Divers Tell Tale Of Mystery Sub

U-Who? 6-Year Search Nets Answers

(CBS)  "Decompressing" doesn't mean relaxing after a tough day. For deep-wreck divers, it’s a life-and-death process.

"One of your options is not coming directly to the surface," says Chatterton. "Chances are very good that you’re going to develop decompression sickness. You could be seriously hurt. You could be permanently injured. And you even could be killed."

Divers call decompression sickness the bends. That’s what happened to Chris Rouse and his son, Chrissy, who joined the dive team in October 1992.

At the bottom, they got disoriented, used up their air, panicked and went straight to the surface. Both father and son died from the bends.

"These were our friends," says Chatterton. "We knew them; we knew their families and that kind of thing."

"There were people that never got back on a dive boat, and a few that quit diving," says Kohler. "I mean, again, that’s something that once you see that, you can’t get rid of it. I can’t. But, you know, I personally could not give up on this U-boat."

"If I died on a wreck, the last thing that I would expect would be for my friends, my peers, to walk away from diving," says Chatterton. "I would expect them to continue on."

Which is just what these wreck-divers did — even though the mystery consumed their lives and broke up their marriages. Many of their fellow divers thought the risks were just too great to carry on.

Kohler and Chatterton narrowed their search to one bit of unexplored territory: the sub’s motor room, which was blocked by a large piece of fallen steel.

So Chatterton came up with a desperate — and dangerous — plan to reach it through a tiny opening. He planned to do something incredibly risky: squeeze through the opening by taking off his air tank.

"Sliding the tank ahead of me, I could get in there. Once I’m in the compartment, I believe that the compartment was largely intact. I could then put the tank back onto my back and retrieve the artifacts that we believed were gonna identify the submarine," he says.

It sounds simple enough, but according to Kohler, Chatterton "had a very finite, limited source of breathing gas. And he had no back-up, whatsoever."

It was a very close call for Chatterton. Tangled in debris, he almost ran out of air. He was able to get out, carrying a wooden box. What was inside wasn’t important, but one of the small tags on the front was the jackpot.

"These tags have the U-boat number here — U-869," says Kohler.

It was that number that took the wreck-divers six years to find.

"This is the proof that we needed to conclusively prove that this U-boat was U-869," says Richie.

According to German war-time records, U-869 was ordered to the coast of Africa. But that little tag proved the sub never received those orders, and instead sailed to New Jersey — where she and her crew met their fate. The mystery at 230 feet was solved.

Both men have paid dearly for this mystery. Both nearly died, their marriages failed and three men were lost.

"There were two choices: follow it through to its conclusion or quit. So in many ways, yeah, you know bringing it to a conclusion was difficult," says Chatterton. "But quitting was just unacceptable."

"Never," Richie says.