By: Kurson, Robert
Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson is a true story of a few ordinary men risking everything to solve a World War II mystery, which even governments had not been able to budge. One is introduced to Bill Nagle at the start of the book. He is given a location of the mystery object from a fisherman. Nagle is the caption to the Seeker and had a feeling that this dive will be a life changer. So he meets with John Chatterton, the only man that he can trust on a dive like this one. Chatterton has been diving for almost his whole life and is known as one of the best divers in the world in 1991. Nagle and Chatterton proposed a plan to take six top divers to the site and see what was down there. On the first dive Chatterton finds out that the object is a submarine and in a later dive finds that the submarine is a German U-boat. They know this because of a peace of china Chatterton found with an eagle and the swastika, the symbol of Hitler’s Third Reich on it. Chatterton also found a knife with the name Horenburg hand carved into the handle. The problem is that they do not know what U-boat they just found. All records show that no German U-boat was sunk in that area. To solve the mystery Chatterton has to bring Richie Kohler on board because Nagle is dying from liver poisoning. Kohler is also one of the best divers, yet Chatterton and Kohler do not get along very well. Kohler tried to steal one of Chatterton’s dive sites a long time ago, when the two first met. Over time Chatterton and Kohler become best friends and spend six years of their lives trying to solve the mystery of the German U-boat. Within the six years they found tons of artifacts that do not get them any closer to finding the name of the U-boat. The only major clue was the name Horenburg, yet there was only one Horenburg and he died in a U-boat 2,000 miles away on another U-boat. After, Chatterton and Kohler had leaped over many hurdles and had lost almost