Book ideas #7: Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson
Shadow Divers is a narrative non-fiction book about shipwreck diving. A group of divers discovers a World War II U-boat (i.e., German submarine) off the coasts of New Jersey and tries to identify it. I started reading the book in the middle of a cross-Atlantic flight. Then I found myself wishing for an extra two hours of flight time to finish the book in one go.
I’ll share four stories from the books that stuck with me.
Follow the fish
Fishermen hunt fish. Shipwreck divers hunt shipwrecks. Fish like shipwrecks, and people like to trade. The story starts with a local fisherman discovering a great fishing site and suspecting that the bottom of the ocean might hide a shipwreck. To the fisherman, this means a potential trade. Realizing this, he seeks out a local diving legend with knowledge of a different wreck with fishing potential. He offers to exchange coordinates. The deal is accepted.
The presence or absence of certain contextual cues may mean nothing to a layperson. If he were to sail by the spot the fisherman discovered, he would see some fish but attribute no importance to the whole affair. Similarly, an empty street during the 2006 Battle of Ramadi (Iraq) would not mean much to the casual observer. American counterinsurgency units, however, were all too familiar with the sudden absence of civilians in an otherwise bustling street. It often meant an impending insurgent attack. Albeit very different in their consequences, a good fisherman and a good soldier are similar in that they can both infer valuable information from the presence or absence of ordinary contextual cues.
Secrets that don’t last
When the fisherman and the diver exchanged coordinates, they agreed to stay silent about the other’s spot. A good fishing or diving spot is a finite resource. If rival groups learn about it, its value is quickly depleted. To investigate the potential wreck, the diver assembled a team of experienced divers. As soon as it became clear that they found a U-boat, every team member took an oath to stay silent about the discovery.
The secret lasted a total of 2 hours once the expedition members were back ashore. One of them called his diver friend who almost made the crew. Simultaneously, the original diver also told someone, who told someone else, and the discovery quickly became common knowledge.
People have conflicting loyalties. For instance, a diver may feel bad about lying to a close diving friend about a diving discovery, while simultaneously feeling bound by his oath of secrecy. In a large enough group, it’s quite likely that someone will choose to divulge the secret.
If withholding information doesn’t work, one can always try to overwhelm someone with an avalanche of misinformation. This is what one of the divers suggested as a strategy to manage the aftermath of the disclosure. The U-boat claim was fairly implausible in the first place, as no U-boats sank in the area according to official records. So, the reasoning went, the gossipy diver should try to discredit himself (and make the U-boat story less believable) by making up a different story about the discovery every day.
This strategy, which didn’t work in the end, is nothing new of course. For instance, picture a politician involved in a corruption scandal. If he cannot silence his critics, he may as well falsely accuse them of corruption. After all, if everybody is accused of corruption, the population may become confused and politically disengaged, helping the corrupt politician stay in power.
To search, or not to search, that is the question
Shipwreck divers want to recover artifacts from wrecks. At the same time, they impose certain constraints on themselves and think about how far they are willing to go to get what they want. As the crew of the submarine died when the submarine was torpedoed, the divers faced a difficult trade-off. They could either search the marines’ personal belongings and recover objects that could potentially lead to the identification of the U-boat. Alternatively, they could leave their belongings alone and potentially miss out on relevant objects. They chose the second option.
Had they not thought about this trade-off beforehand, they would have had to make a quick decision on the spot. Quick decisions involving hefty moral issues, especially underwater with one’s oxygen running out, are prime candidates for later regret.
Some years ago, I found myself in a similar situation. Not underwater, thank God, but facing a similar trade-off with a real possibility of future regret. I researched the lives of some now-deceased family members, focusing on their experiences during World War II and post-war Communist Hungary. I read their letters and other documents and scrutinized fading photos, searching for familiar faces and places. I wanted to know the truth about their lives. But not at all costs: I wasn’t going to search their informational remains in ways they would have disapproved of. In practical terms, this meant that I stopped reading a document when I thought the relative in question would not have given me that document himself.
The mission and nothing but the mission
There are few things in life I desire less than diving in a submerged shipwreck, dozens of meters deep. I find the whole thing scary, claustrophobic, and entirely lacking in everything I enjoy in life. In turn, some people are utterly uninterested in anything that doesn’t involve shipwrecks and cold water. This diversity of human endeavors is what makes our world so rich and interesting.
Even though I cannot relate to shipwreck diving as a hobby, I can very much relate to people with a mission—regardless of whether their mission happens to be shipwreck diving, competitive duck herding, ultramarathon running, or parenting.
Throughout the multi-year project, the duo that eventually identified the U-boat tracked down U-boat experts and enthusiasts, went through thousands of documents, consulted weather and military reports, and spent countless hours in obscure military archives. That said, their mission came to fruition not only through perseverance but also due to the attention they devoted to every task.
Divers can only spend a short time in wrecks during deep-water diving. As visibility is poor, moving around without undue risks is only possible if they have a mental map of the wreck’s layout. Virtual reality U-boat simulators weren’t a thing at the time, so the duo needed to find a real-world 3D model of a U-boat. Fortunately for them, there is a museum in Chicago that exhibits a U-boat that visitors can walk around and observe. One of the divers flew to Chicago for a day and stood in line countless times, spending hours absorbing every little detail of the U-boat, all the while enduring other visitors’ eye-rolling and complaining as he “blocked impassable aisles, backed up into children, [and] wiggled around visitors”.
If someone can do mission-relevant tasks with this intensity and persevere at them for years, good things will happen.