[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by GoDeep

I too am one of those people that gets annoyed at historical inaccuracies in a movie.

I just finished watching The Tudors. It's a combination of great film-making, taking great lengths to explain historical details and causes to an unfamiliar audience, then turning around and butchering other parts of the story. I enjoyed it, but still had several teeth-grinding moments...no, make that hours.

If you're going to make a historical movie (even an alternate history one), at least have the decency to get your facts straight.

As much as I hate the movie, I'm going to try to tackle some of your personal objections.

U-571 is disabled closer to European waters than US waters, yet somehow the S-33 departing from the US arrived before the German rescue sub? And with time to modify the S-33 to look more like a German sub?

I thought the u-boat was operating on the western side of Greenland, but I'm not going to watch it again to make sure.

When U-571 is captured, they have to cross the Western Approaches, which is described as the German's backyard, crawling with U-boats. Fair enough, but explain to me what a single German destroyer is doing there?

True. On the other hand, if I'm right about the location it's even worse, because German destroyers had stability problems when the fuel was low, and were limited to a relatively short range.

How did the single-engined German fighter (ME-109?) get in the middle of the Atlantic?

Obviously they were operating from the secret base in Greenland, as depicted in the 1943 movie Crash Dive.

Depth charges exploding just metres from the hull of U-571, yet the hull isn't even dented.

Well, the depth charges in Das Boot were so close that any one of them would have cracked the hull and sank the boat, so I have to give them that one.

The chief (Harvey Keitel) tells about being depth charged once, off the coast of Murmansk in WW1. What would a US sub be doing at Murmansk? What would a German destroyer be doing outside of Murmansk? AFAIK, no US sub ever fought in European waters in WW1.

Maybe he served in a British sub. Or a German one.

During the confrontation with the German destroyer, the US boarding party calmly readies the deck gun for firing. How on earth would the German destroyer crew have let this happen without firing a single shot?

Everybody knows German are stupid and have the worst soldiers and sailors possible. That's the real reason they lost the war.

The German sub commander orders his crew to fire on survivors with the AA gun. AFAIK, this happened only once in reality and if I remember correctly, the German commander was court-martialed for this, by the Germans.

Heinz-Wilhelm Eck torpedoed the Greek freighter Peleus on March 13, 1944 and then proceeded to shoot survivors in life rafts. Three men survived to tell the tale, and Eck's war diary survived the wrecking of U-852. On November 30, 1945, Eck and two of his officers were executed by an Allied war crimes court.

When the German destroyer hunts U-571 which has now submerged, you can hear pinging noises. Since the Germans didn't have ASDIC AFAIK, who or what is pinging U-571?

I'm pretty sure German destroyers had active sonar, but verification will hinge on me getting my copy of German Destroyers of World War Two out of storage, and that may be awhile.

Still, I watched it again on RTL7 a few nights ago just because there was a U-boat in it. It was worth a chuckle or two. My wife did the chuckling at me shaking my head and getting wound up about movie inaccuracies. It's just a movie, she said...

Don't you hate it when they put things in perspective?