U-571 is a 2000 movie directed by Jonathan Mostow and starring Matthew McConaughey, Bill Paxton, Harvey Keitel, and Jon Bon Jovi, in which a German submarine is boarded in 1942 by disguised American submariners trying to capture its Enigma cipher machine.

Movie versus reality

Enigma and the associated "code books" (actually, cipher-key tables) were first captured from U-110 by the British in May 1941, before the United States' entry into World War II. The British also captured material from U-559 in 1942. The U.S. Navy did seize German Naval Enigma material in June 1944 when it captured U-505 (the U.S. Navy's first capture of an enemy vessel at sea in 129 years).

The film caused irritation in Britain. Critics argued that U-571 failed to portray history correctly, because, in total, there were some 15 captures of Naval Enigma material during World War II, of which the Americans carried out one (U-505), the Canadians carried out one (U-774), and the British performed the rest; moreover, while the British captures from subumarines and weather trawlers provided critical information for breaking Enigma, by the time of the American and Canadian captures, the Allies were reading Naval Enigma routinely. Moreover, the American capture of U-505 by a misguided destroyer captain on the eve of D-Day put Operation Overlord at risk. However, as acknowledged by the filmmakers, the story of the film is entirely fictional.

Shortly after the release of the film, BBC radio interviewed a former British naval officer who had been involved in the recovery of cipher-key tables from a German submarine that was on the point of sinking: he commented that the film had nothing to do with any historical facts, but was entertaining.

Tagline: Heroes are ordinary men who do extraordinary things in extraordinary times.

U-571 was an actual German submarine, but that vessel was not involved in anything like the events depicted in the film.

See also

• Submarine film
• Enigma (2001 film)

External links

• Official site (http://www.u-571.com/)
• U-571 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0141926/) at the Internet Movie Database