74 DAS BOOT [THE BOAT]
reviewer for the London Times (17 May 1955) termed The Dam Busters “a film of
unusual merit.” Brigid Murnaghan called it “a motion picture that must be seen”
(Murnaghan, 9 November 1955).Reel History Versus Real History
For the most part, The Dam Busters achieves a high degree of historical accuracy
but does tweak the facts for dramatic purposes. Barnes Wallis’s achievements as
an aviation engineer are slightly exaggerated (e.g., he wasn’t the chief designer of
the Vickers Wellington bomber). The movie also exaggerates the bureaucratic
opposition that Wallis faced. He was not directly opposed, merely ignored, until
a chance encounter with a key Air Ministry official won him permission to build
and test prototypes of his experimental bomb. Nor did the idea of bombing the
dams originate with Wallis; they were already identified as impor tant targets by
the Air Ministry before the war. The film also romanticizes Guy Gibson by show-
ing that all of Gibson’s crew from 106 Squadron volunteered to follow him to his
new command. Actually, only his wireless operator, Robert Hutchinson, went with
him to 617 Squadron. The real Guy Gibson was unpop u lar with his men. In a 2013
interview, George “Johnny” Johnson, the last surviving Dam Busters aviator, said
that “one of [Gibson’s] major failings was he couldn’t bring himself down to the
lower crews. He mixed very well with se nior officers, particularly those above him
and with the se nior officers immediately below him but even with the ju nior offi-
cers he had difficulty. With the NCO’s he just didn’t want to know. He was bom-
bastic, he was arrogant... He was a strict disciplinarian” ( Jepps, 2013). The film
shows Gibson devising a spotlights altimeter after visiting a theater. Actually Ben-
jamin Lockspeiser of the Ministry of Aircraft Production suggested the method—
already in use by RAF Coastal Command aircraft for some time— after Gibson
requested they solve the prob lem.Das Boot [The Boat] (1981)
Synopsis
Das Boot is a German submarine film produced by Günter Rohrbach, written and
directed by Wolfgang Petersen, and starring Jürgen Prochnow, Herbert Grönemeyer,
and Klaus Wennemann. Adapted from Lothar- Günther Buchheim’s 1973 novel of
the same title, the film is set during World War II and follows U-96, a Type VIIC–
class U- boat, and its crew on a war patrol.Background
Lothar- Günther Buchheim (1918–2007) was a German painter, photographer, and
writer who served as a war correspondent in Hitler’s Kriegsmarine during World
War II. Twenty- eight years after the end of the war Buchheim published Das Boot
(1973), a novel based on his experiences aboard a Type VIIC– class U- boat. Bavaria
Filmstadt bought the screen rights to Das Boot in 1976. Envisioning a large- scale