Visitors at The National World War II Museum heard from Stephen O. Sears, author of Sunniland, a novel following a young geologist in Florida monitoring the development of a new oil well while facing a German U-boat rampage taking place in the nearby Gulf of Mexico in the spring of 1943.

In 1942 and 1943, German U-boats sank more than 100 tankers in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea, blocking the flow of crude oil to refineries in the northeastern United States. In response, the American government encouraged drilling in South Florida, resulting in the discovery of oil by a wildcat well in the Everglades. During this time, four German saboteurs landed by U-boat in Florida, and were caught and subsequently executed.

These apparently unrelated and largely forgotten historical facts serve as the backdrop of Sunniland, the extraordinary adventure of Jerry MacDonald, a young geologist who travels south from Manhattan to Florida with his wife, Maria, in the spring of 1943, dispatched to interpret the geological findings as a wildcat well is drilled in the wilderness of the Everglades. Faced with constant questions about his civilian status while his contemporaries are joining the Armed Forces, guilt and uncertainty comingle with the pleasure of a trip to an exotic location.

Jerry and Maria arrive at the small town of Everglades City to find an isolated village that exemplifies the culture of the Deep South in the middle of the 20th century. The challenges of setting up a drilling rig in the marshy terrain of the Everglades and spudding a wildcat well preoccupy Jerry, while Maria finds work as a bartender in the Turner Hotel. As the well is drilled, the German U-boat rampage in the nearby Gulf of Mexico violently collides with the lives of the MacDonalds, the drilling crew, and the inhabitants of the Everglades.

Sears grew up in South Florida, boating and fishing off the Florida Keys and in the Everglades. He studied geology at the University of Florida and earned a PhD in geochemistry from Penn State. Following a career as a petroleum geologist with Shell Oil in Texas, California, and Louisiana, Sears joined the faculty of the LSU Petroleum Engineering Department in 2005. His interest in the German U-boat campaign of World War II originated in 2001, when he was on an oil field vessel that discovered the sunken U-166 on the Gulf of Mexico seafloor near the wreck of the torpedoed freighter SS Robert E. Lee. The author of over 40 technical, scientific, and general interest publications on geology, engineering, and higher education, Sears lives with his wife, Barbara, in Mandeville, Louisiana.