In the kriegsmarine, when an officer was placed in command of a U-boat or ship he was referred to as a "commander" even though his rank might only be comparable to a Lt. Jr Grade.

in fact it was not uncommon for an officer that junior to be a u-boat commander.

Not uncommon in any navy. US PT-boat 'Captains' were indeed J.G.s a good deal of the time, with even the ocassional Ensign.

Interesting that not one disagreement with the OP actually disagrees. Excuses don't constitute accuracy. The book is not accurate. The reason for the inaccuracies are irrelevant. The question is, what is the nature of Iron Coffins and what is it good for? RoaldLarson's research is pretty impressive and I look forward to further installments.

The difference between Pacific war and Atlantic war aficionados is quite interesting, with the Pacific people looking at a variety of sources and having no sacred cows, but the Atlantic people defending their Das Boot and Iron Coffins like some holy scriptures. They are not. They are a small part of the body of works which must be considered as a whole to try to determine the truth about the past. Filtering everything through flawed works, written for non-historical purposes makes no sense whatever. It is like trying to reconstruct the American Civil War through Gone with the Wind.

Is Gone with the Wind a good and entertaining book? Sure, I guess. That doesn't make it valid source material on which to base our impressions of the Civil War. Perhaps Ubi should recreate the Battle of Atlanta in a new game. And gamers could call it the "Gone with the Wind" experience, as some have called SH3 the "Das Boot experience." The Das Boot experience is not the World War II U-Boat experience. Nothing wrong with living within that fantasy, but might as well buy that Star Trek uniform and practice your Vulcan salute.

" The difference between Pacific war and Atlantic war aficionados is quite interesting, with the Pacific people looking at a variety of sources and having no sacred cows,"
And what would those sources be? The ones written by the victorious allies perchance,:hmmm: Well they will be balanced and unbiased won't they:nope:
Or the japanese,sadly they're records are few and far between if surviving at all.It seems strange that anything written by the vanquished is fair game for criticism and derision and is obviously the work of fiction,where as the the allies have only ever written a balanced,fair and honest account of our tremendous victory:shucks:(Apart from the Ruskies,Stalin,communism,cold war and all that:shifty:)
Unfortunately thats not strictly true,Even the official history's of the allies contradict each other,and at times have blaring inconsistencies that are laughable if they were not so ridiculous.
My point being is that were are you going to get a fair,true and unbiased account of these type of events,its just not going to happen.
The official accounts carry to much hand wringing and patriotic flag waving,the unofficial accounts by the allied soldiers themselves are marginalised and pushed to the fringes for fear that they may put blots on the big picture:nope:
And as for the losers,can they ever be hoped to have any account that they write to be taken seriously and honestly,Hardly ever.
The stigma and tarnish of nazism and Japanese imperialism means that most are dissmissed out of hand as being fictional at best,self serving at worst.
I suppose the biggest problem I have with all the criticism that is levelled at works like this,is the justification that we should not trust it cause it is self serving and inaccurate,and to prove it,here is a document or book written by someone else which is unbiased,true,honest and in no way written by someone with an axe to grind:nope:
Please,do me a favour,where do you think they got they're facts from.

Iron Coffins has been my favorite U-boat book since I first read it in the 70s. I would not be surprised if it has inaccuracies, intentional or not, most memoirs do, as several here have pointed out. Still a great work.

Another thing to keep in mind, U-boat and US sub commanders frequently claimed sinkings and hits that did not happen. Not out of deceit, but often in the heat of battle they would assume an explosion was a torpedo hit and a stricken ship was sunk. After the war JANAC stripped a lot of sinking from the records of US skippers. So, Werner may have heard from Paulssen or Siegman that such and such ships had been hit and sunk, etc.

What would have triggered my BS detector would have been a lot of unsubstantiated claims of sinkings when Werner was in command of his boat. He didn't.

Iron Coffins, always sticks in my mind for the best last line of any book I ever read.

Yes, well put Neal.

So before people get all bent out of shape over this ( again ), and there has already one thread closed due to this ( Hitman alluded to this earlier in this thread ). Take Iron Coffins for what it is, a book from one U-Boat Commander regarding his experiences in the Kriegsmarine. Just one contribution to the massive Battle of the Atlantic history.

Of course I agree with part of your statement, you are right in that accurancy is not perfect in the book, and it is not intended as an excuse.

But, using the same criteria with Richard O'Kane we could say that neither "Wahoo: The patrols of america's most famous submarine", or "Clear the Bridge!" are then historically correct books either. O'Kane described sinkings that, according to JANAC and Clay Blair simply didn't happen. In fact, you can notice in some chapters of the book a bit of irony when he describes certain sinkings, insisting in how wrecked the target was and how certain he was. When you read that in the book...you will know that it is a sinking denied by JANAC ;)

Anyway, sinkings and specific operations apart, Iron Coffins does a great job of telling us how the author felt during the war, and how many of his commarades felt. The historical accurancy in that point can't be discussed, I think.:yep:

So my point is:

Want historical data about operations or sinkings? Forget Iron Coffins or Clear the Bridge! and pick Blair's or Gannon's impressive researches.

Want historical data about feelings and impressions? Look no further: Iron Coffins and Clear the Bridge are it.

:up:

:damn: You would have to say that while I'm at work and don't have my copy to see what you're talking about. :rotfl:

Whenever reading first-hand wartime accounts, the expression, "Hours of boredom, punctuated by seconds of terror," comes to mine. It is, what it is.

Eye-witness accounts of crimes often go awry in court as well. A tip-o-the-hat to H. Werner for "strapping it on" for his country.

How interesting. I found the review I wrote of Iron Coffins back in early 2005, more than a year before I started writing for Subsim! Perhaps I should read the book again and re-review it. Here's my original review, completely unedited:

"...What a miserable, obscene war, where able-bodied men and sophisticated machines were employed to exterminate the helpless and the harmless... Death on a gigantic scale had become so routine that life itself seemed rather odd and irrelevant, and all the once commonplace joys of life seemed abnormal, ludicrous, and weird...

Background
Iron Coffins is one of those stories that just seems to incredible to be true. 75% of crews assigned to German U-boats never returned. But perhaps none of the other 25% were so lucky as Herbert Werner.

At the age of 19, Werner, a "newfound warrior, all full of wind and smoke" enlisted in the German Kriegsmarine. In 1941 he was assigned as a petty officer onboard U-557. During the next four years, he served aboard four other German submarines. He survived thousands of depth charges and aerial bombs, participated in several major convoy battles, escaped to Norway in the last surviving French-based U-boat, and lived to tell about it.

He commanded his own boat in the war s last desperate months, while nine in every ten boats that put too sea never returned. Werner s memoirs may be one of the most remarkable survival stories of the Second World War. It is also a story of the futility of war; by the end, Werner has lost everything he knew and loved, and is thoroughly disgusted with his nation s policies and the war itself. But which parts of his story are actually true, and which are made out of whole cloth?

The Story (as Werner tells it)
Iron Coffins begins in April 1941, when young Herbert Werner is assigned to the 5th U-boat flotilla in Kiel. He joins the crew of U-557, under command of Ottokar Paulshen. It is not long before U-557 begins its first war patrol in the Northern Atlantic.

U-557's first three forays into the North Atlantic are nearly identical. Each time, U-557 participates in wild nighttime surface attacks on allied convoys, destroying merchant vessels with devastating precision. Each time, the Allied escort vessels prove ineffective in their counterattacks. When U-557 returns to port, the crew are hailed as heroes, and get all the wine and women they could possibly want.

After three grueling patrols, Werner is promoted to Oberleutnant and assigned as first Watch Officer aboard U-612, commanded by Paul Siegmann. In August of 1942, U-612 is struck astern by another U-boat, sinking with the loss of two men. The surviving crew is quickly re-assigned to U-230.

After a long absence from the sea, February 1943 finds Werner in a new war. The British have begun installing radar on their patrol planes, making the Bay of Biscay more difficult to cross. Despite the increased Allied presence, U-230 is still able to tear away seven merchants in a series of epic convoy battles.

The next patrol brings U-230's crew closer to death than ever before. Much of it takes place during May 1943, during the infamous (for the Germans) "Black May" anti-U-boat counteroffensive, during which 38 U-boats were destroyed. Miraculously, U-230 survives concentrated allied aircraft and destroyer attacks, each time escaping by the skin of it's teeth. The tide of the Battle of the Atlantic has suddenly turned...

Commentary
Iron Coffins can be viewed as an allegory for the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. In the beginning, we see Werner as a handsome young sailor, drunk with victory and unceasing in his belief of a crushing allied defeat. By the end, he is an old man at 25, commanding a dilapidated submarine on hopeless missions for uncaring superiors.

For much of the book, I wondered just why Admiral Donitz kept sending poorly-trained men to their deaths in obsolete diving machines, with little hope of stopping allied war material from pouring into Europe. Did the U-boat men honestly believe that their sacrifices were truly worthy, that they could turn the tide in the last few months?

Again and again, Werner and his comrades are promised new wonder weapons that will decide the war in Germany's favor. They never come, and one by one, the U-boat force is reduced to a pitiful shadow of its former self.

The last third of Iron Coffins reads more like a continuous cliff-hangar than a methodically-paced submarine warfare tale. In a span of perhaps 18 months, Werner manages to survive mining Chesapeake Bay, the Straits of Gibraltar, an aborted attack on the Normandy invasion fleet, incompetent chief engineers, air raids, and hundreds of depth charges. Did I mention he survived the Allied blockade of the Bay of Biscay and commanded the last U-boat to escape from France?

So What's wrong?
Earlier in this review, I mentioned that parts of Iron Coffins seemed to be "made out of whole cloth". For quite some time, I took Iron Coffins to be the "gospel truth" of life aboard a German U-boat in World War II. A little research proved me dead wrong; in fact, it seems that Werner outright invented entire convoy attacks, leaving me to believe that the entire book may be outright fabrication.

In actuality, U-557 sank a single 7,000 ton merchant on her first patrol. Werner has included a prolonged nighttime convoy attack, inflating the patrols total to seven merchants sunk, for 37,000 tons. On her third patrol, Paulshen & crew sank a single 4,000 ton merchant. Once again, Werner has U-557 engaging in a night surface attack, sinking six ships for 32,000 tons.

The fabrication doesn't end there. During U-230's first patrol with Werner as first watch officer, a single 2,800-ton merchant was sunk. Somehow, this has been increased to seven for 35,000 tons. The narrative of U-230's fourth patrol also omits the sinking of two British Tank Landing Ships. Finally, Werner describes attacking an Allied convoy in January 1945, observing at least three distinct torpedo hits. Official records fail to credit him with damaging or sinking a single vessel.

In Conclusion
U-boat historian Jurgen Rohwer said of Iron Coffins, "If one were to pencil in with red all the factual mistakes in this book, it would look like a bloodbath". Perhaps he is right. Herbert Werner has created a gripping and ultimately tragic story, but is it simply a novel?

I cannot help but wonder why Werner felt the need to falsify the successes of his former commanders. Paul Siegmann and Ottokar Paulshen were not the Aces of the Deep that the author makes them out to be.

It's somewhat of a shame really. Iron Coffins is one of the few memoirs written by a German military officer who survived the last violent months of the war. For once, people got a chance to see German submariners as actual human beings, not inhuman piratish thugs. It also gives a vivid account of a crumbling Germany, and how the war affected civilians, including Werner's own family.

The emotional scars from World War II still affected Herbert Werner in 1969. In his introduction, he dedicates the book to seamen of all nations who died in the war. He goes so far as to say the book is a lesson, "that war is evil, that it murders men".

However, I do not feel that gave him reason to outright lie about his war record. It is with some trepidation that I give Iron Coffins the title of wartime fiction. A remarkable story of survival, yes, but still a novel.

It is not a particularly difficult book to read, though the English translation is a bit clumsy at times. Most readers should be able to finish it in under a week. If you have no interest in submarine warfare, you'll probably find yourself bored with this book. If you eat it up, give it a look, but don't take it as 100% truthful. I give it four stars based on it's value as a war story, not as a memoir.

I'm glad you know my library. I've lost a book, in fact and wonder if you could tell me where it is? Operation Thunderhead is the title. In fact my library does contain Japanese books and they are invaluable. But you knew that.:D Why resort to personal attack when we are talking about a difference of behavior in people which is neutral. By the way, have you read this book here, The Threshold of Hell, by Albert Rupp of the Grenadier, or Torpedoman, by Ron Smith? Surely you would sing a different tune than sarcasm if you had. I've found a similar well-rounded collection of books in a plurality of Pacific War afficianados.

But a monocular concentration on Iron Coffins or Das Boot dominates U-Boat fans. There is SO MUCH more out there, and it will increase, not decrease your appreciation of those two as you divide truth from fiction, appreciating both in those two utterly dominating and iconic works. They've sucked all the oxygen out of the air, much to the detriment of U-Boat fans.

It's unpredictable when a single book or movie will capture a critical mass of people's imaginations and drive a tunnel vision mentality. Star Wars did it and it was considered a lightweight movie when it came out, nothing special. Until people actually started seeing it and speaking to friends who had seen it. Star Wars achieved critical mass and is an economic powerhouse today. It would be foolish to say that because so many have formed an obsession with and been thoroughly entertained by the Star Wars universe that Star Wars represents accurate history or authentic experience. But that is the rationale of Iron Coffins and Das Boot fans. To them the U-Boat experience IS the Das Boot or Iron Coffins experience. Nothing wrong with that, but people should admit it and that the books are not reliable factually without getting personally defensive as if somebody burned their Bible.

I would compare Iron Coffins with Edward Beach's Run Silent Run Deep trilogy: Run Silent Run Deep, Cold is the Sea and Dust on the Sea. Except that Edward Beach does not pretend to be writing anything but fiction. And he wasn't polishing his resume. Writing an intellectually honest book, Beach fills all three volumes with enough information to turn you into a great sub captain in Pacific or Atlantic, with all the "do it in your head" rules of thumb and calculations laid out in beautiful simplicity. He obviously used incidents from real submarines, but didn't feel the need to take credit for others' accomplishments or embellish his own record. The RSRD trilogy is what Iron Coffins could have been if written with honesty. I wonder why it didn't occur to Werner to just be honest by writing a book of historical fiction. Oftentimes, more of the flavor of the experience can be transmitted authentically through historical novel than through a non-fiction history. (I especially reference Newt Gingrich's incredible Gettysburg: a Novel of the Civil War.) Werner certainly would have avoided the near unanimous scorn of U-Boat veterans. It is hard to imagine that their scorn is not earned.

For me that spot has for forty years belonged to the last sentence in HG Wells' War of the Worlds, "But the strangest thing of all is to look at my wife and know that I have considered her, and she has considered me, among the dead."

That may not be a perfect quote, but it's close. And unforgettable.

I feel it is worth noting that JANAC was re-evaluated and some claims stripped from submarines were given back. (Now if I only had proof of this at my finger-tips :03:).

One of the biggest problems with JANAC was the people (branches of service) involved with crediting ships sunk. To the best of my recollection, there wasn't a submarine officer on the board. Use Barb's foray into that shallow harbor that earned Fluckey the CMOH: Most of those sinkings were stripped by JANAC. Why? Because the Navy Air went in there and bombed the hulks that were sitting on the bottom. Planes got JANAC credit. Eye-witnesses of the actual events say the ships were sunk at night by a submarine...

Other problems JANAC itself had to cope with was the abysmal record keeping of the Japanese regarding sinkings. One of the reasons for this problem was that Japan had three merchant fleets. One for the Army, one for the Navy and one for general mercantlie trade and cargo hauling. These 3 divisions seldom communicated with each other (one the reasons for poor convoy practices) and the records of what sank when were scattered all over. And the Japanese had a penchant for not writing down losses.

I will not dispute that there were many over-claims and errors made when claiming ships sunk. There were :yep:! But US submarines most likely did better than JANAC credits allow. The true score will never be known because of the problems of record keeping I already mentioned. Allied (and German) records were much better and there is less doubt as to scores in the Atlantic.

Back to Topic: I like Iron Coffins. I got it from my 1st order from the Military Book Club when I was (I think) 13-14 years old--about 36 years ago. There is no doubt that is "spruced up" to make it a better read. Without doubt, it is fiction. For accuracy, I have a few other books like Hitler's Uboat War. Dry reading but accurate ;).

Now I'll try to find some proof of what I've written (or maybe not :haha:).

I have to agree that the amount of elapsed time between the events and the writing of the book, plus the paucity of notes, were a real handicap and explain all sorts of minor inaccuracies of dates and sequencing. I also agree that one can hardly expect a memoir to be written to the same standard as a history (though see Alan Brooke’s memoirs as an example of a memoir that is of a higher standard than some histories, but he had access to his own detailed diaries.) Please understand I am not criticizing this book merely because it is not entirely accurate. Under the circumstances many inaccuracies can be forgiven. My criticism is that Werner has passed off as fact things that he must know are false.

I know in which half of which month I graduated, even though it has been more years than elapsed between Werner’s graduation in Flensburg and when he wrote the book. I can remember my professions’s equivalent of how many sinkings occurred on my first patrol, 28 years ago. I expect that most retired quarterbacks can tell you how many touchdown passes they threw in their first professional game. (or professional strikers tell you how many goals they scored.) I doubt that many would remember six if they only had one in their first game and never had six in a single game in their entire career. I doubt that there are very many people who have vivid memories of seeing six ships sink on their first patrol, when only one ship was actually sunk. He claims more sinkings on his first patrol on U-557 than occurred in all of his patrols on that boat put together. This is not a matter of mistaken memory or mixing up dates.

His claims are also not a matter of ships claimed sunk that the crew of U-557 thought were sunk but turned out to be end of run detonations, non-fatal hits, or hits by other boats. They are not hits that were reported to him by others. The claims are ones he says he saw with his own eyes. He describes feeling shockwaves on his face. He described debris raining down around him. He describes the impacts, the damage to the target, the manner in which the ships sank. These are not “hazily inaccurate” recollections. These are crystal clear. And they are false. And he knows it.

His claims are not ones that he got second-hand from Paulssen and Siegman. We know this, not only because of Werner’s descriptions of the sinkings, but also because we have records of what Paulssen and Siegman reported back to BdU. On the first patrol, Paulssen radioed a claim of one sinking. It occurred at a time that Werner claims U-557 was surveying the oil slick at the site of the Bismark’s sinking. We know from the position reports of U-557 and from the record of orders issued by BdU to U-557 that it was never at that location. And we know from the records of HX-128 that the ship Paulssen claims to have sunk was indeed sunk when and where he claims it was sunk.

It is just not reasonable, Stiebler, Hitman, and nikbear, to discount his lies about sinkings as honest error. Werner's account should not be read as being “as accurate and honest as memory permitted”. There is no way his writings about sinkings, the deviation to the Bismark sinking site, or some other events can be explained as honestly mistaken memory. Neither is it reasonable to put it in company with the majority of military memoirs, which though they contain error, do not contain claims which the authors must know to be false. Yes, there are some self-serving dishonest military memoirs, but I condemn them too.

So if Werner lied about the number of kills made by his first two commanders, why didn’t Werner deliberately exaggerate the number of his own kills? Because to claim successes at the time he was in command would run contrary to his thesis. He needs a large contrast between his experience in the earlier part of the war and the later part. His own actual experiences don’t have such a great contrast, so he makes it up. We know he exaggerates many fold the successes of the u-boats at the start of his career. I suspect he also exaggerates the dangers faced late in his career.

As to the relatively minor point about the use of the term “Commander” next to his name on the cover, I don’t know whether it is even Werner’s fault. Generally the publisher is responsible for cover design. My understanding is that the English language version of Iron Coffins is the original. It is not a translation of a work first published in German. It was published (and probably written) in English. Therefore the use of “Commander” on the cover is not a simple matter of (mis-)translation from the German or of appropriation of German usage. When an American publisher uses the term “Commander John Doe” to identify somebody it is understood to be a designation of rank, not a description of responsibility. If they wanted to convey the fact that he had been the commanding officer of a u-boat they should have (and I think would have) said “U-boat Commander John Doe”. ”. I note that at least one edition of the book gives the author as simply Herbert. A. Werner, without the “Commander”.

This does get to the question of who is responsible for the untruths (not the mistakes) in the book. If it is, as was suggested by nikbear, the publisher who pressured Werner to “spice things up”, I would have to say that an honourable man would not give in to such pressure. On the other hand, if Werner lies about the number of sinkings he was involved with, it is not unreasonable to assume that he may have mislead his publisher about his rank as well.

I think that Subnuts' review comes close to summing it up.

I'm sorry if my comments RR came across as some sort of personal attack,they were not meant as that
I was just trying to get across the fact that any book,regardless of who wrote it,whether it be official or personal,whether it was written at the time or written sometime later in a library,by a dusty historian with facts and figures at his fingertips,doesn't make it any more true or worthy just because it happens to fit the accepted or ones own personal version of events
After reading many personal accounts of combat the first thing that strikes you is how different they are from the official accounts,there is confusion,chaos and half the time utter FUBAR all over the place.
To give you two examples,the first "The battle for Normandy 1944" by Robin Neillands in which he give's you the official account,both American and British,and then gives you interviews with soldiers who were there corresponding with each phase of the battle.
And the one thing that strikes you time and again is how incorrect the official accounts are,and how angry veterans get by the inaccuracies and the implied friction between the allied forces,something the men on the ground never felt or experienced.
The other example is "The forgotten soldier" by Guy Sajer.Its his account of war on the eastern front while fighting with the Grosse Deutschland division in Russia.
In it there are inaccuracies,dates wrong and passages in which he freely admits that he can't tell you what happened,who he killed or where he even was.
So total was the colapse of the eastern front that barely an official account exists,Front lines and scratch divisions were formed and overun before they could even be drawn on a map.His account matches no official account for what exists,because how could it? All around him was a state of constant flux,nothing was permenant.
Does it make it any less truthfull or worthy cause the things he talks about and saw are supposed not to have happened.No
Does the anger felt by D-day vets at the incompetence of they're leaders and the after war blame game they used to deflect blame from them selves any less worthy because it doesn't tally with the official account,No
If anything just these two out of a miriad of millions of accounts prove that if anything,they are far more worthy than any official account could ever be,or any historian could ever write!
And if they don't tally with the Official account of events,then thats fine by me,I would rather read it from men who were there,at the sharp end where it all happened,inaccuracies and all,Than read it from a thousand statatitions,pencil pushers,library historians or johnny come lately armchair warriors who re-fight long won wars from the comfort of their front room or college class room.