Shadow Divers

In 1991, sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey, at the incredible depth of 230 feet underwater, two amateur divers, John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, find what divers dream about: an undisturbed wreck that they soon identify as a German U-boat.

Week by week – and then year by year – these two polar-opposite figures and their team of daredevil divers seek to identify the vessel that in the meantime they call “U-Who”; three divers, including a father and son, die while trying to do so. No historian or government can solve the puzzle and official records agree that there couldn’t be a U-boat there.

But after increasingly perilous diving…and painstaking archival research…and gaining the trust of retired U-boat crew…these two polar-opposite divers, who move from being rivals to comrades, finally identify it as U-869 and work out what on earth it’s doing there.

Then they trace the families of the men who died on U-869, whose bones they’d agreed they wouldn’t touch, in an ending worthy of Steven Spielberg.

It’s a story of – among other things – persistence, ingenuity and a shared obsession…