From Michael Hadley's
Count Not The Dead:
Quote:
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Jurgen Rohwer, Germany's premier naval historian, savaged [Iron Coffins] in a scathing review. "If one wanted to underline the factual errors [in red], almost every page would be like a blood bath," he observed. On the basis of documentary evidence - some of which consisted of reports submitted by Werner himself during his wartime service - Rohwer condemned the book as sheer hyprocisy. Werner had spliced other submariners' achievements onto his own record, had wildly exaggerated circumstances and events, did not have access to witnesses on whom he claimed to draw, invented orders that never existed, and distorted statistics and records - all to sustain his charge that the naval leadership had irresponsibly "fuelled up" submariners to undertake suicidal missions.
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Others may be able to comment on specific items of contention in Werner's narrative. While
Iron Coffins is no doubt a great read, the most generous approach is probably to consider it a narrative drawn from one man's personal recollections, which are inherently subjective and prone to inaccuracy in some respects, rather than a well-researched and strictly factual account of "the way it was."
Das Boot stirred up a lot of controversy when it was published as well, but of course it was marketed and sold as a novel based on an assortment of real events, not a non-fiction retelling of them. It's also a great read and the paperback version is readily available from Amazon.
Also good are Peter Cremer's memoir - in the English version I have, I think the title is
U-333 - and Jordan Vause's books
Wolf and the one about Wolfgang Luth, the title of which I've forgotten. I found Michael Gannon's
Operation Drumbeat to be another compelling read.