U-571
Enigma: The battle for the code by Hugh Sebag-Montifiore (Wiley, 2004) 
Enigma by Robert Harris (Arrow, 1996) 
Das Boot: The mini-seriesU-571
Reviewed by author, journalist and lecturer Daniel Lee.
RATING: 2
France/US, 2000
Director Jonathan Mostow
Screenwriters Jonathan Mostow, Sam Montgomery and David Ayer
Cinematographer Oliver Wood
Music Richard Marvin
Production design William Ladd Skinner and Götz Weidner
Cast Matthew McConaughey (Lieutenant Andrew Tyler), Bill Paxton (Lieutenant Commander Mike Dahlgren), Harvey Keitel (Chief Petty Officer Henry Klough), Jon Bon Jovi (Lieutenant Pete Emmett), David Keith (Major Matthew Coonan), Thomas Kretschmann (Captain-Lieutenant Gunther Wassner), Jake Weber (Lieutenant Hirsch), Jack Noseworthy (Seaman Bill Wentz)
'Gripping, absorbing and nail-biting from start to finish,' Jonathan Ross said about U-571 on its release. The Mail on Sunday added, 'Terrifyingly good,' while the Mirror screamed, 'It's dynamite!' All of which may be true. There is certainly plenty of action and tension from the moment the film opens with ominous music, dark underwater filming and the onscreen words:
Spring 1942: Hitler's U-boats wreak havoc in the North Atlantic sinking over 1,000 Allied ships and threatening to destroy the supply line from America to England. Unable to crack the new U-boat radio codes, the Allies struggle blindly against the German onslaught.
An encounter between a German U-boat and Allied ships follows. The scenes in the submarine are most evocative – the heat, sweat, smell of fuel and sense of danger ooze from the screen. Period details, such as realistic wheels, levers and uniforms, add to the authentic and compelling feel of the film. You get the picture: as an action film, it works. But that's not the whole story.
Drifting off course
Just as the U-boat appears to be getting into serious trouble, the drama shifts to an American dancehall – which is where things start to go wrong. Not with the story being told in the film, but with its depiction of the truth (or lack of it).
It is at this point that it becomes clear that the film is about how the Americans captured from the Nazis an infamous Enigma code machine, which enabled the Germans to send ever more super-secure messages to their army and navy. The Allied cryptographers had been struggling to decipher these messages for some time.
Once you start looking at the historical truth behind the Enigma codes, the film rapidly begins to fall apart
Like finding a key that unlocks a whole code, once you start looking at the historical truth behind the Enigma codes, the film rapidly begins to fall apart.
In 1942, the year in which the film is set, the Allies did seize Enigma codebooks from a U-boat. But it was the British, not the Americans, who were responsible, and the submarine was not the U-571 but the U-559. The captured codebooks provided vital assistance to the British cryptographers, led by Alan Turing, at the code-breaking hothouse of Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes. The British operation – during which two British naval personnel drowned and a third, 16-year-old canteen assistant Tommy Brown, saved the codebooks – was later described by George VI as 'perhaps the single most important event in the war at sea'.
Earlier successes
Not only did the British capture the Enigma codebooks in 1942. Seventeen months earlier, in May 1941, they had seized the German submarine U-110 and, with it, Enigma documents and a code machine, all of which gave them critical information for the code-breaking effort. The Americans certainly played no part in this – they had not even entered World War II at that stage.
But in truth, neither the Brits nor the Americans can claim to have been the first to break the Enigma codes. That credit must go to the Poles, who did it back in 1932, 10 years before the U-571, or even the U-559, was captured. Seven years later, just before the Germans invaded Poland, they gave their findings to the French and the British ... er, not the Americans.
By 1942, the British were regularly reading Naval Enigma (coded messages sent to the German fleet), thanks to the important code material they had earlier captured from enemy submarines and weather ships.
However, to be fair to U-571's makers, the US Navy did seize a German U-boat – the U-505 (which can still be seen at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago) – and Enigma material, but this was in June 1944, just before D-Day. And even that, one of the Americans' rare captures at sea (the first since 1815), posed a possible threat to Operation Overlord.
Senseless
Among the film's many other gaffs, critics have singled out the mysterious materialisation of a German Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter and a German destroyer in mid-Atlantic. In 1942, ships of the Third Reich avoided those dangerous waters, leaving it to their submarines to attack the Allies. In addition, the Germans had no aircraft carriers, and only aircraft much larger than a Messerschmitt would have been able to fly that sort of distance. The scene may have looked evocative, but it was more or less impossible.
More seriously, the U-boat crew were shown machine-gunning Allied merchant seamen in a lifeboat. Although this clearly set up a traditional good guys/bad guys scenario that movies thrive on and heightened the tension of the film, such cold-blooded killing was actually quite rare at sea.
Fallout
The film U-571 (which was the name of a real German submarine that had nothing to do with Enigma) caused outrage in the UK, particularly among the families of Royal Navy Lieutenant Antony Fasson and Able Seaman Colin Grazier of the British destroyer HMS Petard, who died while retrieving the Enigma material from U-559. Speaking in the House of Commons, the prime minister Tony Blair said that the film was an 'affront' to the British sailors killed in the war. He went on: 'I hope that people realise these are people that, in many cases, sacrificed their lives in order that this country remained free.'
The then culture secretary Chris Smith added: 'I think one of the things we need to make clear to Hollywood is, yes you're in the entertainment business but the people who see your movies are going to come away thinking that's information, not just entertainment.'
Shortly after the release of U-571, novelist Robert Harris, who wrote the 1996 thriller Enigma about the code breakers of Bletchley Park, attacked the Americans' handling of historical films, 'It's a form of cultural imperialism,' he said. 'No matter what the situation, or where the film is supposed to be set, an American has to be central, to be seen as the good guy, or to save the day in some way.'
Despite all this, the film was a big success in the US, and it also did surprisingly well in the UK.
But it makes for a gripping film, doesn't it?
Other novels and films based on the Enigma story may not take as many liberties with the subject, but most still deviate from the truth. When Robert Harris' novel was made into a film in 2001, it was criticised for a number of historical inaccuracies. The 1979 Polish film Sekret Enigmy (Enigma Secret), which dramatised the vital work done by the Polish code breakers, seemed to fare better, but Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel Cryptonomicon was taken to task for altering the facts. The best of the bunch on the subject of submarine warfare is probably Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 film Das Boot.
So, one could conclude that, apart from depicting the wrong country capturing the wrong material at the wrong time from the wrong submarine, U-571 is a good film. Its makers eventually – but only after the public outcry in Britain – added a caption before the credits, admitting the fact that it had been the Royal Navy that had captured the Enigma codebook.
STOP PRESS: On BBC Radio 4's Film Programme on 18 August 2006, one of the screenwriters of U-571, David Ayer, admitted that he was ashamed of having altered history so much and said that he would never do it again. He has since gone on to write Training Day (2001) and Harsh Times (2006), which he also directed.
