Mathews County, Virginia, is a bleak strip of land along the Chesapeake with almost nothing to offer ? but it sent one of the largest concentrations of sea captains and merchant mariners of any community in America to fight in World War II. The Mathews Men tells that heroic story through the experiences one extraordinary family whose seven sons (and their neighbours), all of them merchant marines, suddenly found themselves squarely in the cross-hairs of the first fleet of U-Boats bearing down on the coastal United States in 1942.