U-571 film: Encyclopedia - U-571 film

U-571 (film)

U-571 is a 2000 movie directed by Jonathan Mostow, and starring Matthew McConaughey, Bill Paxton, Harvey Keitel, Jon Bon Jovi, Jack Noseworthy, Will Estes, and Tom Guiry. In the movie, a German submarine is boarded in 1942 by disguised American submariners seeking to capture its Enigma cipher machine.

Tagline: Heroes are ordinary men who do extraordinary things in extraordinary times.

U-571 film - Historical inaccuracies

Enigma and associated documents containing key material were first recovered from a U-boat in May 1941 — before the United States' entry into World War II — by the British who captured U-110. The British also captured material from U-559 in 1942. The U.S. Navy did seize German Naval Enigma material in June 1944 when it captured U-505 (the U.S. Navy's first capture of an enemy vessel at sea in 129 years).

The film caused irritation in Britain. Critics argued that U-571 failed to portray history correctly because, in total, there were some 15 captures of Naval Enigma material during World War II, of which the Americans and Canadians each carried out one (U-505 and U-774, respectively), while the British performed the rest. While the British captures from submarines and weather trawlers provided critical information for breaking Enigma, by the time of the American and Canadian captures, the Allies were reading Naval Enigma routinely. Moreover, the American capture of U-505 by a destroyer captain on the eve of D-Day might have jeopardized Operation Overlord. However, as acknowledged by the film-makers, the story of the film is entirely fictional.

Shortly after the release of the film, BBC radio interviewed a former British naval officer who had been involved in the recovery of cipher-key tables from a German submarine that was on the point of sinking; he commented that the film was entertaining, though it had nothing to do with historical fact.

The movie has also been criticized for a scene in which the U-boat crewmen machine-gun Allied merchant crewmen who have survived their ship's sinking, killing them in cold blood as they float helplessly in their lifeboat. The implication is that the killing of survivors was typical U-boat behavior. Critics of the U-571 movie point out that this is an incorrect depiction of typical U-boat crew behavior. In contrast to the depiction of U-boat men in the movie, and to the behavior of German armed forces in other services and fronts, U-boat crewman almost universally followed the accepted rules of war; in a number of incidents, they helped survivors with food, directions and occasionally medical aid. Assistance to survivors only stopped after Admiral Karl Dönitz issued the "Laconia order" following a US attack on U-boats transporting injured POWs under a flag of truce (the Laconia Incident). Out of several thousand sinkings of merchantmen in World War II, there is only one documented case of a U-boat crew deliberately attacking the ship's survivors: that of the U-852, a Type IXD2 U-boat under Kpt.lt. Heinz-Wilhehm Eck, whose crew attacked survivors of the Greek ship Peleus.

There was a real German submarine designated U-571, but that vessel was never involved in events like most of those depicted in the film.

U-571 film - Trivia

• The titular registration number, 571, was also that of the United States' first nuclear powered submarine, the SSN-571. It is not known whether this influenced the choice of number for the fictitious boat in the film or is purely coincidental.

See also

• History of cryptology — World War II cryptology.
• Submarine film.
• Enigma (2001 film)
• First naval seizure of Enigma

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