Randomizer

One should not assume that I am down on either the book or the Petersen film in its assorted incarnations, rather the opposite actually. My badly worn, dog eared copy of U-Boat, the title in the first paperback English languge editions (and subsequently changed to "The Boat" to cash in on the movie's success), was bought new in 1976. My oft-read paperback edition of Iron Coffins replaced an early hardcover edition bought while I was in high school in the sixties and lost in a minor flooding accident. So I am intimately familier with both, I grew up with these two works and consider them indispensible to any Battle of the Atlantic library.

My issue is with those who read nothing else and accept them unreservedly as "Historical Fact", and sadly there are a significant number of Members of this Forum who tend to do just that.

Anybody who reads Buchheim should make the effort to read its best (in my opinion) Allied counterpart, Nichlolas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea or at least have a movie marathon and watch Das Boot and the 1950's Jack Hawkin's movie based on Monsarrat's book back to back. Two sides of the Battle of the Atlantic coin by eloquent veteran's of that conflict. Both should be considered historically important for context but essentally useless as reference material.

The supposedly factual Iron Coffins is like many unsourced autobiographies and first-person narratives, it's both entirely self-serving and full of easily debunked errors and inconsistancies that throw the credibility of the author into a poor light over those parts of the book that do not have independent corroboration. As an aside the bulk of U-Boat veterans treated Herbert Werner much the same as they treated Buchheim and for many of the same reasons. I find it more than a little ironic that two German authors, largely shunned by their veteran peers at home should find themselves so lionized by their former enemies.

For novels, The Cruel Sea and Das Boot certainly deserve inclusion with great war fiction, sharing memorable company with All Quiet on the Western Front, The Red Badge of Courage, August 1914, A Rumor of War, Good Soldier Svejk, Bomber and Run Silent Run Deep.

Being a good story is not the same thing as being good history.

Edited to correct one factual error, A. Solzhenitsyn's great book of the Battle of Tannenburg is titled August 1914 not just 1914. My error, had to check the bookself to make sure.