Now THAT sounds like a lot that I've written. However your analogy of the ground pounder account of an action vs. the official account doesn't tally with what we have here. Those are more like the accounts of the torpedo man or engineer serving aboard a boat he does not command. Find and read Torpedoman, by Ron Smith for a perfect example of what you are talking about. Now, this is a piece of historical fiction, but a cursory reading reveals that there is a lot more real life here than Mr. Smith lets on. It's a poorly written book, language-wise, a bit crudely executed and that lends an authenticity unmatched by sterile after war analyses.

However, as mentioned before, Werner claims perfect knowledge. What he "remembers" are things that no captain could ever forget. I like the analogy of the football quarterback not remembering how many touchdown passes he threw. The numbers and experiences Werner misrepresents are of central importance and unforgettable to the man. The near unanimous opinion of his fellow U-Boaters is that he did not write an honest book. When in doubt I default to respecting his peers. However, in this case, doubt is not a problem.

That doesn't mean that Iron Coffins is not a terribly engaging, entertaining, rip-roaring book full of good generic portrayals of U-Boat life and appropriate moral commentary. It is a very good read, and a great introduction to learning about the U-Boat war. But it is the beginning, not the end of that process. In the pursuit of that process the opinions of RoaldLarson, Subnuts and the rest of the U-Boat sailors of all ranks will be shown to be true. There is no conflict between saying that the book is a good read and questioning the honesty of the author when he claims to be writing a book of non-fiction and it can be shown that central facts, which he must have known intimately, were misrepresented.

That's not exactly what I said. I said that some erroes might be honest errors, and other irrealistic episodes are there to spice up the book. :yep:

The thing is, leaving aside the sinkings described in the book, I still think it offers a good representation of how the life was for the U-Boat men, and specifically their feelings. I believe that's the ultimate message of the book, not the concrete sinkings or successes, which honestly never bothered me too much as they were IMO always a secondary matter.

Quote:

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.

Now this is a very interesting conclusion. My only beef is not with this conclusion, I just find it interesting. My beef is...what is the purpose of ripping the author and this book apart? A means to what end? It is a great book and provides a good picture of what happened in the boats. Would the book have lost any of it's meaning if the attack accounts were omitted? I would say no. Some classify it as fiction..well perhaps in the passages concerning the attacks but the overall depiction of the wars end and what the uboats crews were enduring is not IMO fiction. I would say it is darn close to what one man endured and experienced.

The thing that fascinates me most is out of every book I've read about submarine/U-boat warfare,from both world wars,There is not a single account of a commander who hasn't claimed to have sunk at least one ship of which there is no historical record of a ship being lost on that day,of that Type,that position:hmmm:
I know that by its very nature,submarine warfare precludes confirming everything that goes on in the heat of battle,but can it really be that submariners are prone to telling whoppers when they get back to port:06::rotfl:

I would have to say the same thing Nikbear come to think of it.

I agree 100%.

You can read Blair and Patterson's books on U-boat operations and know the actual true events that happened in terms of patrols, attacks and ships sunk, but it seems very removed from the actual feel of being on a boat and almost clinical.

For that, we turn to books like Iron Coffins, Das Boot and Steel Boats, Iron Hearts. While the misremembered or fabricated details of which ships were sunk where and inflated tonnage numbers are evident, that's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. These books give you an insight into the mindset and life on the boats.

I disagree because that's a pretty blanket statement to make. Sure, you can take Werner to task by intentionally lying on some of the facts, but does that mean he was inaccurate when he said that the boat was filthy, mechanical breakdowns were common and the crew was fearful for their lives? I doubt it.

Having read a fairly wide selection of books on the U-boat war, both academic and biographical, I take some offense to that statement. You could just as easily say that Pacific war fans cling to Clear the Bridge and Thunder Below as their holy scriptures to the exception of all else.

While I agree that Das Boot and Iron Coffins are not the be all and end all, there's much in those books that frames the U-boat war in a human perspective and that's what I'm looking for when I read those books. I've got quite a collection of U-boat books and have read the books by guys who were there like Teddy Suhren, Peter Cremer and Hans Goebbler and the picture they present isn't far off from what I've read in Das Boot and Iron Coffins. If I want factual information on who was where at what date and what they did there, I'll go to Blair. If I want a feeling of what it was like to be there, I'd say Das Boot and Iron Coffins are not inaccurate places to start.

I'm sorry, Hitman. You did indeed refer more than once to inaccuracies and spicing things up. My wording was clumsy and could leave the impression that I thought you were excusing all his false statements, but I know you were not.

My original draft had many quotations from several replies to my OP, but I editied them out because I thought it was making the new post unreadably long. Instead I referred by name to three of the posters who suggested possible reasons why Werner might have been mistaken. This could be taken to mean that they thought that Werner's false claims were honest error.

What I was mostly concerned about in your post was when you said
and especially While this could be true of "many of the things he narrates", it cannot be true of the falsely claimed sinkings or the fake trip to the Bismark sinking site, or some other false reports. I was concerned that your wording could be taken by some to reinforce the claims of others here which seek to excuse all inaccuracies as honest or understandable error, even though you do not actually do so yourself.

Clear the Bridge and Thunder Below do not dominate the Fleet Boat book pantheon like Das Boot and Iron Coffins do. Who has EVER referred to Silent Hunter 4 as "The Thunder Below Experience" or the "Clear the Bridge Experience?" Nobody has ever criticized Silent Hunter 4 saying it just doesn't convey the flavor of Thunder Below or Clear the Bridge. We get multiple threads about whether SH3 authentically conveys the Das Boat experience.

I think the timing and qualities of these two U-Boat books was such that they riveted the attention of essentially the whole world on those two works to the exclusion of all others. Where their proper function is as gateway books to all the others, including the ones you cite, leading to a deeper understanding of the U-Boat experience and a deeper appreciation of Das Boot and Iron Coffins, even as it reveals the inaccuracies within those works.

My statements above were meant to be general expressions of a plurality of U-Boat and Pacific War afficianados, not criticism of specific individuals. Of course, there are Pacific buffs who base their entire conception of the sub war on Thunder Below or Operation Petticoat for that matter!

Of course there are some U-Boat fans like you who own a well-balanced collection of books relating to the U-Boats and rightly judge Das Boot and Iron Coffins as two small pieces of a much larger and richer puzzle.

If I were to pick a book on the fleets and view it as golden:

'Wolf Pack. The American Submarine Strategy That Helped Defeat Japan'. Steven Trent Smith

No worries, nikbear. I'm not feeling personally attacked. We are just having a lively discussion about how to interpret a popular book about the u-boat war. As I proceed to torpedo your entire convoy of arguments, I hope you'll not take it as an attack on you personally, either. :03:

Absolutely.

What makes it true or worthy is whether the author actually believes what he is saying. This is different from the issue of whether the book is a useful source. What makes it a useful source is whether what it portrays is accurate. What I am arguing is that Werner can not possibly believe what he has written with respect to the number of sinkings, and some other important specific claims. That in turn must cast significant doubt on whether other claims in the book are accurate. This doubt renders the book useless as a reliable source for understanding what it was like on a u-boat in 1942-45. And I say this because there are those who persist, in this very thread, in claiming that Iron Coffins is a useful source for understanding what life on a u-boat is like.

Then there is the question about why he deliberately misleads the reader. As Neil Stevens correctly points out, Werner doesn't manufacture sinkings when he is finally in command of a boat. No, what he manufactures is dangers faced. My sugestion is that Werner is deliberately trying to portray an ever greater change in fortunes of the ubootwaffe than actually existed. And that means we cannot take as reliable what he portrays as the feelings of u-boat men toward their commanders or about their situation. I do not go so far as to say that he misrepresents these feelings. Only that we cannot accept them as being a reliably truthful account.

I was going to say "I haven't read this particular book." because I didn't recognize it from your description. However, after I looked up the book on the internet I discovered that not only have I read it, I own a copy of it in my collection of Normandy histories. I don't think that his book does what you think it does. It does not contradict any offical histories. It contradicts historical interpretations by a certain school of historians like Carlo d'Este, Max Hastings, and Norman Gelb, and moreso it seeks to correct a set of popular misconceptions fostered by the American entertainment industry. I like most of Neillands' interpretation, and his methodology. He relies on primary sources as much as possible. That includes interviews with veterans, but it also includes references to historical records.

I cannot say I have been struck by how incorrect the "official accounts" are. I don't know which offical accounts you are referring to. I have read some of the official histories of the Normandy campaign, some personal acounts, and some other histories of the campaign. I have come away with the impression that the official history of the Canadian Army is the most accurate.

Personal accounts of soldiers on the ground are a very different animal from offical accounts of a whole campaign. Personal accounts of soldiers are usually almost useless for any historical purpose, except undertanding what it felt like to be there. (one of many exceptions is George G. Blackburn's three volume memoir of his experiences as the longest serving allied FOO on the Western Front.)

However, let us take the case of the memoir of an American corporal who descibes how his platoon sergeant destroyed two SS Tiger tanks on the beaches of Normandy at about 09:30 on the day of the invasion, by dropping hand grenades down their hatches. It would seem you would rather believe his account, because he was there on the beach, than the offical accounts that say that the first German tanks to be engaged were Mark IVs of the 21st Panzer Division who counterattacked on the night of June 6th between the Canadians and the eastern British beachhead.

The problem with this corporal's account is that nobody else wrote about these Tigers, that the sergeant in question didn't say he had destroyed any tanks at this time, that aerial reconnasiance photos taken shortly after show no wrecked Tigers on the beach, that it is an objective fact that there were no Tigers within several kilometers of the landing beaches until days after the invasion and that Tigers were employed against the Canadians and British weeks before any came into contact with Amercans. What reason do we have to believe anything else this corporal has to say about what it was like to be on the beaches on D-Day?

That is the Normandy equivalent to Werner's fictional claims. Non-existant destructions of notable objects which provably were not there. You cannot explain away his lies by citing fog of war, confusion, FUBAR and discrepancies between other personal accounts and official histories.

I have highlighted the two very significant differences between Sajer and Werner's cases. Sajer freely admits he can't tell you what happened. He does his best to recollect what happend and admits he might have part of it wrong. Because there is no reliable historic record we don't know which part of Sajer's recollections are inaccurate so we have no way of knowing whether Sajer has attempted to mislead us. Werner on the other hand, gives vivid descriptions of events in great detail. There is a reliable, accurate historic record of sinkings of ships in convoys that proves that what he decribes did not happen. This is corroborated by the records of BdU.

The fact that there is no offical record of what happend does not mean that what Sajer describes is "supposed not to have happend". It means that there is no official record that contradicts Sajer. Therefore Sajer's account is not disproven. We don't know whether we can rely on it, except that Sajer himself say that in certain ways we cannot rely on it.

I can't really comment much on this because you haven't explained which "offical" accounts you claim it contradicts. In his introduction Neillands doesn't claim to contradict any "official" accounts. He sets out to bust myths that have propogated (particularly in American popular culture but which have spread into the historical consciousness of English-speaking countries.) However I will observe that you seem to be confusing the usefulness of historical interpretations with those of primary sources. Nellands is challenging certain (not all) historical interpretations. He relies on official records that constituted primary sources. Werner is contradicted by primary sources, not just by subsequent interpretations.

They prove no such thing, of course. (Well maybe they do - You haven't defined what you mean by "worthy", nor what you mean by "official account".)

So I ask, of what relevance are the Neillands and Sajer books to Werner? Are you suggesting that just because Neilland may have found some discrepancies between post-war interpretations of a land campaign and the recollections of some vets that we should doubt primary source documents we have from both sides that corroborate each other? Neillands doesn't. He cites primary source documents. Are you suggesting that just because some first-hand accounts are inaccurate because of fog of war and limited perspective and that some cannot be disproven because of a lack of records that we can't prove that Werner is lying?

I too would much rather have first-hand accounts from reliable sources than second-hand interpretations. However, I don't assume that just because somebody was there and tells an exciting story that he is telling me the truth. When somebody lies to me about one thing, I have no reason to believe he's telling me the truth when he talks to me about a related matter.

So because Werner was factually incorrect (whether intentionally or not) on spatial notions like dates, times, location or attacks, he therefore has nothing to offer on the thoughts and feelings he had as a U-boat commander? That makes no sense. :doh:

That is a good question, a fair question and a question that deserves to be answered. You and Mookiemookie provide examples for my motivation:


I have no doubt that you believe what you say, AVGWarhawk:
I just don't believe that what you say is well founded. Either part. "It is a great book". It is a book that contains lies about the most significant events it portrays. It "provides a good picture of what happened in the boats." How do you know? What does "good" mean in this context? It has a high degree of verisimilitude. It is exciting. By these standards, yes it is good. But if by "good' you mean "accurate", I ask again, how do you know? I suggest that it provides a slanted and inaccurate view of how things were in the boats; that it paints a too rosy picture early, and a too horrific picture late.

I would say yes. If Werner had accurately accounted for the attacks of his boats and on his boats, both early in his career and late, the difference would not be nearly so dramatic. The sense of despair and disillusionment he wishes to promote would not be nearly so acute.

I have no doubt that it is your opinion. But it is only an opinion, not an established fact. If you want to set aside the proven lies and assume that everything else is truth, go ahead. I see no logical reason to do so. I do not suggest that everything in the book is false. I suggest we have reason to doubt that all the rest is true. I suggest that it is provable that some claims beyond the sinkings are false, and there is no reason to think that the only false things in the book are those that are provably false.

My reason, in a nutshell, is that many submarine game afficianados are basing their understanding of u-boat life on unreliable sources. I want them to realize that the impressions they have taken from these sources may not be the correct ones. I have even seen Iron Coffins cited as a source for mod design decisions. I want an accurate simulation, not something dolled up to match fiction.

I agree. Blair, Patterson et al don't give the reader a lot of flavour. There is a need for different sources for the feel of being on a boat. In search of such information, many turn to Iron Coffins and Das Boot. Certainly they give the reader a lot fo "feel". But how accurate is that feel? Why should we take the word of a proven liar on the subject of u-boat matters?

They give you an insight, yes. How do you know they give you an accurate insight? Sinking claims are not the only lies in the book. I would suggest to you that the false claims about sinkings are part of an attempt to misrepresent the historical context. This in turn could lead to a misunderstanding of the atmosphere in which u-boat crews operated. I suggest that Werner's motivation would lead him to misrepresent feel as much as hard facts.

But I suggest that Iron Coffins frames it in a false human perspective. I would much rather rely on Suhren, Cremer and Goebbler, though IIRC Suhren got out of front boats around the end of the Second Happy Time, Goebbler was captured before D-Day so only Cremer's last combat patrol or two would match up with some of the experiences Werner describes during his commands.

To the extent that Iron Coffins isn't far off from these other sources, then it can be useful. However, whereever it differs, there is no reason to believe it. But that makes it totally irrelevant. It is only useful insofar as it is corroborated by other, more reliable sources. If you have the other sources, you have no need of Iron Coffins.

No.

First of all, the "that" at the beginning of the passage you quoted does not refer to mere inaccuracies. It matters whether it is intentional or not. "That" refers to deliberately inserted inaccuracies. Lies, not mistakes. A deliberate attempt to mislead. And this lying is done for a purpose. That purpose is consistent with misrepresentation on thoughts, feelings and experiences.

Secondly, the inaccuraces are not limited to "spatial notions like dates, times, location or attacks".

Thirdly, I do not say "he therefore has nothing to offer on the thoughts and feelings he had as a U-boat commander". Certainly he has much to offer. His life experience means he has much he could offer. I say we cannot tell whether what he actually does offer is genuine, without reference to corroborative sources. As an independent source, his proven dishonesty renders him next to useless.

Not meant to be a hijack, but I'm curious if anyone has read Erich Topp's "The Odyssey of a U-Boat Commander: Recollections of Erich Topp"?

I ask in this discussion because it is another personal memoir from a much more famous commander. I'd be interested if there are any "inaccuracies" and "spicing up" in it. I just never hear any mention of this book in most discussions.

I would love to read it but it is pretty pricey on Amazon for $103.00. For that price, I want some scantily clad female to deliver it for me. :sunny:

Sadly sharkbit,there are alot of books like that,that are not re-printed and are just to pricey:nope: But I must admit he's one of my favourite commanders,along with Luth and Suhren,and Kretschmer.Especially Suhren,His book "Memoirs of A U-boat Rebel" is wonderful:salute: