ORIGINAL: Culiacan Mexico
“By innacurate it could be innaccurate props, or innaccurate story lines (unless the movie is intentionally about a fictional battle).”
Gary Childress
ORIGINAL: IronDuke
U571 was the worst.
How so? U-571 is completely fictional. No such operation every happened during the war, so it doesn't seem to meet the criteria.
"...S-33, being modified to resemble a U-Boat... when S-33 sails, Hirsch explains that the Allies intercepted the disabled U-571's SOS. They are going to masquerade as the resupply ship U-571 called for, board the ship, capture her enigma coding device and then scuttle the U-571."
ORIGINAL: IronDuke
Ingenious American submariners steal Enigma, at one fell swoop writing British efforts...
Actually Polish efforts.
The only British naval action that even comes close to the premise of the movie would be this:
"On 30 October 1942, U-559 was damaged by five British destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean. After the captain was killed and the crew abandoned the U-boat, a British boarding party from HMS Petard entered the submarine and recovered the signal key books. Then two British sailors drowned trying to remove the Enigma machine when U-559 quickly sunk. However, the recovery of the signal key books was important because the addition of the fourth rotor in the early months of 1942 had prevented the Allied codebreakers from reading messages to the German submarines. The key books from U-559 enabled the Allies codebreakers to understand how the fourth rotor on the Enigma machine worked and to start reading the messages to German submarines again."
Please note: the fourth wheel was in itself not significant to winning the Battle of the Atlantic as the problem never was finding German U-Boat (Donitz was very happy to do that for the British). The problem was that the Germans were reading the British convoy codes, only once the British realized this and changed their codes did the dynamics of the battle change.
"The B-Dienst, created in the early 1930s, had decrypted the most
widely used code of the British Navy already by 1935. When the war
broke out in 1939, the B-Dienst specialists had deciphered the British
naval codes so well that the Germans new the positions of all British
warships. They had further decryption successes in the early stages of
the war; the British were slow at changing the codes. One important
code the B-Dienst could read was the British and Allied Merchants
Ships (BAMS) code, which proved valuable for U-Boat warfare. In
February 1942, the B-Dienst cracked the code used for communication
with many of the Atlantic convoys."
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