Download Shadow Divers: Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of WWII AudioBook Free
Within the tradition of Jon Krakauer’s Into NOTHING and Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm comes a true tale of riveting adventure where 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 greater 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 often than once in the rusting hulks of sunken ships.
But in nov 1991, not even these courageous divers were prepared for what they found 230 feet below the top, in the frigid Atlantic waters sixty miles off of the coast of NJ: 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 obvious on the submarine or the few artifacts taken to the top. No historian, expert, or government had a clue concerning which U-boat the men had found. Actually, the official records all agreed that there simply cannot be considered a sunken U-boat and crew at that location.
Over another six years, at the very top team of divers embarked on a quest to solve the mystery. A few of them wouldn't normally live to see its end. Chatterton and Kohler, initially bitter rivals, would be drawn into a friendship that deepened to a almost mystical sense of brotherhood with one another and with the drowned U-boat sailors–former enemies with their country. As the men’s marriages frayed under the pressure of any shared obsession, their dives grew more daring, and each realized that he was hunting more than the identities of any lost U-boat and its own nameless crew.
Author Robert Kurson’s account of the quest reaches 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 storyplot of Shadow Divers often seems too amazing to be true, but everything happened, 2 hundred thirty feet down, in the deep blue sea.
