|
Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson
Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson
One of the things that brings us into diving is a desire for exploration and adventure, to make new discoveries, both personal and communal.
While we all achieve the first of these objectives, few of us get the chance to discover genuinely 'new' history.
Shadow Divers is about the 'U-Who?', a mystery U-boat wreck off America's East Coast that, according to all official records, just shouldn't have been there. It's also about the quest of a group of divers to identify it. Theirs is a persistent struggle involving some hair-raising diving and endless sifting through wartime records, discovering that many such records were wrong and that history needed to be re-written.
It is also a biography of the divers involved. The usual trouble with biographies is that the subjects are turned into either gods or demons. Shadow Divers, which has apparently been optioned by Hollywood, certainly brings out the heroes and villains, but is realistic in that the principal divers, John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, are painted as heroes with warts and all.
I can admire the diving involved back in the early '90s, spanning the last few years of deep air and the dawn of technical diving and trimix, yet nowadays diving of this sort is relatively common.
What I really admire is the time, resources and determination that the divers put into sifting through historical records.
Without the mystery of the historical research, it could have been just another deep wreck dive. That's what makes these men real heroes.
John Liddiard
|
Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson (Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN 0340824549). Softback, 372pp, £18.99
|
|
|
Archive | 
