Commercial divers are among the more unique workers in the world’s industries. But, perhaps the most uncommon among this atypical occupation was a small group of underwater rocket recovery specialist derogatorily called, among other names, the "Undertakers."

In the 1950s, Cape Canaveral, an area that is still America's premier rocket launching facility, lying halfway between Miami and Jacksonville, Florida, had two primary features that promoted its selection as a missile test laboratory. First, its flight range was over the Atlantic Ocean. Second, that same ocean contained a string of small islands that could act as tracking bases when test missiles flew over. Nevertheless, the Cape's best feature was also its worst; if something went wrong during a missile's flight, the ocean bed became its last resting place.

In the late 1950s, at the height of Cold War rocket testing, the Cape saw the launching of as many as 287 missiles in one year. In one 24 hour period, for example, the Air Force, Army, and U.S. Navy fired eight major missiles. Many of these early developmental launch attempts were failures, as missilemen learned their art through trial and heartbreaking error. The blinding flash of dying rockets plunging into the ocean in pieces became common sights at the Cape and the surrounding coastal communities. When something as valuable to national defense as an expensive Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) or Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) falls into the ocean, some of its precious flight data go down with it. America's security depended on rapidly locating and salvaging the test vehicles to determine what went wrong. The cry, "get the damned Undertakers" was a common one; the divers rarely went wanting for work.

The Undertaker's company name was Lou Berger Divers Inc. Though Mr. Berger owned the company, one man, Vern Nealy, diving superintendent and manager, was its soul. Vern, though now in his late seventies, his powerful tall frame, ruggedly handsome Scotch-Irish features, and dark though graying hair, still make him look every bit the adventuresome diver/sailor. If Cape missilemen once bragged of having rocket fuel in their veins, Vern's blood was a compound of rocket fuel and sea water.

Vern's experience in diving, before coming to the Cape, had been while working as a diver on the glass bottom tourist boat named "Mermaid" in Miami's Biscayne Bay. Vern had hired on with the Mermaid in April of 1951. Using an open bottom, Miller-Dunn copper diving helmet, Vern would walk the bottom of the Bay under the boat as the tourist’s watched through the large glass port in the deck. To supplement his meager wages, Vern would scam the wealthy tourist on the boat by selling them seashells he picked up from the bottom of the Bay. Only problem was that shells do not occur naturally on the bottom of Biscayne Bay. In truth, every few weeks Vern would drive over to Fort Myers on Florida’s Gulf Coast, where shells can be found in abundance, and he purchased the seashells from a flea market. Unknown to the tourists, before the Mermaid went out each day, Vern had previously hidden his seashells in a bag under the boat's keel.

In 1954 Lou Berger was awarded the missile recovery contract for Cape Canaveral and its missile test range. Lou had met Vern on the glass bottom boat and asked him to come to the Cape to work. Unknown to the Air Force, Lou's and Vern's limited scuba and open bottom helmet diving experience were the sum total of their marine salvage background. But in those days, diving, like rocket engineering, was a hazardous art that one learned as he went along.

After hiring a few former Navy underwater demolition divers and several commercial divers, and with the use of Air Force crash boats, the Undertakers got their first job in October 1954.

This first salvage task was to recover a Snark cruise missile which had failed on launch and fell into 50 feet (15 meters) of water just off the Cape Canaveral beach. The Snark was a difficult system to develop. Eventually so many would crash into the Atlantic around the Cape that missilemen only half-jokingly termed the area "Snark infested waters."

locating and salvaging the errant Snark proved relatively easy, launch crews had watched it go into the water. When divers arrived at the crash site bubbles and hydraulic fluid were still oozing up from the remains. The Berger Divers picked up floating debris and marked the site with buoys. Latter, with Vern doing the rigging, the wreckage was slung and hauled up with a crane. Subsequent recovery efforts of other wayward missiles was to prove less straight forward.

From 1954 onward the rate of missile launches rapidly built up on the Cape. In the following years the Army attempted to perfect its Redstone, Jupiter and Juno missiles; the Air Force struggled to get its balky first ICBM, the Atlas missile, into operation; and the Navy, with its submarine launched Polaris missile, was having little more luck than the Air Force.

In operations with the various military services at the Cape, Vern worked out a general drill for missile recovery. Before any launch a series of Air Force crash boats with Berger dive crews lay off-shore to rapidly speed to the impact site, should a launch failure occur. On shore, two powerful Theodolite telescopes, one tracking in elevation the other tracking in azimuth, would follow the missile in flight. In addition, tracking radars from the Cape, Patrick Air Force Base, and downrange radars on the islands followed the rocket. To help with sighting the rocket if it fell (as they often did) near shore, Vern and a Coast Guard sailor, would stand on top of the Cape Canaveral lighthouse, which was only a few thousand feet from the launch pads. Using a small telescope, Vern could get an additional azimuth fix on the crash site and guide dive boats to it by radio.

The radars, which were eventually combined with heat sensitive tracking accessories, were coordinated with the theodolites. Together these systems could follow the rocket exhaust as it ascended, and even the explosion plume and hot metal parts all the way down to the ocean, thus giving longitude and latitude coordinates to the recovery divers. Parallel with the Cape's radars, the offshore boats could also use their own navigation radar to see the splash of a falling rocket, if it impacted the water at night.

This system worked well until the Army suffered its first launch failure of the Jupiter IRBM Missile. The rocket rose from the pad and promptly went off course. The range safety officer detonated the missile but the parts headed for the lighthouse. "We were standing there transfixed, watching the flaming parts headed towards us with our mouths agape like idiots," Vern remembered, "not that we could go anywhere. It blew up between us and hanger-C (300 feet [92 meters] separates the lighthouse and Hanger-C) and took all the windows out of the hanger. The detonation hit us in the face like a big feather pillow. After the explosion the Coast Guard guy and I ran around the top of the lighthouse and got in to run down the stairs only to realize that we had a ton of glass Fresnel lens over our heads." Fortunately, the lens stayed intact. Just 10 days latter the first Air Force Thor IRBM missile launch also blew up while Vern was on top of the lighthouse sending him and the sailor again scrambling for cover. After this last incident, it didn’t take much persuasion to get Vern to go back to the relative safety of diving.

Diving in Cape waters is nothing like diving in the beautiful seas of South Florida. The Cape has no clear waters or beautiful reefs. The bottom is covered with an adhesive clay-like soil called "Blue Mud." Visibility is often zero and the waters are cold about half the year. Wet suits hadn’t come into wide use in the early 1950's, and the divers didn't like wearing the warmer heavyweight deep-sea dive rigs the company owned. Heavyweight commercial rigs were fine for underwater construction, but for searching over great distances they were an encumbrance.

In an attempt to stay warm while diving, the Undertakers wore the wool long-john underwear (woollies) that was supplied for the heavyweight deep-sea diving dresses. When wool is wet it gives some insulation, but this doesn't last long. For breathing apparatus the recovery crews used a DESCO Mask, or Jack Brown Mask as it is sometimes called. Air was supplied to the masks from a surface compressor through an umbilical, and line pull signals were the general means of communications.

With weightbelt (an Army cartridge belt with lead added) and tennis shoes topping off the outfit, Vern and his crews could search about one quarter square mile a day, for a lost missile.

Often test rockets blew up at altitudes of many thousands of feet, and depending on wind and currents the debris could cover a wide area. As a rule, however, the military wanted the engine parts only, and the search area could be narrowed.

In the winter, when a search was extended due to the wide scattering of parts, the divers suffered grievously from the cold. During most searches the Undertakers would walk the bottom for a short while, then come up and lay on the diesel engines of the crash boats to get warm. When they had stopped shivering, they again rigged-up and went over the side. These recovery efforts continued 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until the missile was found. Physical cases of exposure were common among the divers.

Looking for a rocket engine, or in latter years a secret mock-up of a nuclear warhead, the divers often employed the technique of using two 14 foot (4.3 meter) aluminum skiffs (small boats), and a 200 foot (61 meter) section of steel cable. The cable was attached to a 100 foot (30 meter) section of steel chain that was drug across the sea bottom between the boats. The chain would snag and make a metallic noise when it hit a metal rocket part. This, of course, was in the era before side scan sonar and other modern bottom locating technologies.

Finding the rocket parts was only half the chore. The Cape's and the missile range's waters are famous for shark attacks during warm months. I still live in this area and we average about five attacks during the summer months. Apparently the sharks have acquired a taste for warm tourist. When searching for missile components, especially the outer hull of the Atlas missile, one had to work with extreme caution. The Atlas’s fuel tanks are essentially nothing more than thin walled, stainless steel balloons, and the tanks are the major part of its airframe as well. The stainless steel skin of the Atlas airframe is so thin that the Atlas must be kept pressurized with nitrogen, or fuel, to keep the rocket from sagging while sitting on the launch pad. During searches in the murky waters, divers often cut themselves on the razor sharp edges of the Atlas's twisted and crash torn stainless steel skin. The bleeding divers quickly attracted sharks.

Potential hazards of marine life and jagged metal aside, the divers feared more present dangers. The rockets they searched for were armed with explosive self-destruct packages, explosive bolts that were used for separating stages in flight, skin tissue damaging corrosive fuels, toxic oxidizers, impact-weakened high pressure gas containers, and solid propellants that could set their boats and equipment ablaze. These dangers existed over and above the normal risks of diving such as heavy currents, poor visibility, and life support equipment failure.

Still, all was not bone chilling hard work and harrowing moments. In the latter 1950's the Berger Divers expanded operations to the warm clear waters of the Bahama Banks. From 1957 to 1959 the Army Ballistic Missile Agency fired twelve Redstone missiles downrange from the Cape into shallow water north of Grand Bahamas Island near Mangrove Cay. The Army wanted Vern and his Undertakers to locate the missile's dummy warhead, mark it with a beacon and strobe light so the exact range and accuracy of the Redstone could be determined. A telemetry barge equipped with radar was anchored three miles from the predicted impact point to locate the splash of the Redstone warhead as it hit the water. Before launch the divers would wait anxiously near the telemetry barge and when notified of the "all clear count" (that the missile had flown its path and landed in the water) would race to the impact site.

The waters were so shallow and clear on the Bahama Banks that crews in a low flying B-17 aircraft (a bomber left over from World War-II) assigned to the project could spot rocket debris on the sea bottom. Vern Nealy often accompanied the aircrews on these flights, so he might guide his divers to the impact local by radio. Early in the project, in an effort to get a jump on the dive crews, and make early beer call at the officers club, the B-17 captain persuaded Vern to leave earlier than the all clear count provided.

When the Cape notified them that the first Redstone had blasted off the launchpad, the aircrew started timing the flight. Estimating how long it took the rocket to reach the predicted impact area, the B-17 left Mangrove Cay, which was 10 miles from ground zero. Flying straight into the impact zone, the B-17 crew, with Vern aboard, passed the telemetry barge and dive boats too early.

Realizing too late that he was inside the three mile predicted impact area, and with the hair rising on the back of his neck, Vern was just about to ask the B-17 captain to turn around when the tremendous blast of the Redstone's re-entry shock wave shook the aircraft (essentially a sonic boom). Less than a mile in front of the B-17, the Redstone warhead’s massive impact splash blossomed up from the ocean. The pilot veered hard to the starboard; nevertheless, he was close enough that water droplets from the splash struck the airplanes port-side windows.

Today, with their harrowing exploits still largely unrecorded, the Undertakers have been mostly forgotten in the onrush of historical events at Cape Canaveral. Their anonymous but uniquely important contribution to rocketry and national defense has become merely a footnote in Cape lore. Vern Nealy now lives in quiet retirement not far from Miami’s Biscayne Bay of his youth. During our last visit together, as I listened to him reminisce about deep water and dying rockets, I came to understand that the rather modest Vern Nealy and his Undertakers would probably not lay much claim to having helped launch the space age, or win the Cold War. But they were a group of commercial divers that did both.