History influenced Das Boot

Roughly three out of four German submariners died, and Das Boot is made to put an audience inside that statistic rather than to state it. The source is Lothar-Günther Buchheim's novel, written from his own patrol aboard U-96 as a war correspondent, and the film keeps the details that only somebody aboard would supply: the boredom, the damp, the food going bad, the depth-charge sequences timed by sound alone, and the bolts failing under pressure. Petersen built the set to the real dimensions of a Type VII and shot in it in sequence, so the crew's exhaustion is partly the actors'. The film is a war film with no victory in it, which was the point being made in 1981 about who those men were.