Wolfgang Petersen · 1981 · sea

Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 film of the U-boat war. U-96 sails from La Rochelle into the autumn Atlantic of 1941 with a war correspondent aboard, and finds weeks of boredom, one savage convoy action, and a depth-charging that pins her on the bottom. Then come new orders: past the guns of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, and home again if she can.

1. 1
   La Rochelle

   U-96 puts out from her base on the French Atlantic coast to a brass band and a drunken send-off, the crew young and the captain not - forty men sealed into a steel tube for a patrol of unknown length.

2. 2
   The North Atlantic

   Out on the convoy routes there are weeks of grey nothing, then a night action against a convoy, then the counterattack - hours pinned deep with the hull groaning, the rivets starting, and depth charges walking overhead in the dark.

3. 3
   Vigo

   Battered, they slip into neutral Vigo in Spain to be resupplied in secret from an interned German ship - a few hours of white tablecloths and fresh fruit in a warm harbour, and then orders that nobody aboard wants to hear.

4. 4
   Gibraltar

   The orders are to run the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, past searchlights, patrols and aircraft - and the attempt goes wrong at once, leaving the boat wrecked and sinking to the bottom far below her diving limit.

5. 5
   La Pallice

   Somehow they raise her and limp home to the bunkers at La Pallice - and as the crew step ashore into the safety they have spent the whole patrol imagining, the RAF arrives overhead.