seaboard. Five months later, just a few U-boats had sunk nearly six hundred ships in American waters at a cost of just six of their own, the worst defeat ever suffered by the U.S. Navy. In Germany, U-boats were welcomed back to harbor by bands, flowers, and lovely ladies. Churchill wrote, “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.” It was no longer safe to be Goliath in a world where David could turn invisible.

  The Americans, however, did not remain vulnerable for long. The navy began running convoys, an ancient maritime strategy whereby armed escort vessels protected groups of boats sailing together. Now when a U-boat fired on an Allied ship, the convoy escorts would be there to spot, chase, and kill it. As convoys increased, sinkings by U-boats dropped to near nothing.

  Scientists joined the war effort from U.S. laboratories and universities. One of their most potent weapons was radar. Even in total darkness or a violent storm, radar-equipped airplanes and ships could detect a surfaced submarine at great distances. While submarines had long enjoyed the luxury of operating primarily on the surface, where subs moved considerably faster than they could while submerged, they suddenly found themselves pounced upon by Allied aircraft that seemed to appear in the sky as if by magic. For a time, Karl Dönitz, the commander in chief of the U-boat force, did not fully appreciate the radar threat. His submariners continued to die. Even when Germany finally grasped the situation’s gravity, the U-boats could do little but submerge and stay underwater, which protected them from radar but made them too slow to catch or evade enemies.