Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.
I’ve said before on this blog that I grew up in part on war movies. What I mean specifically is that I watched a lot of World War II movies when I was a kid along with some World War II television like Combat! with Vic Morrow. I didn’t specifically love the war aspects of those movies, but I did like the inherent sense of adventure in them. Propaganda films from the war years were cliched but I loved them, and also the more openly violent films of the 1960s and 1970s. Had something like The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare been around when I was 10, it would have been one of my favorite movies.
This movie, which for convenience I’m going to call TMoUW, tells something like a true story of Operation Postmaster, undertaken shortly after the entrance of the U.S. into World War II. The problem at the time was the German U-boat command. Massive shipping losses prevented the Americans from sending troops to Europe by ship, and air travel was not at a stage where it was feasible for large troop movements. Subs needed to be shut down, but the Germans were smart enough to keep their resupply ship in neutral Spanish waters. Desperate and on the verge of surrender, Churchill (Rory Kinnear) rolled the dice on a secret mission that violated the accepted practices of war. Essentially, send in an expert but disposable crew and destroy the ship.
