[Randomizer]

It should always be recalled that the film Sink the Bismarck is not based upon the history of Exercise Rhine but rather CS Forester's historical fiction of the same name, after it was reprinted following the box office success of the movie.

The special effects still hold up quite well, arguably the modelling and action scenes are as good or better than the CGI garbage delivered today but other than that, from a historical perspective the film gets practically all of the history wrong. This is because it was written as propaganda, which was Forester's stock in trade.

Bismarck never managed to shoot down any Swordfish, as I recall in the film she gets three. She never sank a destroyer during her last night, fending off the 4th Destroyer Flotilla. But even worse is the awful portrayal of Lutjens as a Nazi fanatic and the deifying of Lindemann as a obsequious incompetent.

Before Lutjens was made Fleet Commander he was the head of the Naval Personnel Department and while there, he was responsible for altering the files of a number of Jewish naval officers, ensuring that under the Nuremberg Laws, they ceased to be Jewish and became legally Aryans. One cannot imagine the fanatic played by Karel Štěpánek doing this in full violation of Hitler's will and without Hitler's knowledge. Lindemann, far from being an ineffectual poltroon had several public disagreements with his admiral, even going to the flag bridge to do so.

Forester hated Germans with a passion. He was of an age too young to fight WW1 and too old to fight the Nazis but his contempt for all things German are apparent starting with his 1941 novel The Ship, an entertaining propaganda piece based on the cruiser HMS Penelope. When he resumed writing the Hornblower series in 1945, few German's actually appear in Hornblower canon but starting with The Commodore in March, his German characters are inevitably cowardly, venal, incompetent and wicked; exactly the way Lutjens and Lindemann are portrayed in the novel and the movie.

Enjoy Sink the Bismarck as the almost entirely fictional account of a real event, but do not think for one-nanosecond that what you are watching is any reasonable sense, historical.

Just $0.02 CAD, ignore as desired.

-C

Edit:
The above is off-topic but there is no guarantee that had the late Wolfgang Petersen actually done Rheinubung, he would not have played fast and loose with the narrative. Most ancient historians positively revile his Troy (which I quite enjoy as a film but is usually spoken of as "The Film that shall not be Named" - rather like SubSimmers and U-571), mostly because of the appalling ending, which bears no resemblance to the most common translations of Homer's Iliad. From what I have been able to determine, the ending that he used, which so many classicists find so offensive is actually based on fragments of a Roman retelling of the story. For what it's worth, I think that he would have made an awesome film of Bismarck's story. RIP Herr Petersen, thanks for the flicks.