Herbert A. Werner was a Kriegsmarine officer who, by his own reckoning, was one of only about "two dozen captains still alive" at the end of World War II. He served in five U-boats, as an Ensign, Executive Officer and Captain in the Atlantic Ocean, the English Channel, the North Sea, the Baltic, the Norwegian Sea and the Mediterranean. He survived the sinking of U-612 in the Baltic and the loss of U-415 in Brest harbour. At the end of the war, he was detained in turn by British, American and French troops before making his way back to Germany in late autumn 1945. He moved to the United States in 1957 and became an American citizen. Werner subsequently wrote a best-selling memoir of life in the U-boat service, en-titled "Iron Coffins".