Roger Moorhouse
Subject: You Sank My U-Boat
Bio: Author of Wolfpack: Inside Hitler’s U-Boat War
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s topic is You Sank My U-Boat.
Our speaker is Roger Moorhouse who is the author of a new book entitled Wolfpack: Inside Hitler’s U-Boat War. I want to hear from Roger about the relative importance of convoys, radar, and breaking the Nazis codes to the allied victory in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Our second speaker will be the What Happens Next Culture Critic Darren Schwartz. We are going to discuss World War 2 U-Boat movies including Das Boot and the recent Tom Hanks film Greyhound.
Roger can you please open with six minutes of opening remarks.
Roger Moorhouse:
I am the author of Wolfpack, which is a new book about the U-boat War from the German perspective. Most of the existing literature, particularly on the Battle of the Atlantic tends to view that conflict from the point of view of the destroyers and merchantmen. The U-boat narrative is literally and metaphorically unseen. There is a wealth of German archival material, war diaries, and unpublished memoirs.
There was a personal angle to this. My mother-in-law is German. And when I told her about the book project I was working on, she said one of my uncles was in the U-boat arm and he used to come to the house, and they had to call the police. He was so broken by the experience of the war that he used to occasionally escape from this psychiatric hospital, and the only place he knew to go was a family home.
It certainly was reinforcing that there is a story here that needed to be written about.
Larry Bernstein:
What is the relevance of the U-boat experience to modern warfare?
Roger Moorhouse:
It is an exercise in asymmetric warfare, which we are seeing in the Ukraine-Russian war. U-Boats are cheap to produce.
It is also experiment in trade warfare. You are trying to strangle Britain out of the war. What is interesting was the comparison to American efforts in the Pacific against the Japanese, which are very much analogous to what the Germans are doing. Using the submarine force to strangle the country out because Japan, like Britain, is dependent on imports to survive. In the Pacific example, the Americans did a good job doing exactly what the Germans wanted to do in the Atlantic but were unsuccessful.
Larry Bernstein:
There is a potential for a blockade of Taiwan by the Chinese, and instead of using submarines, they are going to use large ships to prevent supply into Taiwan. It will be the Taiwanese who are going to be using submarines to destroy a blockade. How do you think about the use of a submarine to prevent a blockade instead of to create one?
Roger Moorhouse:
In that example of Taiwan, if that prospect comes to pass, the Taiwanese could use submarines to great effect and relatively cheap way of defending themselves.
Larry Bernstein:
When the Second World War started, on the first day, they sank a passenger ship. It was a disaster, and they entered the happy time to destroy the merchant fleet providing critical foods and military supplies for the British population. Churchill famously said that he feared the U-boats the most as one reason to lose the war.
Roger Moorhouse:
That quote looms too large in the historiography of this subject. The quote itself comes from Churchill’s postwar memoir, and he says that the U-Boat war was the only aspect of World War 2, not the Battle of Britain, not the Blitz that genuinely frightened him. It has been exaggerated to build up the U-Boat war threat to be more than it necessarily was.
Churchill’s memoir was talking about the winter of 1940 to 1941 and coincides with that happy time that you were mentioning. The German U-boat fleet was small at that time, and they go to war in September 1039, with 29 Combat U-boats, which is a ridiculously small force. Bearing in mind the logistical realities of having a force that only about a third of those U-boats are going to be in theater at any one time. Another third will be resupplying, and another third will be traveling to and from. You have maybe got 10 U-boats in theater.
The Germans had had this great success sinking Allied Merchantmen. Early commanders had been successful on a single patrol could sink a dozen vessels for 50,000 ton. That is why they called it the happy time.
Britain is facing the prospect of having to tighten rationing, having serious shortages of food and material, and having a knock-on political effect as well. By the end of 1941, both the Soviet Union and the Americans crucially will be in the war. The Grand Alliance will have been formed, and the tide will have turned in the U-boat war as well.
Larry Bernstein:
The U-boats have an endogenous interaction between the Germans and the allies. The U-boats are trying to destroy the merchant fleet. The Americans are building Liberty Boats by the thousands, and the Germans cannot destroy a meaningful percentage of the new ships. You mentioned that the total number of tons of material had fallen in half between 1940 and 1941. Well now with all these new ships coming online, it is a throughput issue.
The U-boats must be resupplied. They only carry a dozen or so torpedoes, and it is a gas hog, and they need to be supplied with diesel. They have U-Boats that are milk cows that provide them with fuel. There are tankers in the North Atlantic, but as the Americans, British and Canadians start to take out these tankers and destroy the milk cows.
Tell us about the endogeneity of response function to escalation of technology on both sides.
Roger Moorhouse:
Technology is developed and tested that comes faster out of necessity. On the allied side the use of radar is crucial. This cat and mouse element between the allies and the Germans. The British develop aerial radar that becomes the game changer in the U-Boat war. More U-Boats are sunk from aerial attack located by radar than by any other source.
The Germans develop radar detectors in response, so it gives an audible signal when the vessel is being pinged on radar. So that then gives them a bit more time, because normally if you are caught by a radar enabled aircraft, it can effectively see a surfaced U-boat from say, 15 miles away. By the time that the U-boat realizes that it is about to be attacked, it has about a minute to evade attack to dive, and it takes them 30 seconds to dive. So, the margins are very narrow.
The Germans were also developing the next generation of submarines. They developed Anechoic Coating for their submarines that they proofed against sonar detection, which is very radical technology. By that time, it cannot change the course of the war, but it points the way to submarine technology that is to come in the Cold War. They are playing catch up; they are also innovating effectively as well. That is one big strand of the story is the whole technological race.
Larry Bernstein:
I was always surprised that immediately after Pearl Harbor, Hitler decided to declare war on the United States. Roosevelt takes that decision to allocate resources primarily against the Germans first and the Japanese second. And if only Hitler had deferred that decision, it is possible that the US engagement would have been primarily against Japan for attacking Pearl Harbor.
I was baffled by it. The admiral in charge of the U-Boat command is angry with US naval interference with his U-Boat war. There are several incidents before Pearl Harbor where American ships are guiding the British attacks against the U-boats. It is only with Pearl Harbor that the war is declared, and the U- boats are so happy to be able to have a free for all, but they do not realize that in that process they’ve lost the war themselves. Churchill was also famously quoted when he is awakened hearing about Pearl Harbor, says, “Thank God we’ve won the war.” Tell us about Hitler’s fatal decision to declare war on the United States immediately after Pearl Harbor.
Roger Moorhouse:
Our conventional view of December 1941 and Pearl Harbor being the moment. Through the prism of the U-Boat War, you can see that there are several points. The sinking of the Reuben James, for example, which is a few weeks before Pearl Harbor. Americans become the arsenal of democracy and FDR’s efforts to wrench America out of this isolationist mentality that was very widespread and popular at the time.
FDR’s an interventionist long before Pearl Harbor. That is the situation that the Americans and by extension the Germans find themselves in the Atlantic through 1941. It is an undeclared war that is going on. The problem for the U-boats themselves is that they cannot necessarily identify vessels before they attack them. So, if you see a convoy on the horizon and you are a U-boat from a couple of miles away and you are deciding to attack, you cannot say, I am not going to attack that one. That is the American. They are just going to fire their torpedoes at waves in front of them. And then the political fallout from that is what they must deal with on both sides.
The Germans were paranoid that you would have another political episode of crisis like with the Lusitania in 1915, which contributed to bringing the Americans into the First World War. But you cannot prosecute the U-Boat war by pussyfooting around and hoping not to sink vessels that you should not be sinking because they’re being used as supplements to the escort force.
Larry Bernstein:
The British, before the entry of the United States, protected their merchant marine with the use of convoys that would include destroyers to destroy the U-boats. When the merchant marine went independently not in a convoy, they were picked off at will by the U-boats. As soon as America entered the war, the Germans immediately said that the Americans would be unprepared and there would be a new happy time to destroy US merchant marines on the East Coast. It was well lit, they did not use convoys, they would leave at designated times and would be easy game. The British tried to warn Admiral King, but he said that he was not interested in what the British had to say. Take us through the first few months of the war, America’s were so unprepared against the U-boats and why they were unwilling to accept advice from the British.
Roger Moorhouse:
You would think given that narrative that there would have been more preparation given once America enters the war. The Germans launch what they call Operation Drumbeats, which is the attack on shipping off the American East Coast, which is January of 1942, German submariners discover that nothing is blacked out.
You would see the target vessel silhouette against a beautifully lit coastal town. No use of convoys at all. The defenses are underdeveloped, and they consequently, they have what they call a second happy time. Echoing that earlier phase of numerous sinkings where the Americans failed to have learned any of the lessons of the previous two years. Admiral King decided not to take British advice. The Americans knew better, and they didn’t need to be listening to London.
Larry Bernstein:
The Enigma machine, which was a way of giving coded messages to the submarines. They got lucky that the Poles had stolen an Enigma machine. The allies are breaking messages that the Germans believe are made in confidence. You are going to meet in this specific location, there is a tanker there so you can refuel. The British send the Air fleet to destroy the tanker and potentially the U-boat as well. Take us through the discovery of Enigma and its implication for the U-Boat war in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Roger Moorhouse:
It is a huge strand of the story. The Poles had already broken Enigma. Enigma had been commercially available in the 1930s, weirdly. It had been a product on the market, an encryption machine, and Polish mathematicians had already broken it before World War 2. Anticipation that war was coming in the summer of 1939, the Poles contacted their French and British counterparts in cryptography and handed over everything that they had in the hope that the British particularly would run with it.
The story of Bletchley Park and the whole code breaking and cryptography effort that was worked out there. U-110 German was captured intact. This is one of the reasons why the Germans used to scuffle their U-boats when they were forced to surrender was to make sure that all the sensitive code books and equipment would go to the bottom. U-110 was not scuttled, it stayed afloat so the allies were able to get aboard and get this huge cache of sensitive materials and crucially an enigma machine.
By 1941, they are reading in real-time what the Germans are saying to their U-boats. That information is used in a defensive capacity to route convoys away from where they know the U-boats are. U-boat commanders go on a patrol and do not see a single boat because the convoys are all being rooted away from them. They are confused by that.
Larry Bernstein:
Wolfpack is the name of your book. We talked about the cat and mouse scheme, but one of the benefits of the convoy is that we now have destroyers that have depth charges that can destroy the U-boats. Tell us about the Wolfpack as an innovation to undermine the benefits of the convoy.
Roger Moorhouse:
The Wolfpack is enabled by technology. In the Second World War what is a game changer is the use of radio, and that enables them for the first time to coordinate between them. This idea of the Wolfpack where you would have 5, 6, 7 U-boats that would coordinate in attacking convoys together.
They would line up in two banks and allow the convoy to approach, and then they would attack from all sides. You would have a U-boat fire from the outside of the convoy, which would draw the escorts out, those destroyers that are escorting 40 merchant vessels, and have an escort of eight Navy vessels. So, if you fire a couple of torpedoes in from the outside, the naval escort will spread out to try and interdict those that are attacking them. At that point, other U-boats would come within the lines of the convoy itself and would start motoring up and down the lines of the convoy picking off all the best targets with impunity. That worked very well in that first happy time.
Royal Navy personnel started war gaming how best to respond to these new tactics. A unit was set up in Liverpool called the Western Approaches Tactical Unit, where they tried to work out the best way of countering that. One method is that they got the escorts to sweep behind the convoy out once it passed by because they realized that that is where the U-boats tended to congregate after an attack. This is part of that whole tactical cat and mouse game that they were playing. It worked very well for a while until those countermeasures got up to speed.
You mentioned depth charging, which is a blunt weapon. They had depth charges at the end of the First World War as well. The technology is old, but what they developed from 1943 onwards was what was known as hedgehog, which was a forward firing mortar, which exploded on contact. A depth charge explodes by pressure. It has a pressure fuse; you will set it to 50 meters in the expectation that that is where the U-boat was. And if it exploded within 20 meters of the U-boat, it would cause some damage. The closer it got, obviously significant damage. And then the U-boat would be forced to the surface, at which point it either tries to fight its way out or it must surrender. The hedgehog works in a different way because it explodes on contact.
You send an array of these mortars into the water, and they sink, and as they contact the hull of the vessel then they explode. If you are in a submarine at a hundred meters and something explodes on your hull, you are in trouble. You are not going to be able to get to the surface again. So that was a game changer of the kill rate but also to knock the U-boats out much more effectively.
If you look at popular films about this, we still have this image of depth charging being the only thing they did. But aerial attack enabled by aerial radar and the use of hedgehog, both of those were much more effective as countermeasures than depth charging was.
Larry Bernstein:
Darren and I are going to be talking about the U-Boat films in World War II after our discussion, but I wanted to bring up the Tom Hanks movie that came out in 2020 called Greyhound. He plays the captain of a destroyer facing a wolfpack that has broken into the convoy and causing chaos. What did you make of the film?
Roger Moorhouse:
I enjoyed it a lot. Tom Hanks did a great job with it. With my historian’s hat on, the one part of that that did not strike true to me was the bit where the U-boat commander goads the destroyers. He gets on the radio and says that he is coming for you to intimidate them. That is something that I am sure the script writers wanted some devilish human face on the U-Boat man.
I have never come across that happening. I would put my neck on the line and say, that is unrealistic, though that film is realistic in many respects. That was a misstep to have portrayed it in that way. The conventional image of the U-Boat man as cold-eyed killers, and they are fighting a war; it is a brutal business and people die. But what came out most interestingly from my research is that what is much more common than that cold bloodedness, is a degree of sympathy for a fellow sailor.
It is always about the tonnage. They look at a vessel through the periscope, they will say, it is a tanker. Brilliant. It is 10,000 tons. That is a success for us. But when they have sunk it and you have got men in the water, then very often there are people going, oh, this is not good. I mean, we cannot help them. That scene jarred me was because it was the opposite of how they tended to view the human experience of their opponents. There was a sense of fellow feeling there.
Larry Bernstein:
There is another movie, The Enemy Below a Robert Mitchum film, and there is a critical scene where the destroyer rams the German U-boat, and both ships are going down and they go for the lifeboats and the U-boat is being scuttled, and the captain looks like he is going down with the U-Boat.
The captain of the destroyer sees the U-Boat Captain in distress and decides to risk his own life to save the German captain. There is a sense of humanity that there are two legitimate soldiers who have dedicated their lives to their war efforts, but it is not personal, and there is a genuine respect for their opponent. So, at one moment, they are ready to kill them. At the next moment they are ready to risk their own lives to save them.
Roger Moorhouse:
That film came out in 1957 not long after the end of the war. That is admittedly an extreme example the way you have just described it, but it’s closer to the ethos that sailors on both sides would’ve felt that sense of Fellowship of the Sea. I am not under any illusion as to how brutal German forces behaved in other theaters in World War 2, but the Battle of the Atlantic appears to be a relatively, and I stress relatively humane and chivalrous one.
There is one example which might illuminate this, which is the sinking of the Laconia in September 1942 off the West African Coast, a British passenger ship called the Laconia, which is used as a troop ship, was sunk by U-156, and in the aftermath U-Boat 156 comes to the surface.
What they used to do was grab a prisoner and interrogate them and say, what was the ship? Where was it going? What was it called? What was it carrying? They would find out information so they can log it. If they were lucky and found an officer, they might interrogate them further. They surface and discover that those in the water are Italian POWs, Germany’s allies. This commander decides to start trying to help them all. There are Polish soldiers, there are civilians in the water and Italian POWs, and he starts rounding up the lifeboats. He spends four days doing that in the Mid-Atlantic. He radios out in English saying, having a disaster here. If anyone wants to come and help me, I will not attack you if you do not attack me. Eventually he is attacked by American aircraft, but he has got these survivors on his deck, below deck, lifeboats in tow, and he is still attacked by American aircraft. It is one of those examples where he was risking his crews lives to save the men that he had just sunk.
This story gets reported to Hitler, and Hitler has a fit and says why on earth are we saving the crews of these vessels that we are sinking? Hitler gives an order initially to cease forthwith, which is then communicated to the crews by Doenitz. It is known as the Laconia order. But it is remarkable that that is halfway through the war. It is September 1942, and new boat crews are having to be told to stop helping those crews that they have just sunk.
That is not to say that it happened most times, but where it was remotely feasible, that very often was acted upon. It would be at least saying, do you need medical care? Do you need some water? Giving them blankets and pointing and saying land is that way.
Larry Bernstein:
I recently did a podcast on the 80th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials. Admiral Doenitz is brought up on charges related to the Laconia Order where he says that they should no longer try to save the lives of allied forces that are in the water. In his defense, he gets an affidavit from Admiral Chester Nimitz as head of the US Navy in the Pacific, and he says that we operated under the same guidelines and therefore we do not view it as a war crime. Tell us about that.
Roger Moorhouse:
It is very much as you described. Doenitz is arraigned at Nuremberg. He had succeeded Hitler as head of state. For the last week of the war after Hitler’s suicide, he is the head of Nazi Germany. He was never going to escape scot-free. He is sentenced to 10 years, which is short for someone in his position. One of the details under which he was arraigned, was this Laconia Order, which for a lot of people was interpreted as a coded order, not to help but to eliminate allied crews. That was probably a step too far in terms of the interpretation of the order. I think the order is what it says it is. It is an order to stop assisting crews that they have sunk, because in the process as with U-156 and the Laconia, it was endangering German crews. I do not believe it was a coded anything. Doenitz’s defense at Nuremberg was clever. His lawyer was particularly good, and not only got affidavits from Doenitz’s own former commanders saying that they were aware of this fellowship of the sea, and they tried to fight the war as chivalrously as possible. He also, as you said, had this affidavit from Chester Nimitz, which essentially said that whatever the Germans are being accused of that is what the Americans did in the Pacific.
Doenitz is not a good man. He is a Nazi, he is a believer in Hitler, believes in the Nazi project. But when Hitler hit the roof and started his rant about why are we saving those crews? We should be killing the crews. This is total war in Hitler’s mind. Doenitz according to his own memoir account, said that is not the way it works. He answered back, which people did not tend to do with Hitler, as you can imagine. He went on to pass on the order that crews should no longer be helped. But the supposition that was a coded order to kill crews, I think is a step too far. I do not think it is criminal,
Larry Bernstein:
So, we are trying to distinguish a good soldier, good opponent, versus a good Nazi and a bad war criminal.
It is interesting that Doenitz is chosen to be head of state. Hitler did not want Goering to be in charge. He did not want Himmler. The choice of the former U-Boat commander to run the nation is a little odd. He must believe in certain aspects of the project. He is Hitler’s chosen successor, and yet we are supposed to think of him as a fair player.
Roger Moorhouse:
Hitler at this point is in a frenzy of betrayal. He stripped Herman Goering of his positions because Goering in the confusion of the crumbling Third Reich has sent a message back to Berlin where he says, I am assuming that you are unable to operate. Is it okay if I take over command? Which is a reasonable question in the circumstances, but it is interpreted by Hitler as an act of betrayal. And Goering was always unpopular in the higher circles. He was a bit too grand.
He did the same thing with Himmler as well. If you remember the circumstances of Hitler suicide, he had the cyanide capsules tested on this dog before so that he could have faith in the cyanide that came from the SS. Himmler had opened channels of communication with the Western powers with a view to trying to make a separate peace. Hitler sees treason everywhere.
Doenitz in the Navy are free of that. Doenitz was a loyalist, was very keen on the Nazi project, was a big fan of Hitler himself. He is seen as the last man standing. Doenitz was astonished when he was informed that not only had Hitler committed suicide, but that Doenitz was to follow him as head of state. When you look at it in that betrayal, Doenitz seems a logical candidate.
Larry Bernstein:
My mom and my grandparents hid in Vichy France during the war, and then immediately after the American invasion of Morocco with Operation Torch, the Germans no longer respected Vichy France as a separate country. My grandfather was in Marseilles and watched the German soldiers move in and panicked headed for the Pyrenees with my mom and my grandmother. Before they left, he met with the Quakers who were trying to get 200 Jewish children orphans out of France and were negotiations with the Vichy regime to give them exit visas. When the Germans came in, those exit visas were not coming.
The Quakers had arranged for a Portuguese liner called the Serpa Pinto to leave Lisbon to go to Philadelphia. My grandfather was hired to be the physician aboard to take care of the children, and he made his way across the Pyrenees with my mother and my grandmother to Portugal waiting for the children that never arrived. In December 1942, they decided to take the Serpa Pinto to Philadelphia without the children, but with a handful of other Jews in an empty ship.
Along the way, they are stopped by a German U-boat, and the U-boat commander is lifted into the ship, and he asked to see who is aboard and if there was any contraband that could be used in the war. And my grandfather said he did not appear to pay much interest to the Jews aboard. He saw the cork in the helm and then left the ship and did not sink it. The U-Boat captain was not interested in the Jewish genocide but was focused on his job.
Roger Moorhouse:
So that was a Portuguese vessel.
Larry Bernstein:
It was.
Roger Moorhouse:
That is a remarkable story, Larry, and what is telling there is that presumably because a Portuguese vessel was traveling alone, which meant that the U-boat could intercept it following the Prize rules, which means you intercept, you board, you ascertain where it’s going from, what it’s carrying and so on as to whether it’s an enemy vessel or not. What to me is interesting there is that even late in the war when you say it was?
Larry Bernstein:
December 1942
Roger Moorhouse:
So even late in the war they were still operating under the Prize Rules: intercept, interrogate, and if necessary, let the ship go. If that was riding in a convoy, then there is a good chance they would have been hit from two miles distant. Nobody would have known whether they were Portuguese or not. But obviously as a neutral vessel, they were okay. It fits to that surprising element of chivalry. And in the U-boat war that I certainly found surprising writing this book.
Larry Bernstein:
Darren and I are going to talk about the most important U-Boat movie Das Boot. It is based on a work of fiction with the same name. There is a wolfpack working, and the captain of the U-boat is successful destroying a tanker and it’s burning, and he wants to sink it. So, he fires a final torpedo shot, which results in an unbelievable explosion. Men are still on the deck being burned alive and others are jumping into the water. And there’s shock by the captain of the U-boat who says, “they should not be there, and it’s been hours. I do not understand why they are still there, but he does not progress towards the injured men where the people are screaming in the water. He orders the boat to retreat away from the boat as you hear the men screaming and then there is quiet and there is a sense that they probably have drowned. He makes remarks in his diary that he was following the order effectively. Tell us about Das Boot.
Roger Moorhouse:
Das Boot is amazing. It has always been one of my top five films. Now, that scene it is very harrowing, it is very sensitively done in the book. Bear in mind that the author of the book Luther-Gunther Buchheim, had had been on patrol was a war reporter who had been on at least one U-Boat patrol on U-96 in 1941.
The film had two U-boat commanders as historical advisors. You are in the best possible hands in that sense to recreate something realistic. And they do. That scene, shows you that the instinct of the crew of the U-boat crew is it’s about tonnage and as you said, it comes across in that when they say, why are the men there? Why haven’t they been taken off?
There is a degree of luxury in the U-Boat war is that they do not have to get eyeball to eyeball with the enemy. Most of the crew of a U-boat do not even see the vessel that they are sinking.
We must explain why those old naval traditions hold true despite the barbarism that is going on in every other theater. One possible explanation for that is that it never gets eye to eye. They are in their steel tube at 50 meters below surface, and they never get to even see the enemy.
Larry Bernstein:
The U-boat is a small element of the war. 75% of the U-Boat soldiers perished, 30,000 out of 40,000 men, but it is a pittance of the 25 million that passed in this catastrophe.
Yet, one of the great warm films of all time is Das Boot. What is it about the U-Boat experience that transcends that war and a story that should be told?
Roger Moorhouse:
We would go back to the core themes of the book. The conditions that they worked in are unimaginably horrible. They are filthy all the time. We have this romantic image of the U-Boat man with his beard, they did not wash for two months, so they stink. The U-boat men are basically rotting. They are in terrible health. The mental toll that it took on them. PTSD is rife. You could say the same thing about tank crews on the Eastern Front perhaps. But they are not committing atrocities left, right, and center unlike their fellows on land. We can have empathy to the experiences that they went through. The fact that it is a clean conflict in the U-boat war makes it a story that we can empathize with them.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Roger for joining us and I would like to turn next to our second speaker Darren Schwartz who will be discussing the U-Boat film genre.
Larry Bernstein:
Greyhound was a 2020 film. Tom Hanks plays the captain of an American destroyer leading a convoy from the United States to Britain that runs into a wolfpack.
Darren Schwartz:
It did not get its just due because it was released in COVID that had to go direct to streaming.
I loved the movie, one of my top 10 all-time favorite war movies. The ratings were like 78%, which were way underscored. With war films part of the experience is visually on a big screen and audibly that is designed to put you in that moment. War movies are much higher rated when watching it at a theater.
I was blown away. I loved it. It is one of three screenplays that Tom Hanks wrote. Action packed; you never got a break. It all occurred on the bridge. You did not see anything under deck. And it was Tom Hanks and six other guys trying to kill Germans and survive.
Larry Bernstein:
It’s a long day. It was like the TV show 24 as a full season, running around the deck trying to anticipate the actions of the U-Boat. He is not perfect. Ships are blowing up right and left.
Darren Schwartz:
He went to save four people another ship was destroyed killing 70 other sailors. The movie was about his leadership style. He kept getting food from the porter and kept turning it away. They brought him a sandwich and he was like, just coffee. He’s hungry. Get him some food.
Larry Bernstein:
My mom says you got to eat, particularly in battle.
Darren Schwartz:
He was a captain before in his war roles. He was Captain Phillips.
Larry Bernstein:
Oh yeah.
Darren Schwartz:
He was a captain in Saving Private Ryan.
Do you know where the U-Boat term came from?
Larry Bernstein:
I am going to guess Underwater Boat.
Darren Schwartz:
Under Sea Boat. That’s right.
Larry Bernstein:
What did you think you learned about war strategy having seen Greyhound and the effectiveness of convoys?
Darren Schwartz:
Sonar was new. Put your finger in the air and take your best guess. How is he determining how far away that is when you get the ping back? And the answer is he’s not. It’s an educated guess.
These Tom Hanks roles, he always has some ailment. In Saving Private Ryan,
Larry Bernstein:
He’s got that shaky hand.
Darren Schwartz:
In Greyhound, he had the bloody feet.
He is like bring my slippers. Those are nice slippers. You are getting them all bloody.
Larry Bernstein:
People are dying left and right. Do not worry about the slippers.
Darren Schwartz:
Do you remember in Castaway what his issue was besides being alone on an island?
Larry Bernstein:
He had the tooth issue.
Darren Schwartz:
Captain Phillips. He was tied up and beaten. He had some nerve injury.
Larry Bernstein:
Sorry to hear that.
The guy is always putting himself in physical danger. You got to respect that. No double with that bloody foot.
How did you feel about when the captain of the U-boat went over the radios verbally harassing the Americans, specifically Tom Hanks as Captain of the Greyhound?
Darren Schwartz:
I laughed out loud.
Larry Bernstein:
Do you remember what he said?
Darren Schwartz:
We’re going to come kill you. We just destroyed your comrade’s boat. We can hear them sinking and dying. And then he went, the wolf is coming to get you. I laughed out loud.
Larry Bernstein:
Roger Moorhouse thought that was ahistorical. He knew nothing in the record where someone behaved like that. Why become ahistorical and ridiculous to have the howling wolf U-Boat commander?
Darren Schwartz:
You had to put in some acknowledgement for the antagonist. They went overboard with this crazy voice saying, we are going to destroy you and then howling like a wolf.
Larry Bernstein:
Let’s move onto Das Boot. I saw it in the movie theater when it came out decades ago. I thought it was excellent. It was shorter around two hours. This was a three and a half hours director’s cut. We tried looking for the shorter two-hour movie but could not find it.
Darren Schwartz:
It was so long that was the point. Wolfgang Peterson wanted to show how horrible warfare in a submarine can be. Dreary, drab, dirty and boring your existence is until it is time to act. Wolfgang Peterson was the director. He was not happy with the theatrical release. 10 years later he got control of the movie and now it’s a 3.5-hour release and you can’t find the other one. He’s shut that whole thing down.
I watched it over a couple of days. I split it up. You are happy you saw the whole thing. But it’s a test. I thought the movie was marvelous and it was so front loaded with those first 10 minutes. He walks into the officer’s club, and you got the Nazis officers drinking and they are cutting open champagne bottles and people are falling down, singing and throwing up in the bathroom.
Larry Bernstein:
Darren, you need release after a long time.
Darren Schwartz:
Fine.
Larry Bernstein:
It’s excellent. Greyhound is in your top 10 war movies, is Das Boot?
Darren Schwartz:
I’ll go through them. No specific order: Saving Private Ryan, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Paths of Glory, Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, Inglorious Bastards. Das Boot, Courage Under Fire, Blackhawk Down and Greyhound.
Das Boot was well done. I do not want to say anti-Nazi, but it was clearly not embracing Nazism. They wanted to position it for American audiences, even the flag when the sub surfaces, the swastika was obscured.
None of the submarine crew, including the captain, did the Heil Hitler. They did not have any Nazi insignia on them. The crew of the submarines were removed from the battlefield and seemed less committed to the atrocities that were going on the ground, which in no way absolves any of them.
Larry Bernstein:
The film is known for its claustrophobic experience. Submarine life is in narrow quarters. There is nowhere to go. The cinematography is successful in capturing living on top of each other. You get the smells of rotten food, sweat, no showers. Imagine just the two of us, Darren, it would be a pigsty.
Darren Schwartz:
It would be no good. They recreated the subs. Wolfgang Peterson made them live in there. They shot it in a real submarine, it was not a set.
The German sub was a flat organization. People did not walk on eggshells around the captain. He smoked cigarettes with them. One guy lost his mind, and they pulled the gun out and other guys pulled him away. In an American ship, they would be like, you want to shoot him? Tell us what to do.
Larry Bernstein:
My favorite living playwright is Alan Ayckbourn wrote a book called The Crafty Art of Playmaking. In it, he said that he likes to set his plays in three types of locations, the garden, the kitchen, and the living room of a house. There is a natural flow where people come in a garden or a kitchen, they eat and head out.
What makes the submarine an excellent vehicle for drama is the opposite. There is no place to go. There are a few rooms. The captain’s got his quarters, I mean it is tight. You have got the engine room, the deck, the Periscope as a place for the captain to look around. You have got that tension where Ping! that sound of the sonar and waiting for the depth charges to strike and leaking water. It is a natural place like the garden to have built-in drama at location.
Should our audience make the 3.5-hour investment to watch this film?
Darren Schwartz:
Absolutely. Do it over a couple of days. I would recommend people look stuff up on Wikipedia. I do searches, I pause the TV, you study the North Atlantic battles, World War II. It’s fascinating.
Larry Bernstein:
Why do directors lean towards U-Boats and submarine warfare for filmmaking? What is it about the sub that creates drama and action?
Darren Schwartz:
You’ve got built-in emotional reaction. Watching a movie about a submarine and you see guys that are stuck in a tube sweating, claustrophobic, trying to kill other people or be killed, there is an immediate emotional reaction. The primary being, I don’t want to fucking be in that.
Larry Bernstein:
Naval soldiers in the U-boats for Germany in World War 2, 30,000 of the 40,000 perished. A typical sinking of a U-boat would be with all hands died. It’s not like you can easily surrender. You are down 115 meters in an iron coffin.
Darren Schwartz:
Unlike Greyhound, Das Boot did get a significant amount of critical acclaim. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, did not win, director, screenplay by Wolfgang Peterson, cinematography, film editing, sound, and sound effects editing.
Larry Bernstein:
Best foreign film at the Oscars?
Darren Schwartz:
They did not get nominated for best foreign film because it was nominated for best film. You cannot get both. It did win the Golden Globe Award for best foreign film.
Larry Bernstein:
Is there anything else about Greyhound that you want to talk about?
Darren Schwartz:
I found out that there is a sequel to Greyhound in development.
Larry Bernstein:
No.
Darren Schwartz:
And it is due to start filming in Australia next month.
Larry Bernstein:
Who is starring in it?
Darren Schwartz:
Tom Hanks and it will explore him moving from the Battle of the Atlantic to the Pacific Theater. I am going to be in the theater with you.
Larry Bernstein:
Is this a passion project for Tom Hanks?
Darren Schwartz:
Probably. He is committed to World War 2 stories. He was involved in Band of Brothers. He’s once again producing, starring in, and writing the script.
Larry Bernstein:
And Darren is What Happens Next a passion project of yours.
Darren Schwartz:
It is. I love being part of the show.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Roger and Darren for speaking on today’s podcast.
If you missed the previous one, the topic was Cutting Foreign Aid. Our speaker was William Easterly who is a Professor of Economics at NYU and the author of a new book entitled Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest. Bill explained why foreign aid has harmed the developing world. He also discussed how so-called experts from NGOs and the World Bank have failed in their objectives to reduce poverty.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Cutting Foreign Aid, here.
