I read Iron Coffins many times when I was a kid and recently purchased it to see how it held up. I immediately recognized many errors of course and was greatly disappointed. It felt as if an old friend had let me down but by the end of the book I was still glad I bought it.
If you recall the period of time he wrote the book, the late 1960's there was still a lot of misinformation about the actions of the U boat arm in WW2. I think Werner wanted to give a personal view of what it was like. I also think he wanted to get that story published. At a time when there were still plenty of veterans around, what publisher is he going to find to sell a book about U boats where no ships are sunk. Therefore I think he embellished (greatly) the events that happened under other skippers and perhaps some events after the war. As far as his own success as a skipper, I remember saying he made an attack and hearing explosions but not claiming he saw any ships sunk by his torpedoes. His accounts begin to ring true to me when he gets into his commands later in the war.
I don't think it was an ego thing, I think it was what was necessary to get a book published during that period of time. I think he was wrong to say it is all true and I hope it's flaws become widely know via the web, but that hardly makes him unique among WW2 memoir authors. I now see the book as one that does a good job of giving you a sense of what it must have felt like to survive those times.
PS: if he was mentally ill, it was not debilitating, I saw trucks from his post war business up and down the Eastern Seaboard of the US for decades
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