The Sinking Of The Laconia [DVD] [2010]

I found the film thoughtful, exciting, moving and memorable and did not find it at all slow as some critics did. I think they may have expected or wanted an action packed war film, the kind that has been churned out by Hollywood for decades where there are plenty of bangs for your bucks and where there is no need for the audience to use too much grey matter but thank God it wasn't that kind of a film.

The Laconia incident which took place in the second world war on 12 September 1942 is little known by the public for reasons that are not difficult to understand but it was an extremely significant episode and had very important consequences. After it happened the allied authorities did not want the public to know that a U-boat commander could be humane and had given survivors food and water after a ship was torpedoed. If such acts did become widely known it would be more difficult for the British public to hate all Germans and this would not help the war effort. The German authorities also did not want the incident known by their public because it could be perceived as a weakness and lack of resolve so it suited both sides not to publicise the incident too much and so it did not become widely known until long after the war.

The Laconia, an old Cunard ocean liner of 20,000 tons had on board about 2,000 civilians and Italian prisoners of war and was heading back to England from the middle east and in the middle of the south Atlantic U-156 under the command of Captain Werner Hartenstein hit the liner with two torpedoes believing it was a troopship and therefore a legitimate target in wartime. The prisoners of war in the hold tried to escape and some were shot by their Polish guards but they were eventually released. When Hartenstein found out that it wasn't a troopship but a passenger liner containing many civilians including women, children and prisoners of war of their Italian allies he stopped and aided the survivors at considerable risk to his own vessel.

He took some people on board, gave them food, water and medical treatment and others he towed behind his vessel in four lifeboats attached to each other. He contacted his superiors in Europe and ships from Vichy France and Italy were sent to rescue the survivors. He also sent out a signal in English to show his position and enable the allies to mount a rescue operation. The British suspected a trap so they informed the Americans on a secret air base on Ascension Island as they were nearest to the scene but mentioned that there were survivors of a sinking but did not mention that a submarine was aiding them. The Americans sent a Liberator which dropped several bombs close to the U-boat killing passengers in two lifeboats. After this happened Hartenstein, not surprisingly made the decision not to expose his vessel and its crew to any further risk so he cast adrift the survivors in their lifeboats. After four days during which time several people in the lifeboats died they were located by a Vichy French ship and taken on board.

The head of the German Navy, Grand Admiral Karl Doenetz, then issued the notorious Laconia Order forbidding U-boats to continue aiding survivors of torpedoed ships so assistance was never provided again by the Germans during the war. The Americans also pursued this policy in the Pacific with regard to Japanese ships they torpedoed. After the war at the Nuremberg Trial in 1947, Doenetz was found guilty of war crimes and served many years in prison. Hartenstein sadly never survived the war and after the Laconia incident he was killed when his U-boat was sunk in the West Indies by an American Catolina aircraft.

A survivor of the Laconia incident, Commander Geoffrey Greet, met Hartenstein aboard the U-156 and he said "he had just sunk 2,000 people, so my initial reaction to him was hatred but when I found he really believed in what he was doing then I changed my mind completely. And now I think he was a marvellous man. He was humane, and he believed in the brotherhood of the sea: we treat sailors of other nations as sailors first, because we're all in the same situation." Amen to that.

The film graphically reconstructs the Lakonia incident and examines the issues raised by such an unusual event and the acting is superb all round, especially Ken Duken as Hartenstein. It was particularly good to see Germans for a change portrayed as three dimensional human characters, not as the stereotypical fanatical, heel clicking nasty Nazis we are so used to seeing. It was also much better to see Germans played by real Germans as efforts by British and Americans to play Germans are usually pretty unconvincing. Alan Bleasdale's script is superb and gives the audience plenty to think about when describing the contradictions and complexities of incidents that happen in wartime.

The message of the film is that even in war when the object is to destroy the enemy by any means available there is still room for compassion and humanity where for a brief moment enemies can respect each other and in any other situation might have become friends. It demonstrates if it ever needed to be that war is collective insanity but even then the spirit of humanity can occasionally shine through.

Like a lot of people I have heard of the RMS Laconia, and about the German U-boat that came to its aid after sinking it. That is really that all of us know unless we bother to delve into the matter more deeply. It is just one of those things that gets glossed over because in reality it is a dirty little secret.

I believe that there was another RMS Laconia before this, in the first world war, that was also torpedoed and sunk, so I don't think I will ever travel on a ship with this name. If you are thinking of watching this expecting some great gung-ho war film, then don't bother, this isn't like that. Like many ships the Laconia was requistioned for military use at the outbreak of war. So thus it was originally a cruise liner with some armaments added. When this was spotted by U-156, who identified this as a military vessel, they rightly took active action. The commander of the U-boat though, Werner Hartenstein stayed in the area, and he started having a feeling that not all was right. There was no response to the distress signal from the Laconia, and it soon became apparent that there were a lot of people in the water who were of different nationalities, some of them Italian. Although the Laconia was used as a military vessel, at the time it was carrying a few hundred allied soldiers, coming on for two thousand Italian POWs, and just under a hundred civillians. Forgetting about war Harrtenstein then did the most humane and honourable thing, and followed the 'unwritten code of the sea'. Ironically after sinking a ship he and his crew then set about saving survivors, showing a purely brave and selfless action.

With many survivors on his U-boat, and towing lifeboats, of course Hartenstein needed assistance. Communicating with Admiral Doenitz and the German Navy and also sending distress signals in English for Allied help. This dramatisation shows this, and the terrible events that followed, and what happened.

Alan Bleasdale wrote the script for this, and from the first idea through script writing and producing this great drama has taken a few years. What we are given here is a fantastically acted drama which has been coproduced both by this country and a German tv network. The script is well thought out and there is comedy in this amongst the horror that went on. All in all this is one of those dramas that you see which aren't too long, and are well thought out, produced, etc, and are based on real events. Because it is a co-production there are German actors in this, and so there are subtitles at times. At the end of this though one thing can be said, more people will be aware of what really happened, and that the commander and crew of U-156 were heroes by any definition.

This was a great piece of television. Wonderful script, brilliant acting by Ken Duken as the German UBoat Captain, by Andrew Buchan as the young british merchant navy officer, Franka Potente as they mysterious german passenger, and Lindsay Duncan as an upper class passenger. I would have given it 5 stars except for weird and awkward scenes in which the Americans are portrayed as buffoons...maybe this was deliberate - I think it must have been, but it still grated by comparison to the rest of the programme.

The Laconia Incident was a remarkable moment in the war, like the Christmas Day Truce in 1914 (which is remarked upon by some characters in Sinking of the Laconia) I found the drama to be incredibly moving, and well worth the price of the DVD