this is a detail i seem to have missed when watching the film. Are the men the caught up in the depth charging Allies or enimies? i always thought they were Germans who has abandoned ship, but a recent documentary has put doubt in my mind that the might be Allied sailors
thanks
jimin:
From what little I remember, they were the crew of a sunken merchant-ship-definitely "allied"; the choice was not drop & let the sub get away & kill others or drop & maybe get the Sub & probably kill the crewmen in the water but save lots more sailors...
nickm
>>From what little I remember, they were the crew of a sunken merchant-ship-definitely "allied"; the choice was not drop & let the sub get away & kill others or drop & maybe get the Sub & probably kill the crewmen in the water but save lots more sailors..<<
Sad thing is the Asdic contact could have been the submarine or the wreck of their ship sinking- the bad thing was the U-boats stranglehold on Britain was so severe, that a captain of any escort, faced with that situation would be expected to make the same choice Ericson did.
I don't know if this is the incident you are talking about, but it is described in the book that when a destroyer type ship sunk, the depth charges had to be disarmed. Failure to do this would result in the charges exploding while men were in the water and the shock wave would effectively, gut them. Terrible to survive a sinking only to be blown apart by your own depth charges.
shareThis happened more than a few times. Later life vests were designed to provide some protection from explosions below but I'm not sure how effective they were. Sailors were trained to swim as far from the spot of sinking as possible or get any rafts, carly floats or boats away to avoid the concussion of still armed depth charges going off from below. Depth charges are designed to use the force of the expanding pressure wave in the water to detroy the target and is a far more effective method that the actual explosion itself. It's the concussion and pressure wave that kills uboats or the sailors in the water if they're too close.
shareThe disarming of the depth charges occurred during the sinking of the Compass Rose. As everyone was panicking, screaming and dying - the seaman who was disarming the charges was whistling a jaunty tune.
shareThis is the point of the scene..the captain could stop and rescue the men but the U boat would get away and would probably kill a lot more merchant sailors than the ones in the water.Jack Hawkin's character chooses to attack the U boat and sacrifice the sailors in the sea although he is later tormented by his decision.
shareThe novel has Ericson thinking, after the attack, that there probably wasn't even a U-boat anyway, and it was just the survivors' own ship sinking slowly beneath them giving the echo.
Certainly, at the end of the film, Ericson and Lockhart say they only got two U-boats in five years, both of which we see.
U-boats were such a terror that the British were firing and chasing any shadow that COULD be a U-boat, but without any evidence (or weak evidence if the sub feigned a sinking) there wasn't anything to hang a hope of sinking one on. Also, there surely were some U-boats that were lost, even if they survived the attack, that the people on the surface didn't know about until well after the war.
shareAs I recall, in the movie, the U-Boat is thought to be deliberately stopped under the sailors in an attempt to keep from being depth-charged further.
The dialogue goes something like:
Capt. Ericson: There are some men in the water there!
First Lieut. Lockhart: Well, there's U-Boat right underneath them!
My father, who was in the RN during the war, was crew on a minesweeper. He described sweeping prior to an invasion force (possibly D day). There were survivors of a sunken allied ship in the water who swam towards their ship, expecting to be picked up. He looked at the captain who just looked straight ahead and did not change course running over many of the men in the water. My dad could hear cries of 'murderer' from some of the men in the water. They were both Scottish fishermen in real life.
In a sweep like that it was apparently essential that the minesweepers stayed parallel and all at the same speed, otherwise some mines could be missed.
The Cruel Sea is a very accurate term. I don't envy that captain for having had to make a decision like that.
shareWOW ... that is a brutal story!
shareThis is one of the most chilling representations of command decisions ever presented.
The only false note in the whole film occurs when one of the gunners screams out "bloody murderer" after the deed was done. It was not included in the book and I don't understand why it was written into the film.
I agree it struck a false note, but I suspect they wrote that line in simply because they weren't confident everyone in the audience would instantly get the awfulness of the thing the Captain had just done. (Perhaps best to think of that line as coming not from one of the crew but from inside Ericson's own head?)
shareIt's a tough fact, but getting a U-boat was much more important than killing some men in the water. A live U-boat means more sunk ships and cargoes (and men).
share[deleted]
This film was shown this afternoon on Channel 4 (UK) and they completely ruined it by going to a commercial right after the scene where one of the crew shouts "Bloody murderer". They missed out the most moving scene in the movie where Jack Hawkins said "I had to do it".
share
Carlos Aneiro
At least an incident of this kind actually happened during WWII, seventy years ago, in February 12th 1944-a British transport, the Khedive Ismail, carrying African Colonial troops and female military personnel, was torpedoed and sunk in the Indian Ocean by a Japanese submarine-the transport split in half and sank almost inmediately, of the 1511 crew and military personnel aboard, only 208 men, and just six women survived...many of those killed were the result of one of the destroyers depth-charging over the floating survivors, as the submarine had actually stopped under them, after slipping away from that place, the sub kept fighting agresively the escorts, even ramming one destroyer and damaging it enough as to put her in danger of sinking...in the end, it was all for naught, as finally another destroyer blew the sub out of the water...the incident was integrated into the novel that became the film, The Cruel Sea...
[deleted]
I assumed they were Norwegian sailors who were related to the small group that later come and tell Ericson effectively "not to worry about doing what he had to do, because it is part of war".🐭
share