Download The Mathews Men: Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler's U-boats AudioBook Free
Among the last unheralded heroic reports of World Conflict II: the U-boat assault off of the American coast from the men of the united states Merchant Marine who have been supplying the Western european battle, and one community's monumental contribution compared to that effort. Mathews County, Virginia, is a remote outpost on the Chesapeake Bay with little to offer except unspoiled scenery - but it directed one of the largest concentrations of sea captains and US vendor mariners of any community in America to fight in World Conflict II. The Mathews Men explains to that heroic storyline through the experience of one incredible family whose seven sons (and their neighbors), US vendor mariners all, all of a sudden found themselves squarely in the crosshairs of the U-boats bearing down on the coastal USA in 1942. From the late 1930s to 1945, virtually all the energy, food, and munitions that sustained the Allies in European countries journeyed not via the navy however in merchant boats. After Pearl Harbor, those unprotected boats instantly became the U-boats' primary targets. Plus they were easy targets - the navy lacked the inclination or resources to defend them until the beginning of 1943. Hitler was established that his U-boats should sink every American ship they could find, sometimes within look of tourist seashores, and kill as many mariners as you possibly can in order to frighten their shipmates into remaining ashore. As the battle 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 feared Murmansk Run. Through their experience we've eyewitnesses to every risk zone in every kind of dispatch. Some passed on horrific deaths. Others fought to make it through torpedo explosions, flaming petrol slicks, storms, shark problems, mine blasts, and harrowing lifeboat odysseys - and then dispatch out again on another boat as soon as they'd delivered to safety. The Mathews Men shows us the battle much beyond traditional battlefields - often the US vendor mariners' life-and-death battles occurred just off the united states shoreline - but also calls for us to the landing seashores at D-Day and the Pacific. "When final win is ours," Basic Dwight D. Eisenhower possessed predicted, "there is absolutely no corporation that will promote its credit more deservedly than the Merchant Sea." Here, finally, is the heroic storyline of those vendor seamen, recast as the individuals storyline of the men from Mathews.
