Das Boot Totally Explained

Everything about Das Boot totally explained

Das Boot (German for The Boat/The Submarine) is a 1981 feature film directed by Wolfgang Petersen, adapted from a novel of the same name by Lothar-Günther Buchheim. Hans-Joachim Krug, former first officer on U-219, served as a consultant, as did Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock, the captain of the real U-96.
The movie has an anti-war message. One of Petersen's goals was to guide the audience through "a journey to the end of reason" (the film's German tagline), showing "what war is all about." Petersen heightened suspense by very rarely showing any external views of the submarine unless it's running on the surface and relying on sounds to convey action outside the boat, thus showing the audience only the claustrophobic interior the crew would see. The original 1981 version cost DM 32 million to make; it was at the time the most expensive film in the history of German cinema. The director's meticulous attention to detail resulted in a historically accurate movie.

Story

The movie is the story of a single mission of one World War II U-boat, U-96, and its crew. It depicts both the excitement of battle and the tedium of the fruitless hunt, and shows the men serving aboard U-boats as ordinary individuals with a desire to do their best for their comrades and their country. The story is based on an amalgamation of the exploits of the real U-96, a Type VIIC-class U-boat commanded by Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock, one of Germany's top U-boat "tonnage aces" during the war.
   The story is told from the viewpoint of Lt. Werner (Herbert Grönemeyer), who has been assigned as a war correspondent on the German Submarine U-96. He joins its Captain (Jürgen Prochnow), who is only named as der Alte ("the Old Man") or Kaleu (short for his rank of Kapitänleutnant) and they drive to La Rochelle, France. Also in the car is the quiet Leitender Ingenieur (Chief Engineer) or "LI" (Klaus Wennemann), who is tormented by the failing health of his wife back in Cologne. As the U-96 officers, including the "2WO" (the Second [watch] Officer, played by Martin Semmelrogge) drink in a cabaret, Kapitänleutnant Phillip Thomsen (played by Otto Sander), celebrating his Ritterkreuz award, gives a crude drunken speech in which he mocks Adolf Hitler. Cadet Ullman has a tearful goodbye with his French fiancée Françoise, who is pregnant with his child.
   The next morning, the Captain, the LI, and Werner board the U-96 in the massive submarine pen. As they sail out of the harbor to cheering crowds and a band playing "Muss I Denn", Thomsen (now sober) sends them off by saying "Hail victory and happy hunting!" Werner is given a full tour of the boat by Chief Bosun Lumprecht. He gets to know the rest of the crew, and bunks in Petty Officer country, where Petty Officers Pilgrim and Frenssen stay up all night swapping sex stories and dirty jokes. He marvels when the submarine makes its first practice crash dive to 160 metres (525 feet) and survives an attack by a British fighter. But time passes, and he begins to realize the routine of being crammed together with forty people in a small space. There is an unhealthy undercurrent of sweat, filth and boredom. Werner can't relate to the battle-hardened Captain, the quiet LI, the Nazi 1WO, the cynical 2WO, the perverted Pilgrim and Frenssen, or the tough enlisted crew; Werner is able to make friends with Ullman, and sympathizes with his problem (as the French partisans might kill Françoise if it's revealed her child is half-German). To pass the time, the crew loudly sings "It's a Long Way to Tipperary", much to the chagrin of the 1WO.
   The cruise is boring, as the U-96 fails to make contact with the enemy. Eventually, they receive contact that U-32 (commanded by Captain Berthold) has sighted a convoy only ten hours away. They arrive at the location, but a thick fog blocks their view and they receive no further contact from Berthold or headquarters. They dive to check the hydrophones, hearing what appears to be a depth charge attack. U-96 surfaces to investigate. But then the U-96 sees a British destroyer and the U-96 is hit by depth charges.
   A huge storm hits and towering waves slam into the submarine, and after a week of the relentless storm, with little rest or sleep, even the sea-hardened crew is pushed to the limit. The misfortunes - horrible weather, a crabs outbreak, and learning their favorite soccer team lost - sends the crew's morale even lower. After 23 days, the storm finally ends; still, the crew's morale has yet to be raised. Daily radio broadcasts from the Armed Forces High Command indicate that the war is starting to turn against the Germans in Africa and Russia. Soon afterwards, the U-96 encounters a British convoy and, with support from several U-boats in the area, launches torpedoes at the convoy before a destroyer sights them and they're forced to dive deep to escape their pursuers, causing bolts in the pressure hull to fail and shoot off.
   The entire crew falls silent to minimize noise and avoid detection, and Johann, the mechanic, has a mental breakdown and has to be restrained. Despite heavy damage, in which the submarine nearly implodes, and after six hours at silent running, the crew escapes and manages to resurface safely in darkness. They see one lone tanker, burning brightly on the horizon. The Captain decides to give a "coup de grâce" and fires a torpedo into her. The crew are stunned when they see burning British sailors jumping from the tanker they thought empty. They notice that the surviving merchant marine sailors are swimming desperately towards them. Following standing orders not to take prisoners (see Laconia incident for details on this policy) the Captain gives the command to abandon the doomed sailors and backs the ship away. The events are registered on the boat's log books. Johann apologizes to the Captain for his actions, and is forgiven in consideration of his several tours of duty. Despite a radio message about another convoy contact from Captains Kupsch and Stackmann, U-96 is low on diesel fuel and has to return home immediately.
   The worn-out U-boat crew look forward to returning home to La Rochelle in time for Christmas, but the High Command has other ideas. The boat receives secret orders that they make their way to La Spezia, Italy, meaning the U-96 must pass through the bottleneck at the Straits of Gibraltar - a zone crawling with British patrol ships which is almost certain death for a U-boat crew. U-96 has been assigned to help secure Field Marshal Rommel's supply routes, as his force is losing Northern Africa. Unable to let Werner and the LI perish, the Captain arranges for them to be taken ashore once they stop to resupply.
   Before going to Gibraltar, U-96 makes a secret night rendezvous in neutral Vigo, Spain with the Weser an interned German liner that clandestinely resupplies U-boats with fuel, torpedoes, and other supplies. The officer meeting takes place under an eerie atmosphere. After months in the filthy, cramped submarine, living on canned food and moldy bread, they walk into a luxurious suite fit to serve royalty. The U-96 officers meet pampered, decadent Nazi officers who believe German propaganda about the glorious life of the "grey wolves." Ironically, the 1WO (the only officer to wear his proper uniform for most of the film) is briefly mistaken for the Captain when they're introduced. The following sumptuous meal has many features of a Henkersmahlzeit, the final meal before an execution. The Captain tells Werner that three U-boats were recently resupplied in Vigo, but two were lost immediately after putting back to sea.
   During the dinner, the Captain receives his orders for the mission from the Weser's naval attaché, as well as a radiogram stating that his request to have the LI and Werner transferred off has been denied by headquarters. The crew finishes resupplying and the U-96 departs Spain for Gibraltar. The Captain's plan is to approach the seven mile (11.2 km) wide Straits at nighttime, take advantage of the surface current, float silently with engines off, and only submerge at the latest possible moment. Near Gibraltar, the U-96 silently slips past patrol boats; however, as they prepare to dive, the boat is spotted and attacked by a British fighter plane, with Navigator Kriechbaum receiving serious wounds and destroying the deck gun. All crewmembers don their rescue gear and prepare to abandon ship. The Captain sends the boat south, towards the African coast, at full speed; British ships begin closing in and she's forced to dive. The Captain orders the boat to its safety depth of 90 metres; however, the forward diving planes don't respond and, once all other measures fail, the boat starts to sink to her doom. The LI declares the boat "beyond control" once it passes 200 metres.
   Rivets and bolts start to go off like gunfire once again, the hull groans as the pressure builds and the crew seems doomed. Just before the hull collapses while sinking to greater depths, the submarine is lucky to catch on a shelf, "a shovel of sand from God" says the Captain. The U-96 is 280 metres (918.7 feet) deep and numerous hull breaches occur. Seawater floods in through damaged pipes, and major damage has to be repaired before they can even try to resurface. With the carbon dioxide level increasing, the crew barely manages to fix the many problems before they'd all pass out and die. To preserve oxygen, all crewmen who are not working go to sleep and breathe from their rescue gear. After over sixteen hours, they're just able to surface in an all-or-nothing ballast blow, and the U-96 sets a course under cover of night to its home base in La Rochelle.
   Their return to La Rochelle on Christmas Eve is a little less triumphant than their sailing. They now resemble pale old men on a battered boat rather than eager young sailors on the flagship of the 3rd Submarine Flotilla. The port looks a little worse for wear as well. The wounded navigator is taken ashore to a waiting ambulance. But as soon as the fleet commander comes aboard for an inspection, British planes bomb and strafe the facilities. Several civilians and sailors are killed along the docks. Werner, the LI, the 1WO, Pilgrim, Frenssen, the Chief Bosun, and some of the enlisted crew take refuge in the secure U-boat bunker, though most of the men are wounded. After the raid, Werner leaves the bunker and is horrified when he sees the lifeless bodies of Johann, Ullmann, and the 2WO. Looking towards the entry passage, he finds the Captain bleeding from the mouth, watching the U-96 sink at the dock. When the Captain collapses after the conning tower disappears, Werner rushes to his side.

Reception

The movie drew high critical acclaim and is seen as one of the greatest of all German films, along with Nosferatu by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Metropolis by Fritz Lang and Der blaue Engel with Marlene Dietrich. It is regarded as at the forefront among the subgenre of submarine movies.

Criticism

In the movie, there's only one ardent Nazi in the crew of 40, namely the First Watch Officer (referred to comically in one scene as Unser Hitlerjugendführer or "Our Hitler Youth Leader"), with the rest of the Officers either indifferent or openly anti-Nazi (the Captain). The enlisted sailors and NCO are portrayed as apolitical. In his book Iron Coffins, former U-boat commander Herbert A. Werner states that this selection amongst naval personnel loyal to the party, only occurred later in the war (1943 onward), when the U-boats were suffering high casualties. At that stage in the war, morale was declining and this degree of skepticism may or may not have occurred. (In support of Das Boot on this subject, U-Boat historian Michael Gannon maintains that the U-boat navy was one of the least politically Nazi divisions of all German armed forces.)
Even though the beginning and the end of the movie occur in the port of La Rochelle, it doesn't correspond historically. The submarine base in La Rochelle wasn't functional before November 1941, and at the time of the movie the port was dried up. Moreover, none of the British fighter-bombers of late 1941 to early 1942 had the range to bomb La Rochelle. While Saint-Nazaire was the base used in the novel, the film was changed to La Rochelle because its appearance hadn't changed to such a large degree in the years following World War II.
Buchheim himself was a U-boat correspondent. He has stated that the following film scenes are unrealistic:

In the film, an unidentified member of the crew throws an oil-stained towel into Lt. Werner's face. As a Lieutenant, Werner would have commanded special respect and in reality, the culprit would have been court-martialed and received a hefty sentence.
After surviving a bombing, the crew celebrate loudly in their bunks, even with a sailor dressing up as a woman in a red-lit room.
The crew behaves far too loudly during patrols; the celebrations after getting a torpedo hit were described as unprofessional. Still, this is highly plausible, as many crews did celebrate such occurrences.

Criticism by novel author Buchheim

Even though overwhelmed by the literally perfect technological accuracy of the film's set-design and port construction buildings, novel author Lothar-Günter Buchheim expressed great disappointment with Petersen's adaptation in a film review published in 1981, especially with Petersen's aesthetic vision for the film and the way the plot and the effects are, according to him, overdone and clichéd by the adaptation, as well as the hysterical over-acting of the cast he called highly unrealistic while acknowledging the cast's acting talent in general. Buchheim, after several attempts for an American adaptation had failed, had provided a script detailing his own narrative, cinematographical and photographical ideas as soon as Petersen was chosen as new director that would have amounted in full to a complete 6-hour epic, however Petersen turned him down because at the time the producers were aiming for a 90-minute feature for international release. Ironically, today's Director's Cut of Das Boot amounts to over 200 minutes, and the complete TV version of the film to roughly 5 hours long.
Buchheim attacked specifically what he called Petersen's sacrificing of both realism and suspense in dialogue, narration and photography just for the sake of cheap dramatic thrills and action effects (for example, in reality one single exploding bolt of the boat's pressure hull would have been enough for the whole crew to worry about the U-boat very likely being crushed by water pressure, while Petersen has several bolts loosening in various scenes).
Uttering deep concerns about the end result, Buchheim felt that unlike his clearly anti-war novel the adaptation was "another re-glorification and re-mystification" The surrogate father to his mostly young crewmen, who all look up to him. Despite being openly anti-Nazi, he's engaged to a "Nazi girl" (a widow of a Luftwaffe pilot). |- | Herbert Grönemeyer | Lieutenant Werner, War Correspondent | The somewhat naive, but honest main narrator. Unlike the rest of the crew, he wears turtleneck sweaters for much of the voyage. Werner is repeatedly mocked for his lack of sailing experience. |- | Klaus Wennemann † | Chief Engineer (Leitender Ingenieur or LI) | A quiet and well-respected man. At age 27, the oldest crew member besides the Captain. Tormented by the uncertain fate of his family, especially after hearing about an Allied air raid on Cologne. The second most important crewman, as he oversees diving operations and makes sure the systems are running correctly. Because of the German pronunciation of "i" as "e", his title is pronounced like "ellie". |- | Hubertus Bengsch | 1st Lieutenant/Watch Officer (IWO) | A stiff man, a by-the-book officer, an ardent Nazi and a staunch believer in the Wehrmacht victories. Has a condescending attitude. His fiancée died in British carpet bombing. Raised in some wealth in Mexico by his stepparents. He spends his days writing his thoughts on military training and leadership for the High Command. |- | Martin Semmelrogge | 2nd Lieutenant/Watch Officer (IIWO) | A vulgar, comedic, crude officer, who hides a vulnerable side behind his macho image. He explains much of the submarine operations to Werner. One of his duties is to decode messages from base, using the Enigma code machine. |- | Bernd Tauber | Chief Helmsman (Obersteuermann) Kriechbaum | The navigator and IIIWO (3rd Lieutenant/Watch Officer). He gets wounded in the airplane attack at Gibraltar. Kriechbaum has four sons, with another on the way. |- | Erwin Leder | Chief Mechanic (Obermaschinist) Johann | The mechanic, obsessed with a near-fetish love for the U96 engine. Suffers a mental breakdown during the attack of two destroyers; he's able to redeem himself by valiantly working to stop water leaks when the boat is trapped in Gibraltar. Speaks with Austrian accent. This was his ninth patrol. |- | Martin May | Cadet (Fähnrich) Ullmann | Young officer candidate who has a pregnant French fiancée (which is considered taboo by the French partisans) and worries about her safety. He is one of the few crew members that Werner is able to connect with; Werner even offers to deliver Ullman's love letters when it seems the former will leave the submarine. |- | Heinz Hoenig | Petty Officer (Maat) Hinrich | The radioman, sonar controller and ship's combat medic. He is in many ways the third most important crewman, since he gauges speed and direction of their targets and enemy destroyers. Hinrich is one of the few officers that the Captain is able to relate to. |- | Uwe Ochsenknecht | Chief Bosun (Bootsmann) Lumprecht | The severe chief who shows Werner around the U-96. He supervises the loading and reloading of the torpedo tubes. |- | Claude-Oliver Rudolph | Ario | The burly mechanic who tells that Dufte is getting married and throws around pictures of Dufte's homely fiancée to laugh at them both. |- | Jan Fedder | Petty Officer (Maat) Pilgrim | Another sailor (watch officer and diving planes operator), gets almost swept off the submarine, breaks several ribs and is hospitalised for a while. Speaks with a Hamburg accent. |- | Ralf Richter | Petty Officer (Maat) Frenssen | Pilgrim's best friend. Pilgrim and Frenssen love to trade dirty jokes. |- | Joachim Bernhard | Theologian (Bibelforscher) | Religious sailor who is constantly reading the Bible. He is punched by Frenssen when the submarine is trapped at the bottom of the Straits of Gibraltar for praying rather than repairing the boat. |- | Oliver Stritzel | Schwalle | The blond sailor who speaks with a Berlin accent. |- | Lutz Schnell | Dufte | The sailor who gets jeered at because he's getting married and for a possible false airplane sighting. |- | Otto Sander | Kapitänleutnant Phillip Thomsen | Another U-boat commander, an alcoholic. When he's introduced, he's extremely drunk and briefly mocks Adolf Hitler. Sometime after U-96 departs, Thomsen is deployed once again and the two submarines meet randomly in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. After failing to make contact later, the Captain is forced to report to HQ that Thomsen is missing. |}

Das Boot as a career boost

Several of those involved with Das Boot went on to even greater success:

Wolfgang Petersen established himself as a long-standing fixture as a Hollywood director and producer.

Jürgen Prochnow became one of the few German actors to establish themselves in Hollywood.

Herbert Grönemeyer became one of the most popular German singers.

Klaus Wennemann became lead in a successful German detective series, Der Fahnder (the Investigator).

Heinz Hoenig became one of the most sought-after character faces in German movies.

Jan Fedder became lead in a successful light-hearted German police series, "Großstadtrevier".

Uwe Ochsenknecht, Ralf Richter, Claude-Olivier Rudolph and Martin Semmelrogge had successful German movie careers, too.

Hubertus Bengsch became one of the most successful dubbing artists, providing amongst others the German voice of Richard Gere.

Exhibition

In the autumn of 2007, there was a well-visited exhibition about the film Das Boot, as well as about the real U-Boat U96, at the Haus der Geschichte (House of German History) in Bonn. Over 100,000 people visited the exhibition during its four-month run.

Further Information

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