Shadow Divers (34 page)

Three dive seasons had passed since the
U-Who
’s discovery. Though certain that the wreck was
U-857,
Chatterton and Kohler were no closer to proving it than they had been in 1991.

As winter claimed New Jersey, Chatterton noticed fraying around the edges of his marriage. While he had worked to master the
U-Who,
Kathy had become among the finest women pistol shooters in the world. Discordant schedules squeezed the couple’s time together, and diverging interests made that time awkward. When Kathy asked about her husband’s growing obsession with the U-boat, Chatterton told her, “I’m being tested. What I do with this U-boat is what I am as a person.”

Neither Chatterton nor Kathy feared for the long-term future of the marriage; they still loved each other and allowed each other space for passions. But sometimes, when Chatterton looked up from his desk and realized that he and Kathy had not spoken for days, it reminded him of his time as a scallop fisherman. Every so often then, a shadow would creep up on the fishermen as they worked the dredges, sending the men scurrying to track the source of the shadow, which was always a great wave about to punish the boat. Now, at home, Chatterton was beginning to feel the shadow.

At Kohler’s home five miles away, the wave had already hit the boat. For more than a year, he and his wife, Felicia, had argued over Kohler’s availability to her, their two small children, and Felicia’s ten-year-old daughter from a previous relationship. She understood the necessary evil that was Kohler’s glass business—the company was growing and required near-constant attention as Kohler sought to expand it. She had less patience, however, for Kohler’s use of his remaining free time. He spent nearly every day of the year working the
U-Who—
diving it, researching it, meeting with Chatterton, whisking off to Washington. He and Felicia seemed to fight every day. Felicia told him, “If you gave up diving our marriage would improve.” That song was taps for Kohler. Around Christmas 1993, he and Felicia separated. She moved with the children to Long Island and he took a bachelor pad on the northeastern tip of the Jersey Shore. He insisted on having his kids every weekend.

For a month or two, Kohler reveled in his newfound freedom. He dated young lovelies, danced at nightclubs, and read his U-boat books with impunity. But he missed his son, Richie, daughter, Nikki, and stepdaughter, Jennyann. Weekend visits were not enough. He entertained notions of reconciliation with Felicia, but he believed she would not consider it unless he agreed to abandon diving, which would be the same as asking him to abandon food. As February 1994 froze the beaches near his apartment, he became convinced that something would have to change, that he was not in his natural state without his kids to chase off to school.

In late February, Chatterton and Kohler received a letter from Robert Coppock at the Ministry of Defence. Standing in his bathrobe and holding a cup of coffee, Chatterton began to read:

U-869
.
.
.
was [originally] bound for the US East Coast [and] allocated a patrol area . . . about 110 miles south-east of New York. . . .

Chatterton went numb.
U-869
was Horenburg’s boat. It was supposed to have been ordered to Gibraltar.

U-869
.
.
.
may not have received a [new] signal ordering her to Gibraltar. . . .

Chatterton’s heart pounded against his rib cage.

In view of atmospheric conditions . . . it is certainly possible that Control’s [new] signal ordering
U-869
to the Gibraltar area was not received by the boat. . . .

Now Chatterton was light-headed.

In the light, therefore, of the absence of any tangible proof that
U-869
had received Control’s signal ordering her to the Gibraltar area, [along with] the evidence of the knife and the proximity of the wreck’s position to
U-869
’s original patrol area, I would concede that the possibility the wreck is
U-869
cannot be ignored.

Chatterton rushed to the phone and called Kohler.

“Richie, we just got an unbelievable letter from Coppock. He dropped an atomic bomb. You won’t believe it—”

“Slow down!” Kohler said. “What’s it say?”

“It says this:
U-869,
Horenburg’s boat, the one all the history books say was sunk off Gibraltar, was originally ordered to New York. And not just to New York, but just south of New York, right to our wreck site! It says that headquarters later changed those orders to Gibraltar. But get this, Richie, and I quote: ‘It is certainly possible that Control’s signal ordering
U-869
to the Gibraltar area was not received by the boat.’”

“But what about all the reports that
U-869
was sunk off Gibraltar by Allied escort ships?” Kohler asked.

“We’ve seen how accurate those reports can be, haven’t we?”

“This is unbelievable. I’m stunned.”

“Richie, can you conference-call Coppock from your office? We have to ask him to explain where he got this information.”

“I’m already dialing,” Kohler said.

A moment later the phone rang at Great Scotland Yard. Coppock had only a few minutes to talk. He told the divers that his information had been gleaned from reading intercepted radio messages between
U-869
and U-boat Control in Germany. The intercepted messages and their interpretations by American code breakers, he said, could be found in Washington, D.C.

Chatterton and Kohler sat flabbergasted. They had seen radio intercepts before but had never dreamed to inspect those relating to
U-869,
a boat conclusively recorded by history as having been sunk off Gibraltar. None of the experts to whom they had spoken—including Coppock—had thought to do so either.

“I’m going to D.C. tomorrow to investigate,” Chatterton said. “The whole story is there.”

Kohler wanted to join Chatterton in Washington, but he was still part of a two-man business and could not free up the time. Instead, Chatterton took Barb Lander, who had long been diving the
U-Who
and who had shown keen interest in its history. Chatterton promised he would call Kohler with details as they unfolded, and took along several rolls of quarters for pay phones to do so.

Chatterton and Lander landed first at the National Archives, where they requested Tenth Fleet U-boat intelligence summaries starting on December 8, 1944—the day
U-869
had departed for war. Archivists wheeled out cartloads of documents stamped
ULTRA—TOP SECRET.
Chatterton knew the word
Ultra,
the name for the Allied monitoring and decrypting of Enigma. For decades after the war, few had fathomed that the Allies had cracked Enigma and had been reading the German mail. Now Chatterton and Lander were about to read it too.

The divers scanned the U.S. Navy’s intelligence summaries. They found a report dated January 3, 1945. Navy intelligence had intercepted radio messages between
U-869
and Control. The code breakers wrote:

A U/Boat (
U-869
) now estimated in the central North Atlantic has been ordered to head for a point about 70 miles southeast of the New York approaches.

Chatterton could scarcely believe what he was reading—that would have put
U-869
directly on the wreck site. He pressed further. In a report dated January 17, 1945, navy intelligence wrote:

The U/Boat heading for the New York approaches,
U-869
(Neuerburg), is presently estimated about 180 miles SSE of Flemish Cap. . . . She is expected to arrive in the New York area at the beginning of February.

Chatterton checked his crew list. Neuerburg was
U-869
’s commander. He kept reading, his heart charging into his rib cage. In a January 25 report, navy eavesdroppers detected a communication problem between
U-869
and Control:

One U/Boat may be south of Newfoundland heading for New York approaches, although her location is uncertain due to a mix up in orders and Control assumes she is heading for Gibraltar. . . . [But] based on the signals she received it appears likely that
U-869
is continuing toward her original heading off New York.

“I can’t believe it,” Chatterton told Lander. “They were ordered right to our wreck site. Control changed the orders to send the U-boat to Gibraltar. But it looks like
U-869
never got those new orders. She just kept heading for New York.”

“Oh, wow,” Lander said, scanning the document. “Read the rest of what the navy says.”

The
CORE
will begin sweeping for this U/Boat shortly prior to proceeding against the U/Boats reporting weather in the North Atlantic.

“The USS
Core
was an aircraft carrier attached to a hunter-killer group,” Chatterton said. “The navy knew exactly where
U-869
was headed and was lying in wait for her.”

Chatterton took his quarters and ran to the pay phone. He called Kohler and told him of his discoveries.

“Incredible,” Kohler said. “The navy sent a hunter-killer group for
U-869
but they never got her, never even spotted her—we’d know it if they had. U-boats didn’t get away from hunter-killer groups in 1945, John. This Neuerburg must have been some commander.”

For a moment there was silence on the line.

“We didn’t find
U-857
at all,” Kohler finally said. “We found
U-869.
”

“We found
U-869,
” Chatterton said. “It was
U-869
all along.”

Still unresolved, however, was the matter of
U-869
’s reported sinking off Gibraltar by two ships, the
L’Indiscret
and USS
Fowler.
Every history book had it recorded that way. Chatterton and Lander raced to the Naval Historical Center and requested attack reports for the sinking of
U-869.
Minutes later they were looking at butchered history.

On February 28, 1945, the American destroyer escort USS
Fowler
picked up a sonar contact in the area west of Rabat, southwest of Gibraltar. The
Fowler
fired a pattern of thirteen depth charges. Two explosions followed and debris of an “unknown identity” was spotted on the surface. The
Fowler
fired another pattern of depth charges. When the smoke cleared, crewmen dragged a towel through the debris, which “had the appearance of lumps and balls of heavy oil sludge but no samples were recovered.” The destroyer searched the area for further evidence of damage. It found none.

Hours later, the French patrol craft
L’Indiscret
attacked a sonar contact in the same area, which “caused a large black object to break surface and immediately sink.” The boat could not identify the object and spotted no debris.

Navy intelligence was unimpressed with the attacks and the flimsy evidence produced. They graded each of the attacks “G—No Damage.”

But, Chatterton could see as he read the reports, postwar assessors soon changed the grade from “G” to “B—Probably Sunk.”

“Why would they have done that?” Lander asked.

“I’ve seen this before,” Chatterton said. “The postwar assessors were scrambling to account for lost U-boats. One of those U-boats was
U-869.
The assessors have no clue about intercepted radio messages—that was top secret—so they don’t know
U-869
went to New York. They check the German records. The Germans believed
U-869
went to Gibraltar—they think she got the new orders to go to Gibraltar. When she doesn’t come home, the Germans presume her lost off Gibraltar. Then the postwar assessors see these attacks by the
Fowler
and
L’Indiscret
near Gibraltar. They attach the attacks to
U-869,
change the grade from G to B, and that settles it for them.”

Chatterton ran back to the pay phone. He told Kohler that the history books were wrong.

“We found
U-869,
” Kohler said. “We found Horenburg, didn’t we?”

“Horenburg was there the whole time,” Chatterton said. “Think about it, Richie. If there were radio problems between
U-869
and Control, Horenburg would have been the guy front and center for it. He was the senior radioman. Listen, Richie, I’m out of quarters. But I’ll tell you this: Horenburg must have been there for it all.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

NONE OF US IS COMING BACK

Deschimag Shipyard, Bremen, Germany, January 1944

I
N THE CHILL MORNING
of a new year, as ruins still smoldered in Berlin from fresh British bombings, hundreds of young German men from throughout the country made their way to the Deschimag shipyard in the seaport town of Bremen to begin naval training. Most brought just a simple suitcase of clothes and perhaps a cherished photograph or good-luck charm. Perhaps fifty of these men were told they would be the crew of a submarine temporarily titled
W1077.
In a few days that submarine would be commissioned as
U-869.

Though only a handful of these men had previous U-boat experience, many either had volunteered for submarine service or had been chosen for it because of their technical skills and backgrounds. They were a young group—average age twenty-one, with twenty-two teenagers, including a seventeen-year-old—and were worlds away from the crews of 1939, when the U-bootwaffe selected only the most elite of the elite.

Among the most experienced men assigned to
U-869
was twenty-two-year-old Herbert Guschewski, a radio operator and veteran of three war patrols, all with
U-602.
Guschewski counted himself lucky to be alive. He had been ordered off
U-602
just before its most recent patrol; heavy U-boat casualties had created a shortage of radio operators, and his services were needed elsewhere. Guschewski was heartbroken—his crewmen were his brothers, his U-boat his home.
U-602
set sail for the Mediterranean. It never returned.

As Guschewski unpacked that evening in Bremen, he heard a knock at his door.

“Who is it?” Guschewski asked.

“A fellow crewman,” came the reply.

Guschewski opened the door. A handsome man with wavy brown hair and jack-of-spades dark eyes asked if he might come inside. The man introduced himself as Martin Horenburg, the
Funkmeister
assigned to
U-869.
He told Guschewski that he was looking forward to working with him.

Guschewski shook Horenburg’s hand, but his heart sank. He had expected to be the crew’s most senior radio operator. But Horenburg ranked higher; he was a
Funkmeister,
or a radio master. The men spoke briefly before wishing each other a good night. “At least,” Guschewski thought as he closed his door, “this fellow seems bright, capable, and friendly. At least Horenburg seems like a gentleman.”

It would be a few days before the crew was officially assembled. In the meantime, several men assigned to
U-869,
including Guschewski and Horenburg, hopped a cable car to the Deschimag shipyard in hopes of glimpsing their U-boat. Inside the gates, diesel fumes collided with sea and fish, dusting the grounds with the perfume of maritime war. The men asked about
U-869.
A guard directed them to a dock.

And there she was. Lean and stealthy, her cigar-shaped hull grooved into the water at bow and stern, she appeared an eyebrow of the sea, raised for the moment to observe the curious. Everywhere she was painted overcast gray, the most impossible color to see when the world changed from light to dark or dark to light, the times when U-boats were deadliest. Affixed to
U-869
’s conning tower were the Olympic rings, the mark of a boat to be commanded by a graduate of the naval class of 1936, the year of the Berlin games. For a moment, Guschewski stood awestruck before the machine. In every way—weaponry, size, design—it seemed superior to the Type VII on which he had previously served. “There is no comparison,” he thought to himself. “This is a great boat. This is something entirely different.”

For the next two weeks, the men of
U-869
joined other crews for general instruction at the shipyard. They would not meet the submarine’s top three officers—the commander, first officer, and chief engineer—until the U-boat’s commissioning in late January. Until then, they could only speculate about the men who would lead them into war.

Commissioning was scheduled for January 26, 1944. On that day, those assigned to
U-869
dressed in formal navy uniforms and made their way to the submarine’s dock. It was the first time the men had come together as a crew. An officer took attendance, calling out names: “Brizius, Dagg, Dietmayer, Dietz . . .” until each of the crewmen had confirmed himself present. All the while, the crew cast their eyes to the side, where a tall, deeply handsome man with black hair, broad shoulders, and penetrating dark eyes was observing the proceedings. They knew this man to be their commander—they could see a nobility in his posture, a certainty in the slowness of his breaths, a strength in his face’s Teutonic angles. The men had grown up in a country wallpapered with images of the heroic and invincible U-boat commander, a man for whom anything was possible. Here, in the form of twenty-six-year-old commander Helmuth Neuerburg, that image had come to life.

The men climbed aboard the submarine and fell into rows of three on its stern deck, their hands at their sides, standing at attention. Commander Neuerburg looked over his men, over the water, and over Germany. By now, the men knew this to be Neuerburg’s maiden command; some even whispered that he had been a Luftwaffe fighter pilot before volunteering for U-boat service. Neuerburg began to address his men from behind the winter garden’s rail. His speech was short and in proper German, his voice military and exact. He spoke just a few words, all of them official and unemotional. But it took no more than these words for even a U-boat veteran like Guschewski to think, “There is great courage and competence in this man. You do not go against this voice. You do not go against this man.”

After Neuerburg spoke, he gave the order to raise the ship’s ensign. When the flag reached the top, Neuerburg saluted it not with the Nazi
heil
but rather in traditional military style.

“The boat is commissioned,” Neuerburg announced.

And that was it. No one presented Neuerburg with a model of the U-boat, as had been done for Guschewski’s previous commander on
U-602.
No brass band played songs of joy and country. The men simply left the boat and returned to shore.

“We are living in a different time,” Guschewski thought.

That evening, the officers and crew of
U-869
gathered for a celebration dinner at a small guesthouse in Bremen. Seated with Neuerburg were his first officer, twenty-one-year-old Siegfried Brandt, and his chief engineer, thirty-year-old Ludwig Kessler. Guschewski surveyed the sparse room and saw the direction of Germany. Two years earlier, he had attended the commissioning dinner for
U-602,
a raucous feast of pork roast, dumplings, and wine, followed by a party for the crew—officers and enlisted men alike—at Hamburg’s famed Reeperbahn. There, the men had watched a musical in specially reserved theater seats, then lit up the town. This night, there were no parties. Men ate herring and boiled potatoes at unadorned tables, and washed it down with beer. Conversation was reserved.

Still, Guschewski was excited. His brother Willi had traveled to Bremen to visit him. Earlier that evening, Guschewski had asked the cook if he might prepare a plate of food for Willi, one for which Guschewski gladly would pay. The cook obliged, and Willi joined his brother and the other crewmen for dinner. Neuerburg rose from his table and approached the brothers.

“What is this man doing here?” Neuerburg asked.

“He is my brother, sir,” Guschewski answered. “He made a special trip from Bochum to say good-bye to me.”

“He is not a member of the crew and is therefore not permitted in the same room as the crew,” Neuerburg said. He turned to Willi. “You must leave immediately, sir. You may take your dinner to a different room in this guesthouse. Your brother may visit you after ten
P.M.
Go now.”

Guschewski was stunned. He admired commanders who followed strict military protocol. But he had also prayed that
U-869
would be led by a man with a heart. As he watched his brother carry his plate of food from the room, he believed that part of Neuerburg’s character still to be in question.

Onboard training began after
U-869
’s commissioning. As the men shimmied through the sub’s three deck hatches, they found themselves in a technological wonderland. Swarms of instruments, gauges, dials, tubing, and wiring forested every centimeter of the boat. Everywhere, the boat smelled of fresh paint and oil and promise. The clocks, as the men had heard, had been set to Berlin time and would remain so no matter where in the world the U-boat traveled. Not a single photo—not of Hitler or of Dönitz—hung anywhere in the boat.

The men spent the next several days loading the submarine and becoming accustomed to U-boat protocol. No one was expected to salute officers aboard the vessel. Officers addressed one another by first name. In a matter of days, even as the U-boat still remained in port, a bond began to form between crewmen, each of whom likely sensed what Dönitz had written years before: that a U-boat crew was a
Schicksalsgemeinschaft—
a community bound by fate.

From the start, the crew studied Neuerburg. Whatever the task, he remained cool and restrained, the picture of military discipline. The men listened for him to make jokes as they walked through the officers’ mess, but they only heard him engaging in serious conversation with Brandt and Kessler, and always in proper German. He used no slang for the U-boat’s equipment and uttered no profanities. Even as news of Germany’s worsening fate trickled into Bremen, Neuerburg betrayed no fear or hesitation. Instead, he spoke of duty, and when he did not speak of duty he acted and stood and moved as if it were his guiding principle. Though naval officers had to yield membership in a political party while on active duty—including the Nazi Party—the crewmen observed Neuerburg’s intensity and wondered if his heart might not belong to the National Socialists. No one, however, wondered about his commitment. As he took them through the first weeks of training, they sensed that this was a man who would die before he disobeyed an order.

For all the crew believed about Neuerburg’s character, they knew almost nothing about his life. He had flown as a navy pilot—that much he had told them—and had only recently transferred to the U-boat service. Some crewmen speculated that perhaps Neuerburg had joined the U-boats to treat a “sore throat”—slang for an officer’s desire to win the Knight’s Cross, which was worn around the neck—though Neuerburg did not discuss his motivations. Some had seen his wife, a strikingly beautiful woman, on the grounds one day, though Neuerburg never spoke of family. His privacy did not undermine the men’s confidence in their commander. But if there was a mystery among the crew of
U-869
in the early days of training, that mystery was about the life of the man who had been chosen to lead them.

At age nineteen, Helmuth Neuerburg of Strasbourg decided to join the marines. The choice might have surprised those who knew him. As a young man, he had displayed a natural talent for the violin and a great facility for drawing caricatures, several of which lampooned the adults in his life. He had passed his
Abitur,
a prerequisite for higher study. Those closest to him expected that he might pursue a career in the arts. This was likely Helmuth’s intention even as he joined the marines; he knew that if he committed to a few years of service, the military would pay him a lump sum upon discharge, money he could then invest in his higher education. He never considered joining the U-boat force. As boys, he and his older brother, Friedhelm, had talked about submarines, but neither of them had been awed by the legend. “There is a big price behind that stardom,” they’d reminded each other. “You become a victim very fast in a U-boat.”

And so Helmuth became a naval cadet, class of 1936. (The student’s class was designated by year of enrollment, not year of graduation.) He scored high in most subjects, posting his best marks one year in machinery and English. He formed a band while in the service and, as graduation neared, composed a class song, for which he was given a special award by Erich Raeder, the head of the German navy. Upon graduation, he began pilot training as part of the naval air arm. By 1940, he was an officer flying North Sea reconnaissance missions near England, even strapping his beloved German shepherd into the cockpit for one mission. For the next three years, he continued to fly, to train other pilots, and to earn excellent reviews. But if Helmuth’s military career looked to be the National Socialist ideal, his heart and mind told a different, more secret story.

While Helmuth did not dare speak against the Nazi regime publicly—an officer could be executed for such a crime—he had no such reservation when speaking to Friedhelm, a tanker in one of the army’s panzer divisions. During visits, he told Friedhelm that he believed the Nazis to be authoring the downfall of Germany. Friedhelm recoiled at the public nature of his expression.

“Are you crazy talking like that in the open?” he asked Helmuth whenever such conversations unfolded. “People are listening everywhere! What you are saying is very dangerous!”

Helmuth continued talking. On one occasion, after he spoke to a Nazi official near Nuremberg, Helmuth told Friedhelm that the man’s anti-Semitic beliefs were “appalling” and “sickening.” Friedhelm begged his brother to stay quiet.

“The walls have ears, Helmuth!” Friedhelm warned. “Everyone listens. Please, be very careful with what you say. Simply uttering such ideas aloud can be the end of you.”

In 1941, Helmuth married twenty-two-year-old Erna Maas, the daughter of a brewery owner. Bright, beautiful, and energetic, Erna was also passionately antimilitary. The two loved each other deeply. At home, Helmuth collected American jazz records, a music form forbidden by the Nazis, and tuned to enemy BBC radio for news of the war—another wartime offense. One morning, while shaving in front of the mirror, he heard a BBC report of America’s entry into the conflict.

“We have lost this war already,” he told Erna.

He continued to see Friedhelm whenever possible. He continued talking. “After the war I will get rid of the skirt,” he told his brother, referring to his uniform.