POSTPONED - Spring Speaker Event - Killing Shore: The True Story of Hitler's U-Boats Off the New Jersey Coast
Wednesday, April 10, 2024, at 7:00 p.m.
West Park Recreation Center, 615 W Park Ave, Oakhurst, NJ 07755
Due to our speaker's sudden illness the Speaker event for tonight, Wednesday, April 10, 2024, is postponed to a later date.
It is January 1942. Nazi Germany is about to commence an assault along the US East Coast, but this "Atlantic Pearl Harbor" would prove far more devastating than Japan's attack on Hawaii five weeks earlier. The wolves are closing in, and few Americans realize their beaches and boardwalks will soon witness the worst naval defeat in US history.
The United States is already grappling with its unpreparedness for war as the Japanese Empire annihilates US forces in the Far East and the Nazis stand triumphant over vast swaths of Europe. Britain's survival, meanwhile, depends on cargoes delivered by civilian-manned merchant ships. America's economic resources and latent military strength represent a light in the darkness--yet Hitler's favorite admiral also knows this, and he has set in motion a plan of unprecedented boldness.
The ensuing fiery months saw German submarines, or "U-boats," sink hundreds of ships from Maine to Texas. This gambit, which threatened to cripple the Allies, pitted Germans against Americans in a desperate struggle that stained East Coast waters with blood and oil. Plying the seas amid this deadly game of cat-and-mouse was a motley but stalwart contingent of civilian merchant mariners carrying the fuel, food, weapons, and raw materials the Allies needed to crush the Third Reich.
Several American states became battlefronts in 1942, but the events that transpired off the Jersey Shore illustrate the savagery and scope of a campaign waged across the Western Hemisphere. Even in the 21st century, shipwrecks still attest to the countless ways to die which friend and foe faced only miles from the Garden State's most popular summer destinations. These seafarers' lives were forfeit, but the battle they fought would decide the fate of millions.
K. A. Nelson is a Marine Corps veteran, wreck diver, and history author in the Philadelphia area. He will be speaking on the subject of his upcoming nonfiction book, "Killing Shore: The True Story of Hitler's U-boats Off the New Jersey Coast." The main narrative centers on eleven ships attacked by U-boats off the Jersey Shore during WWII, with each incident portrayed from multiple perspectives: victims, attackers, rescuers, and ordinary Americans ashore. Exhaustive research was used to reconstruct these events with a dramatic "survivor's eye" view, and the eleven individual accounts are interwoven into a single overarching narrative about how the Battle of the Atlantic came to American waters and how the U-boats were ultimately defeated there. The final chapter presents the later lives of the surviving characters (all real people) and the legacy of shipwrecks and wreck diving off the Jersey Shore.
The presentation is open to the public and refreshments will be served.
April 10, 2024, at 7:15 pm at the West Park Recreation Center (Next to Park Avenue Tennis Center and Ocean Community Pool Complex) on W. Park Avenue, Oakhurst.
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