"Vividly drawn and emotionally gripping." -Daniel James Brown, #1
New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat From the
author of The Ghost Ships of Archangel, one of the last unheralded
heroic stories of World War II: the U-boat assault off the American
coast against the men of the U.S. Merchant Marine who were
supplying the European war, and one community's monumental
contribution to that effort Mathews County, Virginia, is a remote
outpost on the Chesapeake Bay with little to offer except unspoiled
scenery-but it sent an unusually large concentration of sea
captains to fight in World War II. The Mathews Men tells that
heroic story through the experiences of one extraordinary family
whose seven sons (and their neighbors), U.S. merchant mariners all,
suddenly found themselves squarely in the cross-hairs of the
U-boats bearing down on the coastal United States in 1942. From the
late 1930s to 1945, virtually all the fuel, food and munitions that
sustained the Allies in Europe traveled not via the Navy but in
merchant ships. After Pearl Harbor, those unprotected ships
instantly became the U-boats' prime targets. And they were easy
targets-the Navy lacked the inclination or resources to defend them
until the beginning of 1943. Hitler was determined that his U-boats
should sink every American ship they could find, sometimes within
sight of tourist beaches, and to kill as many mariners as possible,
in order to frighten their shipmates into staying ashore. As the
war progressed, men from Mathews sailed the North and South
Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean, the
Indian Ocean, and even the icy Barents Sea in the Arctic Circle,
where they braved the dreaded Murmansk Run. Through their
experiences we have eyewitnesses to every danger zone, in every
kind of ship. Some died horrific deaths. Others fought to survive
torpedo explosions, flaming oil slicks, storms, shark attacks, mine
blasts, and harrowing lifeboat odysseys-only to ship out again on
the next boat as soon as they'd returned to safety. The Mathews Men
shows us the war far beyond traditional battlefields-often the U.S.
merchant mariners' life-and-death struggles took place just off the
U.S. coast-but also takes us to the landing beaches at D-Day and to
the Pacific. "When final victory is ours," General Dwight D.
Eisenhower had predicted, "there is no organization that will share
its credit more deservedly than the Merchant Marine." Here,
finally, is the heroic story of those merchant seamen, recast as
the human story of the men from Mathews.
General
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