The Mathews men : seven brothers and the war against Hitler's u-boats
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 371-375) and index.

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. 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. 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. It 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. This is the story of those merchant seamen, recast as the human story of the men from Mathews.