The officers are greeted with a rabble of inebriated crewmen along the road who crudely urinate on the vehicle as it drives by. The story begins with a bawdy drunken party as the crew prepares for its cruise. But that is a rabbit trail for some other time… I don’t think it would be a gimmick if executed in a very subtle manner. If I was to show this film in a theater, the only thing that could improve the experience would be the sense of smell – diesel fumes, exhaust, acrid smoke, the salty sea air, booze-breath, moldy bread, and so on. The film is lauded for its hard realism inside the hull, both mechanically and from the human perspective. Because of the way it was produced and the production of very careful sets, the film is said to truly capture the intense claustrophobia, stress, and cramped spaces of combat in a sub. The film is hailed by submariners from all eras as the only submarine film that is not visually and technically absurd. Yet some men survived, and U-96 was one of the very rare boats that actually was retired instead of sunk. The battle of the Atlantic became a very deadly affair for the Germans being assigned to crew a U-boat was almost a death sentence – three fourths of the men perished, many still resting in watery graves thousands of feet deep. As the allies adjusted tactics, ships travelled in large convoys with armed anti-submarine escorts, and aircraft technologies improved to give greater air range for overhead cover. Hunting in wolf-packs, Kriegsmarine submarines (or Unterseebooten in German, hence the term ‘U-boat’) were deadly predators, sinking a great number of allied ships, materials, supplies and personnel. The film follows the crew on a typical Atlantic cruise during the Battle of the Atlantic, a very costly and long-term effort to destroy allied shipping. So my U-boat reading and research had primed me to be ready to laugh at this film. I had launched into a minor research effort in 1998 to solve the (now-solved) mystery of where U-166 rested in the Gulf of Mexico in order to debunk some wild coastal rumors around Galveston, Texas. As one who has studied U-boat warfare for much of the last twenty years, I was excited to see this film long ago. This dual brain-trust formed a vast wealth of first-hand knowledge and is one of the chief reasons the film is hailed as a realistic portrayal of submarine warfare. Both Buchheim, as a war correspondent and writer who experienced one of U-96’s ‘tours’, and Lehmann-Willenbrock, who himself who survived the war, were technical advisors. It also stirs opinions in people like me who don’t wax eloquently over the film as if it was the pinnacle of wartime story-telling, but still recognize its unique place in cinema.Ī word of historical and technical interest up front – this German film and the novel it was inspired by were both based on the career of storied U-boat commander Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock and his famous Type VIIC U-boat, designated U-96. But the film has a place of high honor among those who value military history and technical accuracy in cinema. It was uncomfortable for the German people who had still not quite come to terms with their nation’s past. It was a risky effort for a German film maker to present wartime German men as merely humans and cast them in a positive light. What to say about the now-classic film Das Boot (1981)? This is director and screenplay writer Wolfgang Petersen’s most iconic work, and is based largely (but not precisely) on Lothar G.
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