Movies and Films
This is the forum for Movie and Film discussions. Again, our topic is naval warfare in WWII for the most part.
The Sad Irony of the Real U-571
Posted by:
James Oglethorpe
()
Date: November 07, 2002 10:55AM
<HTML>Hmmm, the original post might be "jerking our chains" don’t you think? But it's very nice to see such well-considered opinions from those who responded.
Surely the application of "morals" in war can only ever be extremely superficial, given that the purpose of humans going to war is the basically 'immoral' one of using force to obtain political goals. What's really amazing is that civilised behaviour (such as NOT machine gunning lifeboats) can in fact still survive under such conditions.
The fate of the real U-571 illustrates this point only too well. I recently reviewed a book for uboat.net called "They Shall Not Pass Unseen" by Ivan Southall, which describes the sinking in some detail.
U-571 was actually sunk in 1944 in the midst of a winter Atlantic storm southwest of Ireland. A Sunderland flying boat of 461 Squadron RAAF, flown by F/Lt RD Lucas, chanced upon the boat on the surface in appalling weather conditions and made an immediate attack. U-461 broke up quickly. 37 of the crew were counted abandoning ship, but they had no time to inflate their life rafts. Lucas's crew passed through an instantaneous “moral†transition; having "sunk the boat" they then tried to "save the men". They dropped their aircraft’s life raft to the struggling swimmers, but tragically it failed to inflate. Another 461 Sqdn Sunderland containing Ivan Southall arrived on the scene almost immediately afterwards, but already there were only six Germans left waving for help. Another life raft was dropped very accurately and inflated correctly, but none of the frozen men had the strength left to reach it. They died there of hypothermia before the eyes of the crew of the circling Sunderland. - Even though Southall wrote his description of these events more than a decade later, his account still conveys the deep sense of shock and compassion which he felt for these doomed men.
No doubt the U-96 crew would have felt much the same as they observed the sailors on that burning tanker.</HTML>
Surely the application of "morals" in war can only ever be extremely superficial, given that the purpose of humans going to war is the basically 'immoral' one of using force to obtain political goals. What's really amazing is that civilised behaviour (such as NOT machine gunning lifeboats) can in fact still survive under such conditions.
The fate of the real U-571 illustrates this point only too well. I recently reviewed a book for uboat.net called "They Shall Not Pass Unseen" by Ivan Southall, which describes the sinking in some detail.
U-571 was actually sunk in 1944 in the midst of a winter Atlantic storm southwest of Ireland. A Sunderland flying boat of 461 Squadron RAAF, flown by F/Lt RD Lucas, chanced upon the boat on the surface in appalling weather conditions and made an immediate attack. U-461 broke up quickly. 37 of the crew were counted abandoning ship, but they had no time to inflate their life rafts. Lucas's crew passed through an instantaneous “moral†transition; having "sunk the boat" they then tried to "save the men". They dropped their aircraft’s life raft to the struggling swimmers, but tragically it failed to inflate. Another 461 Sqdn Sunderland containing Ivan Southall arrived on the scene almost immediately afterwards, but already there were only six Germans left waving for help. Another life raft was dropped very accurately and inflated correctly, but none of the frozen men had the strength left to reach it. They died there of hypothermia before the eyes of the crew of the circling Sunderland. - Even though Southall wrote his description of these events more than a decade later, his account still conveys the deep sense of shock and compassion which he felt for these doomed men.
No doubt the U-96 crew would have felt much the same as they observed the sailors on that burning tanker.</HTML>
