Reviewed by Michael Peck
The Military Book Review

There are some 530 phobias in the world, from fear of cats to fear of clocks. But what about the fear of dying 300 feet under the ocean, trapped inside a metal eggshell shuddering under the impact of high-explosive?

This is the essence of Das Boot ("The Boat" in German). More than a World War II submarine drama, it's a memorable film about surviving fear. War movies tend toward the heroic; however great the odds, the characters take charge of their destinies. But when destroyers are circling their silent sub like wolves around a campfire, and the sonar pings and the depth charge explosions are getting closer, all a U-boat crew can do is grit their teeth and not go mad.

The movie (made in Germany but dubbed in English) starts happily enough, with the crew carousing in a nightclub in German-occupied France. It's 1941, and Hitler's undersea wolves are at the peak of their sinking spree against Allied merchant ships. But then it's time to go on hunting for Allied merchant ships in the stormy Atlantic, commanded by an experienced but war-weary captain (well-played by Jurgen Prochnow).

This is not a lucky sub. A few days out at sea, they're surprised by a British destroyer and depth-charged. After torpedoing a few British merchant ships, they are ordered to make a near-suicidal transit from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, and are attacked again in the Straits of Gibraltar.

These are the most harrowing moments in the movie, or in any war movie ever made. The warrior instinct is to fight back, but there is little the sub can do as the British destroyers circle overhead, invisible except for the noise of their propellers. It's not if the depth charges will come, but when. The U-boat shudders under the explosions like the Hammer of God beating a drum. Leaks flood the boat as it plunges deeper. The hull creaks under the merciless pressure of the ocean.

The madness of war breeds more madness. An engineer driven insane by depth-charging tries to open a hatch while the sub is underwater. The U-boat crew watches in frustrated horror as the sailors of a tanker they have just torpedoed jumps from their burning ship into burning water. And if those horrors aren't enough, there is the crowded, grimy life on a World War II sub.

Yet some might find Das Boot too sanitized in its portrayal of Hitler’s submariners. Among the crew is the obligatory Nazi officer who mouths a few propaganda statements (mocked, of course, by his shipmates), but the movie carefully avoids the moral implications of fighting for the Third Reich.

Still, what the U-boat crews endured would have been familiar to American submarine crews in the Pacific. Das Boot will rank as the best submarine movie ever made, as well as one of the classic war films of all time.