Shadow Divers. How Two Men Discovered Hitler's Lost Sub and Solved One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

February 1945. The war is almost over and Britain and America rule the waves. Sixty young Nazi soldiers are stranded underwater in U-Boat U-869 with barely enough fuel to make it home. The commander must decide whether to carry on to America and risk death in the pursuit of glory, or to admit defeat and return home. He decides to risk it. September 1991. Two deep-sea wreck divers receive a tip-off from a local fisherman about a site off the New Jersey coast. What they discover defies belief: a Nazi U-boat, 230 feet underwater. The recommended limit for diving is 130 feet, but John Chatterton and Richie Kohler know that if they don't take the risk, the mystery of the wreck will remain unsolved. Shadow Divers is the extraordinary story of the six-year quest for Hitler's lost sub. In the attempt to identify the sunken U-boat and its crew, the team teach themselves German, turn back fanatics and conspiracy theorists, and piece together an incredible story. In between, they make some of the most daring and dangerous scuba dives ever attempted. This is a gripping and compellingly readable account of human courage in the face of remarkable odds.

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, theirdives 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.