Of Germany’s 842 U-boats operational in the Second World War, no fewer than 779 were sunk—“iron coffins,” as Captain Herbert Werner called them, to some 28,000 submariners. Yet back in 1939 that outcome was anything but certain, indeed Winston Churchill stated in his war memoirs that “The only peril that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.”
When Herbert Werner first went to sea aged twenty in April 1941 in U-557, U-boats were sinking British ships twice as fast as they could be built; he himself took part in the sinking of five merchantmen in that vessel. When he became first watch officer of U-612 in April 1942, Germany seemed to be winning the all-important Battle of the Atlantic. That submarine was lost through accident in August 1942, although much of her crew survived and were transferred to U-230, of which Werner became first lieutenant. By the time he reached his own command—of the 769-ton U-415 in April 1944—the Battle of the Atlantic had been comprehensively lost.
Werner’s account of the war at sea is intensely personal, often reading like a novel. It became an instant bestseller on publication in 1969 and has rarely been out of print since, largely because of its taut prose style and electrifying story. “U-230 set out to sea at dusk,” opens Chapter 15, for example. “We took advantage of a moonless night and separated from our convoy as soon as the cliffs receded into darkness. We steered a south-westerly course, a straight line into ‘Death valley.’” Anyone who enjoyed the TV series Das Boot will love this true-life story of courage, endurance, camaraderie, but ultimately murderous intent.
Werner was only able to make two (as it turned out, abortive) sorties before U-415 struck an air-laid mine off Brest. He survived, and later took command of U-953 patrolling in Norway and the Baltic until the German surrender. He died in Florida in 2013. Iron Coffins is one of the best-written accounts of the war from the German point of view: gritty, immediate, largely unapologetic, but honest about what he called “a miserable, obscene war, where able-bodied men and sophisticated machines were employed to exterminate the helpless and harmless,” although in that quotation he was referring to the Allied bombing offensive rather than himself.
