One of my pleasures each Memorial Day weekend is watching one or two war movies on the Turner Movie Channel. This last weekend was no exception.
I’m weird that way. I hate war and wrote regularly for antiwar.com from 2005 to about 2010 and sporadically after that. Yet I like war movies. It’s similar to my loving to analyze the economics of taxation while hating taxes.
The two war movies I watched this weekend were The Great Escape, which I had seen probably 8 times already, and one I hadn’t seen titled The Enemy Below.
The Great Escape is my favorite kind of war movie because it’s about escape. It also brings back fond memories. Our family drove an hour from Carman to Winnipeg in 1962 to see the movie and when we returned, my mother, without ever having heard the theme song before that day, played it on the piano. When I put my father’s memorial tape together in June 1997, I put that song on the tape: it was one of my father’s favorites.
My second favorite kind of war movie is one in which there are good people on both sides. The Enemy Below filled the bill. Robert Mitchum plays the captain of a U.S. destroyer who is in a deadly cat-and-mouse game with a German U-boat whose captain is played Curt Jurgens. Or maybe it’s cat and cat, since both were trying to destroy the other.
The viewer gets to see the crews of both the U-boat and the destroyer and, at least in my case, sympathizes with both. I liked everyone on the U.S. destroyer and liked all but one guy on the U-boat. The guy I disliked was reading Mein Kampf in his spare time. The expression on Jurgens’s face when he sees the crewman reading Mein Kampf is priceless.
Because I liked everyone, I wanted both sides to fail. I wanted Mitchum to fail at using depth charges to destroy the U-boat and I wanted Jurgens to fail at torpedoing the destroyer. I won’t tell you what happened.
I like the kind of war movie in which I want both sides to make it out alive. I think it’s kind of natural that I would. What grabbed me in my teens about economics was the idea that so much of it is about transactions in which both sides gain.
I recommend The Enemy Below. It’s also nicely short, running only one hour and 38 minutes.
Two final observations:
First, I learned a new term: feather merchant. When Mitchum arrives as the new captain after his merchant marine ship was sunk, many of the crew are skeptical and some call him a feather merchant. That term means a civilian and has the additional meaning of someone with a cushy job or without combat experience. Although Mitchum does not have combat experience, the crew quickly get to see how clearly he thinks about combat. He’s very analytic.
Second, many of the U.S. crew refer to the Germans as “Nazis.” But the Nazis were a political party and while many Germans expressed fealty to Nazi views, I would bet that less than a majority of Germans were Nazis and that less than a majority of the German military were Nazis. Calling them Nazis would be like referring to U.S. sailors, soldiers, and airmen during World War II as Democrats. My uncle, who, along with my aunt, was captured by the German Navy in April 1941, referred to his captors as Nazis. I don’t blame him. He had good reasons for his resentment. Nevertheless, the term is inaccurate.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Jun 3 2021 at 10:31am
“It’s similar to my loving to analyze the economics of taxation while hating taxes.”
Since taxes are just one argument in an optimization function, I do not see how wanting to minimize just taxes (as if there WERE no other arguments in the function) seem strange.
“What grabbed me in my teens about economics was the idea that so much of it is about transactions in which both sides gain.”
That is nice but I was more attracted to the idea of removing the obstacles to transactions in which more people can gain on net.
Tom Chambers
Jun 3 2021 at 1:38pm
My recollection from 50 years ago:Â yes, Mitchum is analytic, but also he trusts his crew which builds their trust in him. The scene that always stuck in my memory is near the end when he asks David Hedison to take the helm.
A trivium: the ship was a destroyer escort, not a destroyer. Only a naval history buff would notice, or care.
David Henderson
Jun 4 2021 at 11:15am
Thanks for the correction. I hadn’t known the distinction, a fact that some of my approximately 1,500 U.S. Navy officer students whom I taught over the years might have found unforgivable. 🙂
Jon Murphy
Jun 5 2021 at 10:40am
I’ve learned something new today. I’ve always thought the two terms were used interchangeably. What’s the difference between the two?
Tom Chambers
Jun 7 2021 at 12:57pm
Wikipedia article here: Destroyer escort – Wikipedia
Briefly, destroyer escorts (DE) were invented ca. 1940, specifically to escort trans-Atlantic convoys of merchant ships in the face of U-boat attacks (with other tasks later). Destroyers (DD) (which originated ca. 1900) were designed as battle fleet escorts which have a different (though overlapping) set of requirements. DEs were smaller, cheaper, less capable, easier to build than DDs.
The ship class is not important to the movie; I just know a DE when I see one.
Capt. J Parker
Jun 3 2021 at 3:55pm
I always liked watching war movies but have come to fell somewhat guilty about indulging in the fiction that war is all about bravery and daring and cunning and patriotism when it is primarily about waste, destruction and death.
One WWII movie that I found I could enjoy without guilt was “A Midnight Clear” from 1992. Similar to “The Enemy Below” in that it portrays the humanity of people on both sides of the conflict and you find yourself hoping everyone will come out alive. The story is about a group of inexperienced American GIs on a recon patrol at a time when both sides knew the war was nearly over. The GIs come across a similar sized group of battle-hardened German soldiers. Gradually, the Germans communicate that want to surrender. The catch is the Germans fear things will go ill for them after the war if they just lay down their weapons and surrender without firing a shot.
My guilt about indulging in war movies has grown from reflecting on what my father’s experiences must have been like. My father was a corporal in charge of a self-propelled anti-aircraft gun unit in WWII. He was nearly killed in Belgium when an artillery shell landed right beside his half-track. The man sitting next to him was killed. As a boy, I naturally thought he was a hero and war was this great adventure. I wanted him to tell me about his heroic deeds. For the most part he avoided any discussion of the war. I only learned the story of how he was wounded by reading a bound book he had that recorded his battalion’s part in the war.   I think I was 30 when it finally sunk in to my think head as to why he had had no interest in retelling any of his experiences.  One story he did reluctantly tell me went something like this:
I’m proud to have had a father that helped rid the world of Nazism but prouder still to know that during the war, he somehow maintained an understanding that his enemies were still human beings.
David Henderson
Jun 4 2021 at 11:16am
Thank you for that.
As you might imagine, I was a curious kid who often found adults more interesting than other kids. I would ask them about their lives. Of course I asked them about World War II, which many of them had been in: Canada was in the war for almost 6 years. If they had had any kind of battle experience, they didn’t want to talk about it.
Jerry Brown
Jun 3 2021 at 4:54pm
I was not around till a long time after WW2 so I don’t know how people fighting the war generally referred to the people trying to kill them. But it seems to me that ‘Nazis’ is a lot more specific than ‘Germans’ when you are talking about who you are, in effect, trying to kill- and that is a good thing. I mean there were a lot of Germans, such as children, that I don’t think anyone wished harm upon. Plus there were and are a considerable number of German-Americans that we had no desire to harm. It was the Nazi led government that declared war on the US and that government, and its policies, was what the US ended up desiring to end as far as I know. So I think stating that your enemy is the Nazis is probably a good thing, even if a lot of those we killed were not Nazi party members.
I don’t think there was a similar distinction made in the war against Japan. The US did treat Japanese-Americans significantly differently than German-Americans at the time. I don’t know if that is related though.
It was a terrible horrible thing that war. Even if it became necessary at some point. I remember my Grandfather describing some of the things at Okinawa and I am just very happy I was not around for that.
David Seltzer
Jun 3 2021 at 6:03pm
“At the first light of dawn on Christmas Day, some German soldiers emerged from their trenches and approached the Allied lines across no-man’s-land, calling out “Merry Christmas” in their enemies’ native tongues. At first, the Allied soldiers feared it was a trick, but seeing the Germans unarmed they climbed out of their trenches and shook hands with the enemy soldiers. The men exchanged presents of cigarettes and plum puddings and sang carols and songs. Some Germans lit Christmas trees around their trenches, and there was even a documented case of soldiers from opposing sides playing a good-natured game of soccer. German Lieutenant Kurt Zehmisch recalled: “How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it was. The English officers felt the same way about it. Thus Christmas, the celebration of Love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time.” Some soldiers used this short-lived ceasefire for a more somber task: the retrieval of the bodies of fellow combatants who had fallen within the no-man’s land between the lines.”
WWI 40 million casualties. 20 million combatants and civilians dead.
David Henderson
Jun 4 2021 at 11:18am
Thanks, David.
I wrote about that here.
https://original.antiwar.com/henderson/2008/12/24/silent-night/
Henri Hein
Jun 4 2021 at 2:05am
I also hate war and like war movies. I think I like anti-war movies most. I don’t have much truck with the “hero kills everybody and gets the girl” type scripts.
I have a story about The Great Escape. After I first came to the US, my American friends asked me what I thought of it. I don’t remember everything I said, but I remember I said something like “you have 20 different kinds of butter, and they are all bad.” (I would have used more colorful language, but keeping it polite here…) I acted indignant when they didn’t know what was so great about Danish butter, and as ‘evidence,’ I used the line from The Great Escape about the butter – I mean it was not just any butter, but Danish butter. We later saw the movie together, and they kept replaying that scene and couldn’t stop laughing.
David Henderson
Jun 4 2021 at 11:21am
Thanks, Henri.
I love antiwar movies also. My favorite, not necessarily in this order, are:
Paths of Glory
The Americanization of Emily
Shenandoah
All Quiet on the Western Front
Re butter, thanks. I must remember to try Danish butter. My guess, though, is that the USDA, in its wonderful concern for us, does not allow it to be sold here.
Henri Hein
Jun 5 2021 at 3:18am
Thanks for the list. I agree about Paths of Glory and All Quiet on the Western Front. I will have to check out The Americanization of Emily and Shenandoah.
About the butter, I checked it out a long time ago, and were are indeed strict import restrictions on Danish dairy. I can still somehow find it in specialty stores, so either there are some exemptions, or the rules changed. Joking aside, the butter is only marginally better (pun unintended). What I really miss is the cheese.
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