Hollywood has become so political and controlled by the Deep State that there’s not much they get right anymore. However, they did get it right with two movies about the tension and danger over submarine warfare. The results shocked audiences used to be spoon fed watered down scripts that only hint at what a submarine crew and its commander go through in war time or in the vague fringes of peace keeping. Here are two films shot based on true stories and real life implications of the “Cold War”.

The desperate beginnings

The movie “Run Silent Run Deep” starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster was based on true incidents that occurred in World War II. In 1942 with the US Pacific fleet crippled after the Pearl Harbor attack, few offensive actions could be taken with only three aircraft carriers available to hold the line. The Doolittle Raid in February of 1942 did exactly what CINCPAC wanted and that was to keep a certain amount of Imperial Navy Fleet ships near the coast of the Japanese mainland to defend against any possible US retaliations. That helped buy time for the Americans who were to lose a string of sea battles and island invasions in the few short weeks after Pearl Harbor.

Watery bear trap

There was a price to pay for keeping a number of Japanese surface ships and aircraft close to home and that was an almost impregnable defense against US submarines and warships. In fact the top submarine crew and latest submarine class was lost operating in those highly defended waters in 1943 which caused a huge setback for the US Navy. To make matters worse in 1942 US Sub skippers were not moving aggressively and taking a toll on Japanese shipping while the failure of the main torpedo used by the Navy only made matters worse. The Mark 14 torpedo often failed to detonate when hitting the hull of a ship, would steam underneath its target or explode prematurely before arriving at the target. It had to be overhauled and quick!

Daring death as it awaits

American sub commanders were in fear of penetrating the highly defended waters near to the Japanese mainland, but without being able to project threat in those waters to sink supply ships the Japanese would have an advantage. In Run Silent Run Deep a veteran commander (Clark Gable) is under secret orders to take his crew and the ship’s captain (Burt Lancaster) into those dangerous waters to test a new offensive tactic that could be dangerous to the crew. The tensions are high. Especially, once the crew finds out where the navigation course is set. A near mutiny results, but Burt Lancaster (ship’s Captain) quells the unrest and unravels the incredible pressure that Clark Gable’s character is under. The technique is to fire torpedoes directly at the oncoming enemy destroyer which provides a much smaller target area then when broadside which is the optimal target resolution for a sub commander to fire upon.

It is also a dangerous tactic with an enemy destroyer capable of 31 knots on the surface when a sub of that era could only manage a third of that underwater and making too much noise so that it would have to rig for silent running and either come to an all stop or a slower speed. Once depth charges began the sub and crew were in great danger. In one instance during World War II a US Submarine crew endured 17 hours of continual Japanese depth charge runs while sitting silently on the ocean floor. Understandably, they were pretty well shell shocked after the action took place, a submariner’s nightmare!

Further into the lion’s den

The first experiment goes well. Two torpedoes hit the Japanese Destroyer head on, and now there is a new but still risky tactic to neutralize some of the Japanese advantage, but there’s more to the mission as they venture further into dangerous well defended waters. At some point in the mission the veteran commander (Clark Gable) has a nervous breakdown and Burt Lancaster must take command, among his crew demanding to abandon the deadly voyage, but he continues the mission, showing his senior commander respect and maintaining an orderly mission. This would be the very beginning of the end for the Japanese controlled Pacific region off its coast. The sub and its crew come away from the engagements relieved to be alive and get back home, but assured that now there was a way to fight back against Japanese Destroyer tactics.

Game of death

In 1965, what some critics consider to be a hawkish movie comes “The Bedford Incident”. A cold war tale that portrays the cat and mouse game being played by US and Soviet naval forces in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Richard Widmark plays a nuclear destroyer captain who specializes in shadowing the Russian subs who use diesel engines and must surface for air at intervals. He stays on top of them and then rams their snorkel forcing them to surface and surrender, but it is a grueling ordeal that takes a lot of nerve and guts to pull off. Widmark’s character is intense, probably obsessive compulsive, and likely driven to get a promotion, but he is playing with fire.

Not the ending expected

Sydney Portier, plays the part of an embedded reporter there on assignment to do an article on the US role of patrolling the oceans and defending against the Soviet presence. Audiences were in for a shock at the outcome of the movie which could certainly have happened as these silent war games were being played all over global waters between the two super powers. Portier’s character does some random interviews with ships officers and enlisted men but usually sticks to the gloomy and driven captain, Richard Widmark, obsessed with adding another Soviet Sub to his scalp collection.

At the peak climax and ……..

Once at sea they begin trailing a Soviet sub in a long and intense mission to shadow it and bring it to the surface eventually. The hours are long and it seems the captain never takes a break under the grind of the demanding situation. Portier observes the captain afraid that he may snap under the pressure, but Widmark’s character is too committed to let that stop him. At the very pinnacle of the mission’s success, the Russian sub commander proves to be cunning and evades the destroyer for a time even galvanizing the captain’s obsession even more not to let the Soviets get away. Once reacquiring the enemy sub, the Captain orders a missile lock on the target as they suspect the Russians have done as well.

Mutually Assured Destruction

The reporter asks in a terrified manner what is going on and the captain informs him that all the targeting data has been fed into the ship’s fire control and a missile is aimed and ready. Sydney Portier tries to reason with the Captain to de-escalate the situation, but the captain is determined to force the Soviet sub commander to back down. Suddenly, as the captain gives an order a young and nervous officer thinks he’s been told to fire and activates the missile system. The warhead is away. Meanwhile, the Russian sub commander now knows he’s been fired upon and does the same! His executive officer confirms there’s “A live fish in the water tracking them”.

No way out

Richard Widmark’s character orders evasive maneuvers as Sydney Portier’s character demands to know what next! The captain walks calmly away from the instrument clusters and command chair and goes to the front window staring off in the distance as confusion reigns among the crew. The reporter now realizes what is going on. They’ve run out of options. The Soviet’s firing solution is true even though they have already perished from the US launched warhead. The movie ends as a mushroom cloud disintegrating the US destroyer and its crew in an eruption of steam and fallout obscures the screen,

Summation

This movie shocked American audiences into the realization of just how potentially deadly a cold war confrontation could become, and it might not end well for America either. The typical Hollywood formula of “everything will work out just fine” instead becomes a very murky cautionary tale into the cloak of mystery surrounding the cold war aggression that was often in motion in many threat corridors of the world. In 1965, the very beginning of escalation in the Vietnam War was taking shape and now America had three Communist enemies to deal with, both China and the USSR supplying the North Vietnamese, and the Vietcong committed to driving the US out of Indo China. “The Bedford Incident” was but a clue to the deadly operations afoot in the world of undeclared warfare.