Robert Kurson · 2004 · survival

Robert Kurson's 2004 account of two weekend wreck divers who found an unidentified U-boat sixty miles off New Jersey in 1991, at two hundred and thirty feet. Every record said no U-boat could be there. It took Chatterton and Kohler six years, three deaths and two ruined marriages to prove which one it was.

1. 1
   Brielle

   The charter boat Seeker works out of Brielle on the New Jersey shore, and her skipper is given a set of coordinates by a fisherman - a snag on the bottom that nobody has looked at, sixty miles out.

2. 2
   The wreck site

   At two hundred and thirty feet the divers find a submarine embedded in sand, its interior a wilderness of collapsed metal and human bone - and no marking anywhere on it that says which boat she is.

3. 3
   Washington

   The archives insist the wreck cannot exist: every U-boat unaccounted for in 1945 was lost somewhere else - so the identification has to be forced out of the wreck itself, dive by dive, in zero visibility and by touch.

4. 4
   Freiburg

   The answer comes from a stamped spare part and German naval records - and the boat historians had placed off Gibraltar turns out to have been sunk by her own torpedo off New Jersey.