Comparisons With Real Life
The original DE-181 was the USS Straub (DE-181), a Cannon class destroyer escort. She did serve off the coast of Trinidad, but after the battle with a German U-boat. The Straub also recovered a U-boat crew, but the submarine was sunk by aircraft in 1944 off the coast of Recife, Brazil.
The U-boat in the film is very unrealistic in its size. It has passageways and side rooms, with the captain having a private stateroom off the control center. No World War II U-boat had staterooms and the captain's bunk was little more than a shelf across a small passage from the radio room, which was itself merely a small closet. Even the final U-boat class of the war, the Type XXI, was cramped and allowed for only very close quarters.
Fresh water was also extremely limited, and the crew is also much neater and cleaner than a real crew would have been. (For a more realistic portrayal of life aboard a U-boat, see Das Boot).
Depth charge procedures on the destroyer's deck (timing, depth settings and patterns) are well depicted.
The turntable the record was played on was an American turntable not made until after the war.
The movie plot resembles the ramming and sinking of U-405 by the destroyer USS Borie (DD-215). The Borie was too badly damaged to salvage and was sunk the next day. The Royal Navy had more success with U-574 rammed by HMS Stork on 19 December 1941 and HMS Fame ramming U-353 on 16 October 1942 & U-69 on 17 February 1943 also in December 1942, convoy HX 219 came under attack and HMS Hesperus counter-attacked and destroyed U-357 by ramming it.
Read more about this topic: The Enemy Below
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“I don’t like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, but it isn’t exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.”
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“The exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he excludes himself from enjoyment, in the attempt to appropriate it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)