Audiobooks by William Geroux

The Fifteen: Murder, Retribution, and the Forgotten Story of Nazi POWs in America

The revelatory true story of the long-forgotten POW camps for German soldiers erected in hundreds of small U.S. towns during World War II, and the secret Nazi killings that ensnared fifteen brave American POWs in a high-stakes showdown. After the U.S. entered World War II, the American government placed nearly 400,000 German prisoners of war into hundreds of hastily built camps in the United States. Today, traces of those camps-which once dotted the landscape from Maine to California-have all but vanished. All but forgotten, too, is the grisly series of killings that took place at those camps-Nazi power games playing out in America's backyard. Protected by the Geneva Convention, German POWs in the U.S. were well-fed and housed, with most even working jobs, including on American farms. Some were impressed by America's vast land and bounty-a few would even marry farmers' daughters. Ardent Nazis in the camps, however, took a dim view of fellow Germans who befriended their captors. Soon, the killings began. In camp after camp, Nazis attacked fellow German prisoners. Fifteen were sentenced to death for murder by secret U.S. military tribunals. In response, German authorities condemned fifteen American POWs to the same fate. Nazi Germany proposed an audacious trade: fifteen German lives for fifteen American lives. Drawing on extensive research, journalist and historian William Geroux shines a spotlight on the surprising saga of German POWs in America, a forgotten story of murder and high-stakes diplomacy, and the fifteen American lives that hung in the balance, including a fearless P-51 Mustang fighter pilot, two American intelligence agents, and a hot-tempered lieutenant colonel nicknamed "King Kong." Propulsive and vividly rendered, The Fifteen reminds us that what happens to soldiers after they exit the battlefield can be just as harrowing as what they experience on it.

William Geroux (Author), Arthur Morey, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Ghost Ships of Archangel: The Arctic Voyage That Defied the Nazis

An extraordinary story of survival and alliance during World War II: the icy journey of four Allied ships crossing the Arctic to deliver much needed supplies to the Soviet war effort. On the fourth of July, 1942, four Allied ships traversing the Arctic separated from their decimated convoy to head further north into the ice field of the North Pole, seeking safety from Nazi bombers and U-boats in the perilous white maze of ice floes, growlers, and giant bergs. Despite the risks, they had a better chance of survival than the rest of Convoy PQ-17, a fleet of thirty-five cargo ships carrying $1 billion worth of war supplies to the Soviet port of Archangel--the limited help Roosevelt and Churchill extended to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to maintain their fragile alliance, even as they avoided joining the fight in Europe while the Eastern Front raged. The high-level politics that put Convoy PQ-17 in the path of the Nazis were far from the minds of the diverse crews aboard their ships. U.S. Navy Ensign Howard Carraway, aboard the SS Troubadour, was a farm boy from South Carolina and one of the many Americans for whom the convoy was to be a first taste of war; aboard the SS Ironclad, Ensign William Carter of the U.S. Navy Reserve had passed up a chance at Harvard Business School to join the Navy Armed Guard; from the Royal Navy Reserve, Lt. Leo Gradwell was given command of the HMT Ayrshire, a fishing trawler that had been converted into an antisubmarine vessel. All the while, The Ghost Ships of Archangel turns its focus on Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, playing diplomatic games that put their ships in peril. The twenty-four-hour Arctic daylight in midsummer gave no respite from bombers, and the Germans wielded the terrifying battleship Tirpitz, nicknamed The Big Bad Wolf. Icebergs were as dangerous as Nazis. As a newly forged alliance was close to dissolving and the remnants of Convoy PQ-17 tried to slip through the Arctic in one piece, the fate of the world hung in the balance.

William Geroux (Author), Arthur Morey (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Mathews Men: Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler's U-boats

"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.

Arthur Morey, William Geroux (Author), Arthur Morey (Narrator)

Audiobook