“Vividly drawn and emotionally gripping."
—Daniel James Brown, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat
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.
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| Title | The Mathews Men: Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler’s U-boats |
| Author | William Geroux |
| Release Date | 19th Apr 2016 |
| Publisher | Viking |
| ISBN-10 | 0525428151 |
| EAN | 9780525428152 |
| Format | Hardcover |
| Language | English |
| Pages | 400 pages |
| Rating |
**** |
