MovieChat Forums > Torpedo Run (1959) Discussion > Implausible

Implausible

posted 13 years ago by jpgr1
7 replies | jump to latest

Very hard to believe that the commander "took the shot" in this situation. There's no way the US would trade 1,400 civilian casualties (let alone the commander sacrifice his wife and child) just to get one Japanese ship. Can you imagine the bad PR on that once the public found out?

Very, very implausible, imo.

[–] Eric-1226 13 years ago

I agree, it was implausible the way it was set up in this movie.

What IS real about sub warfare during that time period is that not infrequently a Japanese cargo ship could be carrying Allied POW's (which the Japanese conveniently neglected to mark as a prisoner ship), so if such a ship was transiting alone or in convoy, it was targetted along with any other ship. I'm sure more than a few sub skippers had a pang of conscience, wondering just who they were sending to the bottom when they torpedoed a Japanese cargo ship.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_ship

And good does not always triumph. Sometimes the Dark Side overcomes what Lincoln called 'the better angels of our nature.' — Apocalypse Now

[–] alphaboo 12 years ago

The second probably if not unneeded atom bomb was dropped before anyone got to Hiroshima to determine the damage. Once the reports of the amount of damage was seen surrender would not have been to far away. The second bomb was dropped in an area that was known to house us and British pows thou I don't know the numbers.

Dresden was destroyed needlessly as it was so late in the war and also held many POWs. The marshalling yards was a thin excuse and many bomber pilots and fighter pilots stopped when they realized many of the targets were civilians Many fighter pilots stops straffing and bombing trains when they realized they were full of refugees.

I do not want to discuss if the above is 100% truth my point is that the top command did not care about the civilian death rate. Aurthur "bomber" Harris who kept ignoring Eisenhower and bombing not tactical targets but civilian targets goal seemed to kill as many German civilians as possible, but individual units did care and towards the end of the war did not follow orders to bomb civilians and did not face so much as a grounding.

I doubt he would have fired, even though it was his orders, even though it was a war winning target for either side afloat a danger to the allies sunk and advantage to the allies. If he did not fire he would have been liable for court martial.

It would be a tough decision.

[–] darryl-tahirali 10 years ago

Dresden was destroyed needlessly as it was so late in the war and also held many POWs. - alphaboo

The fire-bombing of Dresden was the inspiration for Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut was an American soldier who was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and was incarcerated in Dresden in a slaughterhouse at the time of the bombing. He survived, and used that horrific experience as the basis for what is one of his best-known, and best, novels.

I do not want to discuss if the above is 100% truth my point is that the top command did not care about the civilian death rate.

Given the enormous atrocities committed by the Germans and the Japanese, and that the prevailing notion of World War Two is that it was "the Good War" (to borrow Studs Terkel's phrase) that had to be fought, atrocities committed by the Allies tend to be overlooked. However, as with the Dresden firebombing, they too were significant, and as you point out, were hardly a concern of top command.

One of the biggest admissions Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson and considered one of the architects of the Vietnam conflict, makes in Errol Morris's prickly documentary about McNamara, The Fog of War, has to do with McNamara's service in World War Two with the Office of Statistical Control, an anodyne name for a group that analyzed how to make the strategic bombing of Japan more efficient. For instance, McNamara was involved with the March 1945 fire-bombing of Tokyo, which killed 100,000 Japanese in a single night and is the most deadly single-day bombing raid of the war--more deadly than the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the film, McNamara admits that, had the Allies lost the war, they would have been guilty of the same war crimes that Germans and Japanese were tried for--and executed--after the war. (Interestingly, McNamara, when pressed about similar complicity in Vietnam, stonewalls and refuses to give a definitive answer.)

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"If life's for living, what's living for?" - Ray Davies

[–] gribfritz2 8 years ago

The second probably if not unneeded atom bomb was dropped before anyone got to Hiroshima to determine the damage.

Japan is larger than I thought if it takes over 72 hours to get to Hiroshima.

[–] fnj2002 12 years ago

I am puzzled by this objection. It's almost as if we saw different movies. The movie Torpedo Run that I saw (just hours ago) had the Captain asking "How many torpedoes can I fire without hitting the transport?" "Two" came the reply. Maybe it was something like "Two, but that's pushing it." Even though the reply was a little hesitant, the point is that the Captain did not fire the six torpedoes he was planning, specifically because he didn't want to sink the transport. But every act of destruction in war has its potential for undesired consequences. He lost this crap shoot, and the second torpedo hit the transport.

It was not an act of blatant disregard; hence not implausible.

The details of the movie itself were pretty unrealistic. There were numerous examples of dialog and actions that just didn't happen in American WW II submarines. But the premise of the attack is not implausible.

[–] deadzombie 12 years ago

There is not anyway I could take this movie seriously,Silly,Melodramatic bull.The Captain just happens to find the transport ship that his family are. on. Give me a break. Pure Ficton.The prodcuers had to make this crappy movie sellable in the 1950's. look at the lttle phony ship models there using.the Stock footage of ships blowing. this would have been considered like a B movie. in the 1950's it didn't make a lot of money .once you see the phony :special effects" which are none. This was a cheap movie. made with stock footage.and lttle model ships. It is what it is . I might have seen this movie when I was a kid .It wasn;t good then and its terrible now.

[–] orion32055 12 years ago

So let me guess you wanted them to sink real ships costing millions of dollars just so you could enjoy the real life destruction in a movie you paid 3 bucks for to watch?