WWII at Sea, as Fought on the Screen

Looking for a way to create a World War II submarine drama that would “appeal to modern audiences,” director Jonathan Mostow found it in the story of the sailors who risked their lives to snatch an Enigma decoder from a U-boat and turned the tide of the war in the North Atlantic.

Mostow achieved his goal--with considerable flair--but in the process of translating real events to the screen, he rewrote history to make it more appealing to American audiences in the post-Cold War era.

Using the 1941 capture by a British destroyer of an Enigma decoder device from a Nazi U-boat as his inspiration, Mostow has returned to the classic Hollywood sub-versus-destroyer confrontations that were so popular in the 1940s and early 1950s.

Pitting WWII American sailors against their German counterparts in mortal combat waged on and below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, Mostow also reinterpreted what the British regard as one of their greatest wartime accomplishments into an American triumph.

According to the director, he had no intention of making a docudrama about any one actual event. Instead, he said, “my primary goal was to create for the audience the visceral experience of being aboard a World War II submarine. The best way I could make the audience appreciate the kinds of things these submariners went through was to re-create, as well as I could, the experience of being aboard one of these antiquated vessels.”

Although Mostow had fictionalized the story, he still incurred the displeasure of her majesty’s navy and the survivors of the heist, which King George VI called perhaps the most important single event of the war. To assuage the criticism, Universal Pictures has added an acknowledgment of the British feat, which enabled the Allies to track down and sink the Nazi U-boats threatening to choke off the lifeline of supplies to England. The filmmakers also hired as a consultant Lt. Cmdr. David Balme, the British sailor who pulled the Enigma machine from the sinking U-110, and gave the 78-year-old veteran a walk-on part.

For his part, director Mostow said he simply wanted to create a World War II story “that can appeal to modern audiences.” He says he felt that the Vietnam War had made it “impolitic to make a movie that celebrated old-fashioned heroism in war.” However, the director said he believed that as the century draws to a close, it felt like the public was “ready for us to shine the spotlight once again on World War II.”

History Lessons From Hollywood

“People are willing to feel proud and patriotic about the men who fought in that conflict. If it’s possible to call a war a ‘good war,’ that label would have to apply to World War II,” he says. “Never before in our history was there such a clear-cut case of good versus evil.”

Mostow continued, “There is no moral ambiguity about our involvement in that war, and we rose up as a nation to defeat Hilter. I believe that accomplishment deserves recognition and celebration, which is what ‘U-571’ does. I am proud as a filmmaker to celebrate World War II submarining and the brave men who fought on those boats.”

Of course, Hollywood has done this before, sometimes even showing the enemy as warriors doing their jobs. What is perhaps the best U.S. Navy movie of all time, “The Enemy Below,” similarly transformed the story of a British destroyer into an American ship that wages an epic cat-and-mouse battle with a German submarine.

In his tightly written script for “The Enemy Below,” Wendell Mayes pitted Robert Mitchum, playing a weary American destroyer captain still recovering from the sinking of his previous ship, against an equally tired Curt Jurgens, a U-boat captain whose loyalty remains with his men and his ship, not Hitler. Jurgens’ character bore no resemblance to the stereotypical evil Nazi officer Hollywood created once Germany declared war on the United States following Pearl Harbor.

That change in portrayal had begun in November 1943, when the War Department ordered the film industry to stop making “atrocity” movies. At that time, government officials at the highest level concluded that the alliance with the Soviet Union would come to an end with the defeat of Hitler and that the United States would need new allies to check the expansion of communism.

Politics Leads to Script Changes

This change reached its apex in “The Enemy Below” with director Dick Powell portraying the combatants as skilled warriors in arms, not hated enemies.

In the original script, both captains die when their ships explode as Mitchum reaches for Jurgens’ hand in a futile rescue attempt. In the completed film, Mitchum’s rescue effort succeeds, allowing the two surviving warriors to praise each other’s courage. After all, when the movie came out in 1957, West Germany had become our strongest ally against the evil empire.

The U.S. Navy expressed enthusiasm for the script and requested of 20th Century Fox only minor technical changes in language and procedure before approving full cooperation to the production during filming in Hawaii.

As with Mostow’s film, in 1990’s “The Hunt for Red October,” an American submarine replaces the traditional destroyer in its pursuit of the undersea enemy. In thiscase, an American attack submarine shadows a state-of-the-art Soviet nuclear missile launcher that is either attempting to deliver a first strike against the United States or defecting from Communist Russia. The last Hollywood portrayal of the East-West military confrontation also depicted the demise of the Cold War. Sean Connery, playing the disenchanted submarine commander, is bringing his ship to the West to prevent a possible nuclear war.

With the end of the Cold War, however, Hollywood lost the Soviet Union as the enemy of choice. During the 1990s, filmmakers brought Russian nationalists, drug cartels, money-grubbing terrorists and even rogue American military officers to the screen in such films as “Broken Arrow,” “The Rock,” “A Few Good Men,” “Air Force One,” and “Courage Under Fire.” Despite the threats these opponents posed, they came across more as temporary nuisances than credible world menaces.

Steven Spielberg and Terrence Malick provided the solution: Reinvent the most venal, dangerous enemies the United States ever faced in battle: Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. Since the appearance of “Saving Private Ryan” and “The Thin Red Line” in 1998, Hollywood has returned to our World War II opponents. “U-571” opened Friday, with Jerry Bruckheimer’s “Pearl Harbor” for Disney, “The Windtalkers” for MGM and the Tom Hanks “Band of Brothers” HBO series in the works.

Submarines Hold Special Appeal

What is the special appeal of submarine movies? Darryl Zanuck provided as good an explanation as any. In critiquing the script for his 1944 aircraft carrier epic “Wing and a Prayer,” he observed, “There exists in the public mind the belief that submarine service is the most dangerous of all. Of course it is true that if a sub gets hit, that’s the end of it--it sinks to the bottom of the ocean.”

This perception of a fragile, thin-skinned submarine facing destruction from depth charges that rain down from above remains at the heart of all World War II Hollywood undersea movies, including “U-571.”

In “U-571,” Mostow uses the mission to seize the Enigma device as a means to launch the story, but he is most interested in the action in the North Atlantic. He has not only pitted destroyers against submarines, but also a submarine against a submarine and thrown in what may be the longest-lasting and most horrific depth-charging ever put on the screen. He has also returned to the image of the German enemy so popular in the early days of World War II Hollywood movies, where evil Nazis machine-gun helpless sailors in lifeboats, but with a difference. The machine-gunning is done as an operational necessity on occasion by both sides to illustrate the dimensions of war in moral terms.

Interestingly, one of Mostow’s German technical advisors also served as a consultant to Wolfgang Petersen during the making of “Das Boot,” the now-classic German film in which the Nazi submariners become the heroes of the story and ultimately the victims of the war.

Of course, it was a war movie from West Germans’ perspective, and they were our ally against the evil empire when Petersen made his antiwar statement. Today, however, Hollywood filmmakers have the freedom to portray the German military with all its warts, as the insidious enemy force that fought for Hitler, carried out the Holocaust and tried to take over the world in the name of the Third Reich.

After all, the United States no longer needs its ally against the Soviet Union.

Lawrence Suid is completing a revised, expanded edition of “Guts & Glory,” his study of the relationship between the film industry and the United States armed services.