Audiobooks by Ed Offley

The Burning Shore: How Hitler’s U-Boats Brought World War II to America

On June 15, 1942, as thousands of vacationers lounged in the sun on Virginia Beach, a massive fireball erupted from a convoy of oil tankers steaming into Chesapeake Bay. By the next day, three ships lay at the bottom of the channel, victims of Lieutenant-Commander Horst Degen and his crew on the German submarine U-701. In The Burning Shore, acclaimed military reporter Ed Offley presents a thrilling account of Degen’s rampage along the American coast and of US Lieutenant Harry J. Kane’s quest to bring him down. Since the beginning of 1942, German U-boats had prowled the waters of the Atlantic, sinking merchant ships and threatening to sever the lifeline of supplies flowing from the United States to Great Britain. But when Kane and his crew spotted the silhouette of U-701 offshore that summer, the ensuing clash signaled a critical turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic—and the beginning of an unlikely friendship between the two rival commanders. A gripping tale of heroism and sacrifice, The Burning Shore describes how a small band of mariners and aviators drove Hitler’s wolf packs from America’s home waters. “We have a special appreciation for dramatic stories of untold wartime heroism, and Ed Offley’s gripping tale does not disappoint. Veering from the well-worn paths of World War II’s European and Pacific Theaters, Offley’s The Burning Shore breaks new ground in its description of the German U-boat invasion of America’s Eastern Seaboard in 1942, and the courageous efforts by an undermanned United States military to prevent the Nazis from crippling our war efforts in the Atlantic. Bravo.”—Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, New York Times bestselling authors

Ed Offley (Author), Robertson Dean (Narrator)

Audiobook

Turning the Tide: How a Small Band of Allied Sailors Defeated the U-Boats and Won the Battle of the

The United States experienced its most harrowing military disaster of World War II not in 1941 at Pearl Harbor, but rather in the period from 1942 to 1943, in the frigid North Atlantic and American coastal waters from Newfoundland to the Caribbean. Nearly seven decades after the event, the Battle of the Atlantic still stands as the longest-running and most lethal clash of arms in naval history. During the entire duration of the conflict, more than 30,264 Allied merchant seamen and hundreds of navy personnel lost their lives. The strategic stakes in the Battle of the Atlantic were immense. If the Axis won, Great Britain could have been starved into submission, the Allies would have been unable to marshal their forces to liberate the Continent, and the Germans likely would have at least engineered a stalemate with the Soviets on the Eastern Front that would have allowed the Nazi regime to remain in power. In Turning the Tide, military reporter and author Ed Offley tells the story of how, during a twelve-week period during the spring of 1943, a handful of battle-hardened British, Canadian and American sailors turned the tide in the Atlantic. Using extensive documents from archives in Germany, Great Britain and the United States, and interviews with key survivors on both sides, Offley puts the reader into the heart of the battle, from the navigation bridges of British and American escort warships, to the main decks and engine rooms of Allied merchant ships in convoy, to the claustrophobic control rooms and wave-swept bridges of the U-boats stalking their prey. He also portrays the vicious bureaucratic struggles that raged behind closed doors at the headquarters of both the Allied and German military services, and the above-Top Secret Allied intelligence campaign to crack the German Naval Enigma codes. A thrilling tale of the decisive naval battle of World War II, Turning the Tide is also a harrowing story of how the Allies nearly lost, and ultimately regained, victory in both the Atlantic and in Europe itself.

Ed Offley (Author), James Adams (Narrator)

Audiobook

Scorpion Down

The last thing they heard was the faint scree-scree of a high-speed propeller. Then the torpedo hit, the warhead detonated, the ocean thundered in, and 99 men died. On May 22, 1968, an American submarine was sunk by the Soviets as reprisal for the sinking of a Soviet sub just 10 weeks before. The tragic loss of the USS Scorpion and its crew is still described by the U.S. Navy as an "inexplicable accident." In fact, it was a secret buried by both the U.S. and the Soviet governments to prevent the Cold War from turning into World War III. For nearly 40 years, researchers, journalists, and family members of the lost crew have tried to learn the truth while the Navy and U.S. intelligence communities have covered up the facts. Based on a quarter-century of research, an extraordinary array of new resources, and hundreds of interviews with military personnel with direct connections to the disaster, Scorpion Down is the first book to tell what really happened. It's the first to reveal that the official Scorpion story—the sub's failure to make port, the frantic open-ocean hunt, the search that ultimately "found" the wreckage, and the Court of Inquiry's carefully crafted conclusions—was all a lie.

Ed Offley, Edward Offley (Author), Richard Ferrone (Narrator)

Audiobook