[Hitman]

I heartly support this thread as long as it keeps civil, the idea of confrontating the facts narrated in teh book versus real life records is good.

Having said that, I would like to add my 2 cents about the book here:

-Writing an interesting book is not easy, specially if you are narrating historic facts. Life aboard an U-Boat was most of the time boring, and it is logical that Werner spiced up things a bit. The book must be understood in its full object, it depicts well first years of glory and then hell, both in the U-Boat and outside it, as well as how people evolved and changed during the war.

-When Werner wrote the book, most of the historical facts and figures were not available to him. If he just sat down and started writing off his memory, it is understandable that many things came up being inaccurate. I would have troubles being completely exact in remembering important things that happened ten years ago, so I guess for Werner it was the same.

-Werner's position and functions in the U-Boat would not always have allowed him the best picture of the battle. Probably many of the things he narrates were in fact just heard by him, not seen directly.

-Werner doesn't entitle himself with a higher rank, in the german Navy it was customary to call the skipper the "Kommandant", which is frequently translated to english using the similarly looking word "commander", but has a slightly different meaning. For the britians, a commander is a military rank mostly, if referring to the guy who commands a ship they use rather "skipper" or a generic "captain" (Not referred to the real military rank). A german Kommandant is therefore simply the skipper, and you can confirm this if you look at the WW2 german navy ranks and notice that there is no rank called "Kommandant" (There is a captain though, the "Kaptain zur See").

Cheers

EDIT: I cross-posted with Stiebler, but we ended up saying more or less the same! Cheers!