Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

They warned him—relentlessly—about the “snowball effect,” the process whereby a diver ignores a minor problem or two only to encounter other problems that combine with the earlier ones to doom him. “Always answer the first problem immediately and fully,” they said, “or you’re fucking dead.”

Chatterton splashed first and tied in the grapple. His plan was trademark: shoot video, forgo artifacts, return with knowledge. He often used video cameras, which picked up underwater nuances that were beyond the human eye, then watched the tapes topside, learning wreck topographies and planning his second dive. At home, he watched the tapes dozens

— If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it. — If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving. — Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average. — Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersectio

The diver himself hears two primary sounds: the hiss of his regulator on his inhalation and the booming gurgles of his bubbles on his exhalation; together they are the metronome of his adventure.

The anchor line does not simply keep the boat stationary. It is the diver’s umbilical cord, the means by which he makes his way to the shipwreck and, more important, finds his way back. A diver cannot simply jump off the boat, drop through the water, and expect to land on the wreck. By the time he splashes, his boat likely will have drifted several

If visibility were simply a matter of illumination, a diver’s headlight and flashlight would suffice. But a shipwreck is filled with silt and debris. The diver’s slightest movement—a reach for a dish, a kick with the fin, a turn to memorize a landmark—can stir the silt and disturb visibility. At times of such stark darkness, the deep-wreck diver is

A great diver learns to stand down his emotions. At the moment he becomes lost or blinded or tangled or trapped, that instant when millions of years of evolution demand fight or flight and narcosis carves order from his brain, he dials down his fear and contracts into the moment until his breathing slows and his narcosis lightens and his reason ret

The Seeker arrived at the U.S. Coast Guard Station in Manasquan Inlet at about ten P.M. Each man aboard the boat was taken inside and asked to write an account of the incident, then was released.

Rascality was prized even above gluttony. Often, without warning the boat captain, the gang would yell, “Swim break!” and get naked and jump into the ocean, never letting go of their beer cans as they bobbed in the water. Members brought along guns and slung stuffed animals into the air for target practice. When a black-tie party boat passed, the g