“the British have stopped making mistakes” says the captain gloomily, as he and his officers and crew sail out of La Rochelle only to spend days searching and waiting rather than fighting. It’s 1941 and in the North Atlantic the tide is, metaphorically, turning. This is a war film that leaves ideology at the door in favour of grimly realistic life-and-death tension, terror, ennui, excitement and, at times, joy.
It isn’t just Nazis which enrage them, but also the futility of the battles they’re leading their men into. Fellow U-boat captain Thomsen arrives drunk before giving a speech which mocks both the Fuhrer and Churchill. At the start of Das Boot he and some of his officers visit a raucous French nightclub in La Rochelle, their base. Several of his officers share his disillusionment, as do other captains.
There’s a gulf between old-guard seamen like him, and most of the young crew (“all wind and smoke” he calls them, likening their voyage to being on “a children’s crusade”). For the captain (a brilliantly jaded yet stoic Jürgen Prochnow) the boat is his partner and he takes pride in her ability to withstand the worst that the Allies, bad luck and the weather can throw at her. World-weary and war-weary, battle has aged him – he’s meant to be 30, the oldest man on the boat, but he comes across as much older with the weight of both experience and expectation heavy on him. He’s not a lover of war and he hates the Nazis. “They are drinking at the bar, celebrating our sinking! Not yet my friends, not yet!” shouts U-96’s captain with delight, as they practically bounce up onto the surface of the narrow Straits of Gibraltar, which they’ve been marooned at the bottom of for 15 hours. *** Check out my submarine movies section ***
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