Re: Read that
I too was nervous that you recommended the book, because I've unfortunately seen the film. Co-incidentally I also saw a bit of Hellcats of the Navy at the weekend, as it was on some channel in deepest, darkest Sky. It didn't look terribly good, and I only flicked over to it for a bit. Their submarine seemed to have millions of torpedo tubes, I'm sure he said "Fire 10!" at one point. They seemed to be able to shoot a destroyer, sink it in about 5 seconds, dive to avoid its friend, then pop up and account for them - all in the space of about 60 seconds.
I know you have to compress time in films, or we'd all die of boredom. Yes I'm looking at you Peter Jackson! I've watched about 17 hours of The Hobbit already, and we've barely got anywhere yet! My legs will have fallen off by the time they get anything done. Sorry, digression alert.
I highly recommend Das Boot. Both the film, the full 6 hour mini-series and the book. Particularly as they recently digitally remastered it. This makes it all a bit nicer, but the big benefit is that they went back to the original cast and got the ones who hadn't done an English dub to do so. So you can listen to it in English, with the proper actors doing it, rather than some rubbish dubbing 'artistes' - or watch with subtitles. One word of German I definitely now know is, "Alaaaarrrrrmmmmmm!!!!!!!!!" Although there was still a review on Amazon complaining that when he watched it in English, the actors' lips didn't synch with their voices...
Oh, and one of the better DVD commentaries as well.