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Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert Kurson
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Category: Book
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Rating:  285 reviews
Sales Rank: 6215
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 6.9 x 4.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0345482476
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5451
EAN: 9780345482471
ASIN: 0345482476
Publication Date: May 31, 2005
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Product Description
In the tradition of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm comes a true tale of riveting adventure in which two weekend scuba divers risk everything to solve a great historical mystery–and make history themselves.
For John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, deep wreck diving was more than a sport. Testing themselves against treacherous currents, braving depths that induced hallucinatory effects, navigating through wreckage as perilous as a minefield, they pushed themselves to their limits and beyond, brushing against death more than once in the rusting hulks of sunken ships.
But in the fall of 1991, not even these courageous divers were prepared for what they found 230 feet below the surface, in the frigid Atlantic waters sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey: a World War II German U-boat, its ruined interior a macabre wasteland of twisted metal, tangled wires, and human bones–all buried under decades of accumulated sediment.
No identifying marks were visible on the submarine or the few artifacts brought to the surface. No historian, expert, or government had a clue as to which U-boat the men had found. In fact, the official records all agreed that there simply could not be a sunken U-boat and crew at that location.
Over the next six years, an elite team of divers embarked on a quest to solve the mystery. Some of them would not live to see its end. Chatterton and Kohler, at first bitter rivals, would be drawn into a friendship that deepened to an almost mystical sense of brotherhood with each other and with the drowned U-boat sailors–former enemies of their country. As the men’s marriages frayed under the pressure of a shared obsession, their dives grew more daring, and each realized that he was hunting more than the identities of a lost U-boat and its nameless crew.
Author Robert Kurson’s account of this quest is at once thrilling and emotionally complex, and it is written with a vivid sense of what divers actually experience when they meet the dangers of the ocean’s underworld. The story of Shadow Divers often seems too amazing to be true, but it all happened, two hundred thirty feet down, in the deep blue sea.
From the Hardcover edition.
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CHAPTER ONE
THE BOOK OF NUMBERS
Brielle, New Jersey, September 1991
Bill Nagle's life changed the day a fisherman sat beside him in a ramshackle bar and told him about a mystery he had found lying at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Against his better judgment, that fisherman promised to tell Nagle how to find it. The men agreed to meet the next day on the rickety wooden pier that led to Nagle's boat, the Seeker, a vessel Nagle had built to chase possibility. But when the appointed time came, the fisherman was not there. Nagle paced back and forth, careful not to plunge through the pier where its wooden planks had rotted away. He had lived much of his life on the Atlantic, and he knew when worlds were about to shift. Usually, that happened before a storm or when a man's boat broke. Today, however, he knew it was going to happen when the fisherman handed him a scrap of paper, a hand-scrawled set of numbers that would lead to the sunken mystery. Nagle looked into the distance for the fisherman. He saw no one. The salt air blew against the small seashore town of Brielle, tilting the dockside boats and spraying the Atlantic into Nagle's eyes. When the mist died down he looked again. This time, he saw the fisherman approaching, a small square of paper crumpled in his hands. The fisherman looked worried. Like Nagle, he had lived on the ocean, and he also knew when a man's life was about to change.
In the whispers of approaching autumn, Brielle's rouge is blown away and what remains is the real Brielle, the locals' Brielle. This small seashore town on the central New Jersey coast is the place where the boat captains and fishermen live, where convenience store owners stay open to serve neighbors, where fifth graders can repair scallop dredges. This is where the hangers-on and wannabes and also-rans and once-greats keep believing in the sea. In Brielle, when the customers leave, the town's lines show, and they are the kind grooved by the thin dif
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| Customer Reviews: Read 280 more reviews...
 Exciting even when you know the outcome! July 11, 2004
Howard L. Dixon (Hopewell, VA United States)
71 out of 78 found this review helpful
This is one of those rare books that you know within the first dozen pages it's going to be a great read and you're going to be disappointed when it ends. Robert Kurson's tremendous research combined with a great historical narrative style results in learning not only about the lives of the living players such as Chatterton and Kohler, but the dead sailors on the submarine as well. While this is Kurson's book, you can see the extensive contribution provided by Chatterton, Kohler and others who shared the experience. This book fits beautifully with "The Last Dive", which I reviewed here a few years ago. I did learn things here, which surprised me relative to "The Last Dive". I thought they had been doing mixed-gas diving much longer on U-869 then just before the Rouse's arrival. Chapter 2 is about the dangers of wreck diving and sets the stage of what to expect throughout the remainder of the book. Kurson makes sure the reader understands this wasn't just a bunch of treasure hunters looking for some "stuff". These guys respected this dive site as sacred resting place for these German sailors and their actions (including their own research) supported that belief. And in the end, I was right...it was a disappointment to see it end.
 Gripping story of "regular guys" transformed by adventure September 3, 2004
bensmomma (Ann Arbor, Michigan)
63 out of 76 found this review helpful
....but a mite overwrought. Kurson does a remarkable job recounting the story of the men who found and identified a German submarine of the coast of New Jersey. The story transcends its gripping details to become a story of redemption: self-interested treasure-hunters in the habit of hauling mementos from shipwrecks ("Andrea Doria" china and the like) become genuinely interested in the history of the boat, genuinely frightened of the dangers in exploring it, and genuinely respectful of the German sailors who died in it.
From time-to-time Kurson lays it on pretty thick stylistically; the story is so dramatic (several divers died during the search) that it does not need melodramatic prose. There is an interesting but strangely apologetic chapter on the German sailors; Kurson seems a little too eager to prove that many of them had anti-Hitler leanings. This is surely true, but the story of the lost men, whose bones still rest on the bottom of the Atlantic, is tragic and touching regardless of their politics.
Still, if you like true adventures, you can't do better than this.
 The True Gen July 9, 2004
Robert L. Stevenson (Cumberland, ME United States)
62 out of 92 found this review helpful
I was one of the divers who searched for Steve Feldman on the recovery mission Steve Bielenda organized in 1991. In Robert Kurson's Shadow Divers you will see this recovery mission portrayed as a thinly veiled attempt to "claim jump" the U-869. This assertion is only one of Kurson's many errors of fact.
In the several hours it took to reach the U-869 aboard the Eagle's Nest that astringently cool morning, nobody talked about going inside the wreck to recover china. What we talked about, mainly, were the conditions we might encounter on the wreck and the various ways of pulling off an effective search. A month had passed since Feldman's death, and the currents over the wreck were reportedly strong. We all knew that our chances of recovering Feldman were slim. Yet, the night before, I had received a call from a friend, a former Special Forces Combat Swimmer who now specializes in search and recovery. "A drowning victim's lungs will often fill with water and weigh the body down," he had told me. "If that happened to Feldman, he'll still be near the U-boat, despite the current."
Aboard the Eagle's Nest, Bielenda assigned each dive team a quadrant to search. These quadrants lay outside the wreck. Hank Garvin and I made the first dive and set the hook, lifting it off the sand at 230 feet and shackling it to the pressure hull forward of the hole where the conning tower had stood. In the grey light we swam thirty feet beyond the starboard hull and began our partial circumnavigation of the wreck. We moved forward, not examining the U-Boat, as we were tempted to do, but keeping our vision focused on the outlying sand. We rounded the bow and searched a short section along the port hull. Then, low on air and having found no trace of Feldman, we headed up the anchor line. Back on board the Eagle's Nest, we were debriefed to insure that the next dive team covered new territory. This debriefing was captured on videotape. In successive debriefings not a single diver said anything about venturing inside the U-869. What they said was that all ambient light around the wreck had disappeared, making a dangerous search even more difficult in dark water.
After the dive, I wanted nothing more to do with the U-869, well aware, as we all were, of the frightful desecration taking place inside another German submarine, the U-853. No bone left unturned there. I felt at the time, as I feel today, that the Seeker's claim to the U-869 was morally indefensible. As with the Titanic, Lusitania, Empress of Ireland, U-853, and other shipwrecks where loss of life has been vast and catastrophic and where the wrecks themselves serve as tombs that should not be disturbed for any reason, the U-869 belongs only to the dead.
The motivation behind this recovery mission was to provide solace to Feldman's family, who dearly wanted his body back. What kind of person would quarrel with that? That this humane effort aroused such ire among the Seeker's crew proves only how easy it is, for even brave and honorable men, to succumb to the twin seductions of glory and loot--a complex truth Kurson misses.
I literally devoured this book June 1, 2006
Simon Cleveland (USA)
51 out of 54 found this review helpful
I literally devoured this book. In about 16 or 17 hours I had finished it cover to cover and was on the net looking for another book by Robert Kurson.
What's phenomenal about this story is its unbelievable and yet true account of an ordeal two divers went through, and the years of struggle, to identify a sunken WW2 submarine 60 miles of the coast of New Jersey. The firs one is an ambitious risk taker who's ready to do almost anything to get the answer, while the second, a more cautious yet daring, willing to go the distance beside his friend.
The book doesn't omit a thing. Readers will become intimate with the dangers accompanying deep-ocean diving, such as the narcosis, the oxygen depravation, and yes - death. There are three deaths that occur in the process of discovery, six years go by and two families are ruined, but in the end the mystery is solved. For me, the story represents a tribute to the true human will, what separates the man from the animal - the willingness to face death for the sake of knowledge.
What separates this book from the average `based-on-a-true-story' books is the exceptional narrative with which the author creates a heart pounding, the-edge-of-the-seat, electrifying ride into the little known territory of underwater exploration. In the end, the reader is left wanting more, needing more. A GREAT JOB!
- by Simon Cleveland
Breakout work by a gifted Storyteller March 4, 2005
Michael D. Trimble (Connecticut)
47 out of 49 found this review helpful
This retelling of true events is as good and as close as you can get to the excitement of made up fiction. Admittedly the author, Robert Kurson, had good material with which to work, but a writer of lesser talent could have easily botched this little gem of an opportunity. As it is, Kurson's ability to grab the reader and maintain his/her full attention throughout a story that spans more than six years, is a testament to his writing prowess.
Kurson puts us in the center of the action as we learn about the discovery of a mysterious submarine shipwreck--not one of ours--just 60 miles east of Pt. Pleasant, NJ. In nautical terms this is literally in our backyard. Resting on the bottom of the ocean at 233 feet, it is a depth that is tantalizingly close, yet dangerously deep and accessible to all but a few of the most experienced deep diving specialists.
Central to the story are the truly larger than life main characters: hard drinking rough hewn John Nagle, Captain of the dive-boat and world renowned wreck diving legend; two peas in opposing pods, John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, wreck diving enthusiasts who idolize Nagle and only hope to share in some of the excitement that he has experienced in the past; and a rather odd assortment of other players who come and go at different times. Along the way we witness relationships destroyed, marriages ruined, jobs forfeited, sanity questioned, and even lives tragically lost, all in the single minded pursuit to solve a seemingly unsolvable puzzle.
Kurson pulls it all together nicely, and without revealing the end, I will just say that this book is a richly rewarding experience for the reader. Good books like this leave me wanting to know so much more about the characters, sort of "where are they now?" Fortunately, the adventures experienced by these fascinating men don't end with the telling of this story; John Chatterton, and to a lesser extent Richie Kohler, can be seen quite regularly on the History Channel as the hosts of the Deep Sea Detectives docudrama television series.
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