MOVIES - Das Boot

[Hobie]

This Saturday's movie in the shop is "Das Boot". There are some variations from history (it is a movie) and only one firearm I remember, a P38 but lots of sub action.

I remember having duty on a weekend and having long discussions about which was better, being an infantryman out in the open, a tanker, a pilot a waaaaay up there or a sailor a waaaaay out there. I picked infantryman. I can swim but there is something comforting about being able to lay completely still and still breathe...

Anyway it is a good movie.

[jnyork]

One of the best war movies ever made. I watch it whenever it comes on.

[deerwhacker444]

Great movie.! I don't like the dubbed version, it's much better to read the subtitles. They convey how hot, nasty and cramped one of the WWII subs must have been. I would have been scared beyond belief when they start depthcharging....

[awp101]

Saw the English dubbed version many moons ago on a vaction to an out of state family members house, probably still in Junior High. Read the book Freshman or Sophomore year of HS, kind of a slog since there are only so many ways you can describe an Atlantic storm. Then we watched it in German class with English sub-titles my Senior year.

I think I've only seen it once in the last 20 years but I keep hoping I'll run across the sub-titled version in a bargain bin at a store...

[Blaine]

A special sort of warrior, that's for sure.

[Charles]

Hobie... Your post reminded me of the Bill Mauldin WWII cartoon, where Willie and Joe the quintessencial Dog Face infrantrymen were digging a foxhole when a tank pulsl up. Willie looks up from his work and says to the tank commander.. "No thanks a moving foxhole attracts the eye".

[rjohns94]

I remember I was in Sub School when the subtitled version was out. The people in the class went to see it together. An awesome movie, especially that version.

[2ndovc]

One of my favorites!!

jb

[Gun Smith]

For those of you who suffer from claustrophobia, as I do, know that the thought of being under the sea in a submarine just sailing along, to say nothing of being depth charged, can make one physicaly ill.
Of course, I know that you are weeded out of any sub duty if you suffer from this phobia. And sub duty is volunteer service only.
Once, several years ago, I had the chance to take a tour of an atomic sub stationed at the sub base in San Diego. I got about 20 feet into the boat from the deck hatch and couldn't go further. I was with my brother and he goaded me on into the upper conning tower. And subs are called boats, instead of ships, any reason for this? After I looked around a bit I had to get out quick. For most of you who do not suffer from this condition, I envy you. It is very difficult for me to watch any sub movie. I can barely endure a short elevator ride, and flying is absolutely out!
I have seen the original dubbed film, and it was a fine film, but if I ever see it advertised again, I won't be able to watch it.

[Pathfinder09]

Das Boot is a fabulious movie. Having spent time on a diesel Submarine early in my naval career it is also one of the most realistic movies on the subject ever made. That is a very special movie. Gives you a whole new perspective on the German U boat sailor.

[rjohns94]

pathfinder, we share that, I served on 4 subs during my carreer.

Gun Smith, I feel for you and sorry that you suffer from that. My last sub, a three person Deep Submergence Vehicle, named Sea Cliff, was capable of diving to 20,000 feet of depth. I rember on my 40th birthday, I was below 19,000 feet, diving inside a volcano, taking temperature measurements of the water coming up through a hydrothermic vent. It took 4 hours to dive to that depth and about 4 hours to come up to the surface. For me, the best of times

[El Chivo]

That was good, Hobie you should also check out "Stalingrad" by the same director.

[Modoc ED]

Great movie.

Ya shoulda gone Navy Hobie. Three hot meals a day and a clean rack. No need to sleep in the dirt or eat out of a can or paper sack unless ya want to do something silly like be a Seal.

That said, I gotta say I admire all of our Service men and women no matter what service they serve in.

[20cows]

Das Boot ist ein guter Film!

[DixieBoy]

Das Boot is a GREAT film. Based on the writings of a German journalist who did a war tour on one of the Type VII U-Boats during the war. Not completely certain, but I think the author's name was Jurgen Rohwehr.

I think you were probably a whole lot safer in the infantry. Of roughly 40,000 German sailors who volunteered for duty on Untersee Boots, 28,000 of them are still down there. That's from the Second World War. The lucky ones were the skippers who made Ace (over 100,000 tons of enemy shipping sunk) and then got shoreside duty, teaching others in a sub school.

I've dived most of the shipwrecks off Florida's east coast that were sunk by U-Boats during the war. Read every book that I could get my hands on. In the 1980's a whole bunch of books came out, by American sub skippers, and German ones too. The Americans AND the Germans had all sworn secrecy oaths, forty years earlier. What amazed me is that the German skippers chose to honor their agreements, despite the fact that the government they had fought for was defunct. Most of them felt that they had sworn their loyalty to Germany, not the Nazis. And while the Nazis did indeed run their government, most of the U-Boat skippers were not Nazis.

There were exceptions. Gunther Prien, "the bull of Scapa Flow" who snuck in to the Brits naval anchorage in the Orkney Islands, threaded through their sub nets, sunk the British battleship Royal Oak, and then snuck back out again, he was a Nazi. A virulent Nazi. Prien died early in the war.

Sorry, didn't mean to go off on a tear. I love this stuff. Good topic Hobie. - DixieBoy

[penates]

The authors name is Gunther Buchheim.

[stretch]

The very best submarine movie ever made, bar none. I swear I could smell diesel and sweat
the first time I saw it. The subtitled version is, to agree with some of the other posters, better
than the dubbed one. I thought the book was quite good, too, but I didn't read it until many
years after I saw the film.

I've always like "The Hunt for Red October", too. Great film - but not quite in the same class as
"Das Boot".

My wife LOVES submarine movies - anything about subs really. (??!?! I have NO idea why..........)
We went down in one of those electric tourist submarines in the Carribean one time, and she thought
she'd died and gone to heaven. Of course, it HAD windows and we didn't encounter any depth
charges..... I wonder if the Russkis are giving tours/rides on their Typhoon-class subs these
days?

-Stretch

[Grizz]

There are two other ww2 first person sub books, one written about a Japenese sub and its exploits, and another about an American sub. I FORGET THE TITLES. Sorry about that, but the setting and time-frame is the same as Das Boot. Makes a great sequential read. Someone here is gonna have the titles. It's worth the time to read all three.

Grizz

[rjohns94]

one of them is the war chronicles of the TANG - Called "Clear the Bridge" by Dick Okane, I friend and fellow alumnus. One of the greatest books I have read. I have it on the shelf and perhaps if others want to read it, we could pass it around like we did with the dvd a while back?? I would be glad to forward it to the first "I would like to read it" so long as it eventually makes it way back to me.

[El Chivo]

There are two other ww2 first person sub books, one written about a Japenese sub and its exploits, and another about an American sub. I FORGET THE TITLES. Sorry about that, but the setting and time-frame is the same as Das Boot. Makes a great sequential read. Someone here is gonna have the titles. It's worth the time to read all three.

Grizz

I'm forgetting a title too, but there's a decent American sub movie with Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster (and even Don Rickles) where they take on Japanese destroyers in "the Bungo Straits".

[penates]

There are two other ww2 first person sub books, one written about a Japenese sub and its exploits, and another about an American sub. I FORGET THE TITLES. Sorry about that, but the setting and time-frame is the same as Das Boot. Makes a great sequential read. Someone here is gonna have the titles. It's worth the time to read all three.

Grizz

I'm forgetting a title too, but there's a decent American sub movie with Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster (and even Don Rickles) where they take on Japanese destroyers in "the Bungo Straits".

Run Silent Run Deep

[awp101]

I wonder if the Russkis are giving tours/rides on their Typhoon-class subs these
days?

Talk about ya pays yer money, ya takes yer chances...

[Ysabel Kid]

Been a long time since I saw the movie - in fact, since it was in the theaters, but I remember it being a good one!

[DixieBoy]

My goof on Das Boot's author. I checked my little World War Two submarine library just now, and Jurgen Rohwehr was the fellow who compiled Axis Submarine Successes, which was in our library at school. It's pretty darn expensive, so I photocopied all of the relevant pages for a Florida wreck diver.

Here's a few more good ones from the same period:

U-Boat Commander, A Periscope View of the Battle of the Atlantic, by Peter Cremer. This may be my favorite, if only because this is the guy who sunk two of the ships which I've dove the most. The ships were the Amazone (a frieghter) and the Halsey (a tanker), and Cremer sank them both on the early morning of May 5, 1942. My Dad was on the USS Howard (DMS 7), a minesweeper pulled into doing escort duty, about 150 miles to the north when these two ships were torpedoed. He wrote this down in a little journal he kept until November, 1942, when his ship was sent to North Africa as one of hundreds there to support Operation Torch. Dad has told me many times about the French battleship Jean Bart firing shells overhead, trying to get the American cruiser Augusta. General Patton was on board the Augusta at the time.

This log of Dad's is one of my prize possessions. It was against regulations to keep logs or journals, but Dad says that most of the guys did anyway. These were pretty much guys straight off the farm, and this was the biggest adventure of their lives. But the chief of the boat told all the guys to get rid of them when they were heading over to Africa. Dad mailed his to his sister, and in the 1980's, when my shipwreck diving was hitting fever pitch, she sent it down to him, and it was passed to me. Truly a priceless piece of family history.

Okay, another really good WWII sub book : Shinano, by Joseph Enright, the skipper who sunk the super secret, supercarrier Shinano on Thanksgiving Day, 1944 during the ship's shakedown cruise. Enright's submarine, the USS Archerfish, had been vectored in on Shinano through an ULTRA transmission, and he was ordered to keep quiet about his incredible success, despite taking down the largest vessel by any U.S. submarine during the war.

Tang, mentioned here, is really good, as is Wahoo, by the same man, Dick O'Kane. I like O'Kane's straightforward way of telling a story. Wahoo was "Mush" Morton's boat, and he was likely done in by faulty torpedoes giving away his position. Tang had an even worse time of it, most likely being sunk by one of her own torpedoes going on a "circular run."

Man, those guys had giant cajones back then, all of them. - DixieBoy

[CaptainFinn]

Robb White wrote some really great naval WWII fiction. When I was a wee lad in the fifth grade (1977) I came across a cache of his books in my elementary school library...

It's funny, they were classified as 'boy's fiction' back then but no grade school (or high school, for that matter) would carry them today. Glorifying people FIGHTING in a WAR ?!? Heavens forbid!

Some of the good ones:

Torpedo Run--A story of a PT Boat crew whose Skipper gets killed in the Solomon Islands. The replacement skipper is a martinet whom the crew hates. When they lose their boat during a battle, the crew learns that there is more to the relpacement skipper then they thought.

Up Periscope--a sub crew during the later days of the pacific war. I can't remember much about the book--30 years ago and all--but I remeber they get strafed by a Zeke and one of the Ensigns gets shot through the thigh.

Silent Ship, Silent Sea--A destroyer is crippled during a typhoon, with engines and communications destroyed. The crew becomes divided and turn against each other as they drift across the south Pacific.

Flight Deck--A naval aviator is crippled during the battle of Midway. When he learns that his wounds will ground him, he enlists his older brother, a decorated pilot, to help him desert and man a coast watcher station. His brother is the only one who knows he is there. When his brother is shot down and killed by a japanese AA emplacement on the island, the former pilot wages a one-man war against the japanese manning the AA guns.

[junkbug]

My Dad took me to see "Das Boot" when it came out in the theaters. That was when it was in German, with English subtitles. We both loved it. The only other war "movie" I remember him speaking that highly of was actually a TV series. The old TV series "Combat!" with Vic Morrow. He told me we watched it together also, but I dont remember it at all. I was less than 4 years old when it stopped showing on prime-time network TV.


Dad was a combat infantryman who served in weatern Germany in the last months of WWII. He was convinced to his dying days (at age 82) that he would not have survived the war if he had been called on to participate in the invasion of the Japanese home islands.

Sean

[MrMurphy]

For you sub fans......read Blind Man's Bluff. It's nonfiction and accounts for the majority of US submarine warfare ops from the end of WW2 to the Gulf War. They pulled off some crazy stuff.



My dad trained on diesel fleet boats in 1965/66 in the Navy Reserves and switched over to the Army for 10 years (they wouldn't let him go to sea at the time, he was 18 and fresh out of high school) then went back to the Navy reserves in the surface fleet.

In '95, after he had retired from the Reserves, we were at Pearl Harbor and went aboard the fleet sub that's there. The guide, when someone asked, didn't know what something in a particular compartment was, and he sounds off with what it and everything around it did. He became the more or less de facto guide from that point on, and the guide literally offered him a job at the end of the tour...... considering he was a senior executive for Hughes Aircraft at the time, he turned her down.