Any hope for a new 'Bismarck' film?

Just fifteen years after the Second World War (WW2), in 1960, many of the young men who served in the Royal Navy (the British Navy) would have been alive, and some not yet age 40. Though the feature film "Sink the Bismarck!" is broadly honest, it is inevitable that the Germans would be made to appear, in general, like the bad guys - they were, after all, the enemy in 1939-45! A film made just 15 years after the end of the war would have been poor box office had it even tried to paint the enemy as a bunch of cuddly nice guys!

But to imply that the feature film is an attempt by the English - the British - to re-write history is nonsense. Some German naval officers were Nazis though, as another contributor has stated, overall there were relatively few Nazis in the German Navy.

However, it is a matter of historical fact that the United Nations - as the allies were called in WW2 - did save the world from two ghastly, murderous regimes. Like it or not, the Germans were the villains of the piece in WW2. It is surely the contributor to imdb who is trying to re-write history!

Churchill's call to "Sink the Bismarck!" was an imperative. This new, beautiful, German battleship - the largest warship then ever built - was a serious threat to the Royal Navy and allied shipping. In the first stage of the battle, the sinking of the battle-cruiser HMS Hood, a touchstone of a ship from WW1 to her end, with the loss of Vice-Admiral L E Holland and all but three of her ship's company, sent shockwaves through the British Admiralty and the country. My late father was an Able Seaman LTO at sea in a destroyer, HMS Amazon, a few hundred nautical miles from the position of HMS Hood when she was sunk; I remember his telling me of his fear on learning that the Bismarck had done so.

1940 had been a dark year of war for the British and 1941 wasn't looking good either. It took a lot of ships and aircraft to find and sink the Bismarck and it is a testimony to this great German ship that her name resounds to this day - after all, she did not have a long life:

Launched 14 February 1939
Commissioned 24 August 1940
Sea Trials 15 September 1940 to late April 1941
Sailed on first war mission 13 May 1941
Sunk 27 May 1941

Just 14 days of life as an active unit of the German Navy. Yet her name lives on - and rightly so. See the excellent website www.kbismarck.com for much more about this superb ship.

In my view, no new feature film is necessary. This film is proper enough and contributors who think otherwise would be advised to read the facts before they hit their keyboard. Nazi or not, the Bismarck and her men were an important part of the German war machine and, as such, a serious enemy threat that needed to be hunted and destroyed. I, for one, salute those men of the Royal Navy who did so. Yet, as a former naval officer myself, I can mourn the loss of fellow seaman on both sides of the fight - and I salute them too.

The British TV company Channel 4's film "The Battle of Hood and Bismarck" was released on DVD in 2004 - 152 minutes of history and the search underwater for their wrecks.

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"Interestingly there is an America perspective in this story. The pilot of the Shorts Sunderland who spotted Bismarck and Prinz Eugen was an American in British Uniform flying from an RAF base in Northern Ireland. So H. Wood and her chums can make do with that and SHUT THE HELL UP!!!"

If you are referring to "the spot", the one that led to the Ark Royal's rudder shot, then the Prinz Eugen was not with Bismarck at the time.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

I've heard somewhere that the HMS Gotland (swedish aircraft crusier) was somehow involved in the spotting of the bismarck.. Is this true??

Interesting how people complain about how little people these days know about history, then totally nix the idea of making movies about events like the sinking of the Bismarck that might actually TEACH these people some history.

And once and for all, a movie about something like the hunt for the Bismarck, the Battle of Britain or the Battle of Midway would NOT be a remake. These are historical events, open to revisiting in many new ways. A film about D-Day like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is NOT a remake of THE LONGEST DAY, it's a film about a different aspect of the Normandy landings, focusing just on the Americans at and just beyond Omaha Beach. If you made another film about the D-Day landings focusing on Juno Beach, would you seriously call THAT a re-make of SPR? There are so many aspects of many of these historical events that were not covered in previous movies.

But of course we all know that people don't watch historical movies any more. And we CERTAINLY know Americans won't watch historical movies that only contain British actors playing British characters. Now excuse me while I go watch THE KING'S SPEECH again. In Norman, Oklahoma.