One must remember that, at the time of writing, Werner could have had no access to official sources, such as KTBs, to verify facts. All these primary documents were locked away, for reasons unknown*, in the vaults of the British and American admiralties.
Werner was writing more than 20 years after the events he described. He claims himself that he is writing from memory, and, inevitably, he tends to focus on events that made a big impression on him. How much can SubSim members recall of events 20 years ago in their own lives? In fact, Werner has done a remarkable job of recall.
The British Admiralty sent trained interrogators to interview U-boat crews immediately after the German surrender in May 1945. Although the U-boatmen now lacked any reason to give false information, most of it was hazily inaccurate when cross-checked against actual events. A leading military historian of the British Admiralty's Naval Historical Branch once told me that he would not trust eye-witness accounts spoken just 2 years after the event without cross-checking, let alone after 20 or more years.
Werner's account should be read as being just as accurate and honest as memory permitted - and his memory was surprisingly good. His book can scarcely be beaten as an account of what it was like to be at sea in a U-boat, for which specific facts are not required, only general impressions. The only items of contention today are his heavy criticism of the direction of the U-boat war by Doenitz and BdU. Generally speaking, most other U-boatmen are less critical of Doenitz and BdU. With the considerable advantage of hindsight, I think that Werner had better insight than his fellow U-boatmen. BdU made some rather elementary blunders.
[*Well, maybe we can guess. The naval authorities lacked sufficient staff to read every KTB and related material to check that none contained references to Allied decryption efforts, which might have been too accurate for comfort, when Russia remained a large threat. So they released none of these records until other reports of the decryption of German codes were publicly released in the 1970s. After that, there was no point in delaying release of the KTBs.]
Stiebler.
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