We Dive At Dawn

We Dive At Dawn is a British submarine war movie made during WWII. It's really pretty good. The British accents are a bit thick, and being as this is an old movie, there are no subtitles (AKA closed captioning) available. There are a number of reviews out there on the net that can tell you all about it.

I watched it this weekend and there are a few points that struck me. The submarine is dispatched to attempt to intercept a German battleship on it's way to the Kiel Canal, which cuts across the Denmark peninsula. On the way the submarine encounters a life saving station out in the middle of the North Sea. There are three stranded German aviators on it, and as soon as they see the British sub they attempt to send a radio message. The Brits shoot down the aerial, and the Germans jump into water and swim as quick as they can to the submarine. This whole scene was kind of weird. Life saving station in the middle of the North Sea? They have a radio, but haven't been rescued? They report the subs position (so it can be sunk), and now they desperately want to get on board that same submarine? Something just doesn't compute here.

To get to the battleship they have to negotiate a mine field and a submarine net. The underwater shots were utterly convincing. I imagine they were probably done with models. With the grainy images, the water being not totally transparent, and the lack of background probably made it easier to fake, but well faked it was.

They got through the submarine net by repeatedly ramming it. The net appeared to be made of 1" or 2" steel cables tied into squares between four and eight feet on a side. The submarine was about six squares high. They had to ram the net five or six times, and each time the cables on the net gave way a little more. I was talking to Jack about this at lunch today and he thought it was totally bogus. I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Someday maybe I'll stumble over some stories about submarines versus nets and I'll find out.

When they catch up with the German battleship there is a lot of fussing with getting the sub in position to fire. When they do finally get in position, they let go with all six torpedoes, in sequence, one after another, spaced a few seconds apart. I seem to recall reading about submarines having that many torpedo tubes, but I don't recall ever seeing a submarine movie where they launched six torpedoes all at once. Four maybe, but never six. That was a surprise.

There are German destroyers in the area and they are soon dropping depth charges on our heroes. Due to the incessant pounding the submariners don't know whether they have hit their target or not. Eventually their fuel tank is damaged and they lose most of the oil for their diesel engines. They have a dead German prisoner on board, so they decide to pull the old blow-a-bunch-of-junk-out-the-torpedo-tube ploy to convince the Germans that they have successfully sunk the British sub. In addition, they surface the submarine aft end first briefly, just enough to stick the tail in the air, before it slips back below the surface. Evidently the combination of: 1) a large amount of oil on the surface, 2) a dead body dressed in a British officer's uniform, 3) a bunch of flotsam, and 4) the apparent last gasp of the submarine itself was enough to convince the Germans that they had killed the interloper. I have seen the old blow-a-bunch-of-junk-out-the-torpedo-tube ploy many times before. This may have been the first.

They have escaped destruction, but they are in enemy waters, far from home, and nearly out of fuel. The captain decides to head for a nearby island, let the crew go ashore and then scuttle the submarine. The crew will be interred, or more likely sent to a prison camp, for the duration of the war. And then some wiseguy pops up and tells the captain about a nearby harbor where they might be able to steal enough oil to get home. Well, getting home would be a heck of a lot better than what they were facing, so they go for it. As luck would have it there is a Danish tanker in the harbor, and the captain is more than happy to help the British steal some of his oil. Denmark is occupied, so there are German soldiers about, so we get a firefight where the valiant British soldiers mow down a bunch of the evil Nazis. The whole point of this paragraph was to talk about the Danish Captain. It was really nice to run into someone so agreeable.