, 9 May 1941 The film's story and characters are fictional. The film sparked controversy during its production and release. Anger over the film's inaccuracies reached the
House of Commons.
Paul Truswell, for the constituency of
Pudsey, a town closely associated with , wrote to the US president
Bill Clinton, who acknowledged that the film's plot was only a work of fiction. The director of the local Horsforth Museum lamented the rewriting of history, saying: "You can't rewrite history and we have to pass on the facts to the younger generation through the schools." In 2009, the film was first on a list of "most historically inaccurate movies" in
The Times. Sub Lt. David Balme, the Royal Navy officer who led the boarding party on
U-110, called
U-571 "a great film" and that "young people will love it" Author Hugh Sebag argues that while the media may have made reports on the fact that the British made the most crucial captures, the Americans role was also unjustly downgraded, noting that they made an important part in breaking the Enigma code. However, in 2006 screenwriter
David Ayer expressed regret over making
U-571, stating that the film had distorted history, and said that he would not do it again. He told
BBC Radio 4's
The Film Programme that he "did not feel good" about suggesting that Americans, rather than the British, had captured the naval Enigma cipher: "It was a distortion...a mercenary decision...to create this parallel history in order to drive the film for an American audience. Both my grandparents were officers in the
Second World War, and I would be personally offended if somebody distorted their achievements."
Gordon Welchman, head of
Hut 6 at Bletchley Park, wrote: "Hut 6
Ultra would never have got off the ground if we had not learned from the Poles, in the nick of time, the details both of the German military version of the commercial Enigma machine, and of the operating procedures that were in use." The first capture of a (five-cylinder) naval Enigma machine with its cipher keys from a U-boat, designation , was made on 9 May 1941 by of the Royal Navy, commanded by Captain
Joe Baker-Cresswell assisted by HMS
Aubrietia and
HMS Broadway, seven months before the United States entered the war. The United States's involvement in the
European theatre of the Second World War did not commence until mid-1941 with
Lend-Lease, and direct, open participation did not begin until the US Navy began engaging the Kriegsmarine in the fall of 1941, months before Pearl Harbor, by which time Enigma machines had already been captured and their codes broken in Europe. In 1942, the Royal Navy also seized , capturing additional Enigma codebooks. According to Britain's
Channel 4, "the captured codebooks provided vital assistance to British cryptographers such as
Alan Turing, at the code-breaking facility of
Bletchley Park." She was hit by
depth charges, dropped from a
Short Sunderland Mk III flying boat,
EK577, callsign "D for Dog", belonging to
No. 461 Squadron,
Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and based at
RAF Pembroke Dock in
Wales. The aircraft's commander,
Flt Lt Richard Lucas, reported that most of the U-boat's 52 crew managed to abandon ship, but all died from
hypothermia. The film portrays the U-boat sailors machine-gunning British merchant crewmen of the ship they sank; although Wassner clearly dislikes giving the order, and some of his men are just as unhappy as he is, Wassner argues that because the boat is so badly crippled, short on crew members and supplies, with sensitive information aboard, it is too risky to leave the British survivors to possibly report the U-boat's position. The shooting of survivors could also be seen more as mercy killings rather than leaving them to die. As shown later with Taylor and his crew keeping Wassner alive; sabotage is a possibility as well. In reality, U-boat crewmen are far more often known to have assisted survivors with food, directions and occasionally medical aid. Such assistance only stopped after Admiral
Karl Dönitz issued the "
Laconia order" following a US air attack on U-boats transporting injured survivors under a
Red Cross flag in 1942. German U-boat crews were thereafter under
War Order No. 154 not to rescue survivors, which parallelled Allied policy. Afterward, U-boats still occasionally provided aid for survivors. In fact, out of several thousand of sinkings of merchant ships in World War II, there is only one verifiable case of a U-boat's crew deliberately attacking the survivors: that of after the sinking of the Greek ship
Peleus in 1944. The real was stationed in the
Pacific Ocean from June 1942 until the end of the war. She was sold for scrap in 1946. The
Kriegsmarine destroyer
Z-49 was ordered on 12 June 1943 but never laid down, let alone completed and sailed.
Technical inaccuracies As in most films, the audible sonar "ping" is not accurate, and is introduced for the audience's benefit. The sound of WW2 German
Gruppenhorchgerät system was more complex, whilst the more advanced
ASDIC system used by the British Navy used frequencies outside the range of human hearing. The
Kriegsmarine destroyers rarely ventured out into the open Atlantic Ocean, but usually stayed in European coastal waters. During the
destroyer's
depth charge attack more than eighty depth charges are detonated in the film, despite the fact that they rarely carried more than thirty. The German resupply U-boat would most likely not have been sunk by
U-571. This would have been difficult for a German U-boat to achieve, as German
sonar was not as advanced as British during the war. The only instance of a submerged submarine sinking another submerged vessel was in February 1945 when sank with torpedoes. German
Type XIV supply U-boats or
Milchkühe ("milk cows") did not have
torpedo tubes or
deck guns, being armed only with anti-aircraft guns for defense, and therefore could not have attacked other vessels. ==See also==