Alright, I just received in the mail my used copy of Mr. Gentile's "Shipwreck Heresies" which is advertised to include (and I quote from his website):
The book ends with a 70-page retrospection of Shadow Divers Exposed: what juvenile and irrational critiques were made against it, and by whom; how the truthfulness of the book has been vindicated; and how new evidence has established that the U-869 had been discovered and dived three years prior to events that were related in Shadow Divers: the greatest literary hoax in publishing history.
I did a quick scan to see if I could find any "smoking gun theories" right off the bat, but found what I think is even MORE interesting! This thread is mentioned, (several of the posters, by screenname) as well my "review" of SDE on the Amazon site...:shocked2:
I am in the midst of finishing another book at the moment, but this one (and the section on SDE) is next on the reading list...stay tuned!!!
Well I just got Gary Gentile's email/newsletter.
Apparently he's admitting to several mistakes he made.... Shadow Diver Exposed is not listed in them.
(oh well.... mayb next time)
Omissions and Corrections
Gary Gentile's Newsletter - October 8, 2009
Omissions and Corrections
To err is human, as the saying goes. Everyone makes mistakes and I am no exception, even though I try harder than most people not to. In this newsletter I would like to put some mistakes on the record.
My first mistake was one of omission. When I revised Shipwrecks of Delaware and Maryland in 2002, I expanded the text and added wrecks that were not included in the original volume. I couldn't include every wreck that lay off Delmar - that would require a multi-volume encyclopedia. So I chose the ones that were the best-known sites, and added a couple that had not yet been discovered. The book exceeded my space allocation, forcing me to delete two pages of photos. One wreck that I researched but ultimately left out due to space limitations was the Lucy Neff.
In 2005, I received a phone call from Harold Moyers. He had just discovered a wreck off Delaware in 205 feet of water. He described the condition of the wreck, and read information off a builder's plaque that Steve Gatto recovered. Five minutes into the conversation, I said, "That sounds like the Lucy Neff. Let me check my files."
I pulled out my Lucy Neff folder. The Lloyd's data sheet matched perfectly with what was stamped on the builder's plaque. Positive ID.
In the same book I wrote about munitions that had been found on the destroyer Jacob Jones. I described gun shells whose warheads had nosecones that were "interesting because the fuses were adjustable for amount of armor penetration; they are made of finely machined bronze, and are etched with lines and numbers."
Phil McGrath informed me that what I mistook for armor-piercing nosecones were in fact time-delay fuses for anti-aircraft shells. Rotating rings enabled the timing element to be adjusted. The numbers referred to seconds of delay between the moment of firing and the actual burst. The gunnery officer had to estimate the altitude of the target, correlate the muzzle velocity of the projectile with the number of seconds required to reach the estimated altitude, and adjust the timing rings according.
This was the naval version of flak. The nosecone had a threaded base so it could be screwed onto the top of a projectile as needed, or unscrewed and replaced with a nosecone that detonated on impact.
You learn something new every day, and so do I.
Bret Gilliam has found a couple of errors in Shipwreck Heresies. I wrote that he owned Diving Adventure and that the magazine went bankrupt, bilking his subscribers out of their subscriptions. He has informed me that he had no ownership interest in the magazine, that it did not go bankrupt, and that no subscribers were bilked out of their subscriptions. He has also informed me that no one was ever bilked in any of his other business ventures. My word-of-mouth information was incorrect; I apologize for any misunderstanding that these statements may have caused.
With respect to Mixed Gas Diving, I wrote, "Gilliam was forced to rewrite his book so as to leave out my stolen photos and plagiarized references." I confused two of his books. He has informed me that Mixed Gas Diving never saw a revised edition. The book that was revised was Deep Diving. I stand corrected.
Gilliam also found two instances in the Ultimate Wreck Diving Guide in which the chemical symbol for helium was misprinted. All these corrections have been incorporated in the revised edition of Shipwreck Heresies.
The omission that bothers me the most is the Miraflores. I did not stop researching U-boat attacks after publication of Track of the Gray Wolf, which was published in 1989. After 17 years, I expanded and revised the book as The Fuhrer's U-boats in American Waters. With the addition of some 30,000 words, the latter volume was fully one-third longer than the original. Yet still the story of the U-boat campaign was incomplete.
In 1992, Gene Peterson and I were the first divers to see an unidentified wreck off Cape May, New Jersey. Two years later we recovered a helm stand from the wheelhouse. In 2007 (the year after publication of The Fuhrer's U-boats in American Waters), Gene used information on the helm stand to identify the wreck. That was when he learned that the U-432 had sunk the Miraflores with all hands. This identification adds one ship and 34 souls to the vessel losses and human fatalities that are attributed to the U-boat war in the Eastern Sea Frontier.
Thanks to all my faithful readers for their comments. I will continue to use this newsletter as a mechanism to provide updates of ongoing events, and to provide revisions, corrections, and retractions that relate to my books. Even if you see something as minor as a simple typographical error in an out of print book, let me know, because people are still reading those books.
Gary Gentile
