U-571 is a 2000 film directed by Jonathan Mostow, and starring Matthew McConaughey, Bill Paxton, Harvey Keitel, Thomas Kretschmann, Jon Bon Jovi, Jack Noseworthy, Will Estes, and Tom Guiry. In the film, a World War II German submarine is boarded in 1942 by disguised United States Navy submariners, seeking to capture her Enigma cipher machine.
The film's plot, though a work of fiction, is partly based on real events. Though the film was generally well received,[1] the plot attracted criticism for two reasons: first, it was British personnel from HMS Bulldog who first captured a naval Enigma machine, from U-110 in the North Atlantic May 1941, before the United States entered the war. Second, German U-boat crews were portrayed in a negative light.
The real U-571 was never involved in any such events, was not captured, and was in fact sunk in January 1944, off Ireland, by a Short Sunderland flying boat from No. 461 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force.
U-571 was filmed in the Mediterranean Sea, near Rome and Malta.[2]
During a rainstorm, the S-33 comes across U-571 and sends her boarding party over, led by Coonan. Hirsch temporarily freezes and Wentz is forced to speak German in front of his friends in order for the group to retain their cover until their rafts are tied up. They then take the boat by force, capture the Enigma and begin rounding up the prisoners including the captain. As the prisoners are transferred between ships and the scuttling charges are laid, the S-33 is torpedoed and sunk by the real resupply sub. Lieutenant Commander Dahlgren, wounded in the water, orders his men on the captured U-boat to submerge and save themselves. (This scene was based on an actual incident in World War II: Commander Howard W. Gilmore, USN, after being seriously wounded in an encounter with Japanese destroyer, ordered his men to abandon him on deck and submerge to save the ship and crew. Gilmore was awarded the Medal of Honor for his sacrifice. The movie quotes Gilmore's last recorded words: "Take her down.") Coonan, Larson and many others are lost, forcing Tyler to take command and dive the captured U-boat. After struggling with interpreting the German controls they fire a salvo of torpedoes destroying the enemy U-Boat, draining the last of the sub's batteries and spending all but the last torpedo, loaded in the malfunctioning aft torpedo tube. Surfacing, Tyler and his men search for survivors and find two: the black cook from the S-33, Eddy, and a German sailor claiming to be an electrician, but who is actually the captain of U-571.
