GOOFS . . .

I'm posting this here after being unsuccessful in getting whoever it is that is supposed to to include these comments on the "Goofs" page. A number of the entirely too-typical pompous armchair warriors who have unaccountably been able to post successfully there have gotten some basic facts absolutely wrong.

First, it is FAR from a "serious breach of military protocol" or any such thing for the Marine captain (James Brown)to leave his cover on once aboard the boat. Everybody wears their covers aboard if they feel like it, with the one obvious exception, in terms of protocol, per se, being that you don't wear it to sit down to eat; I don't even remember for sure anybody making any particular effort to remove theirs if they were just passing through a mess (either the crew's mess or the officer's wardroom) to grab a quick cup of coffee without sitting down there to drink it. You'd probably also expect him to remove it when entering a space to address the captain, out of courtesy, but again I don't know that that is really ironclad, especially if the Marine is wearing a sidearm, which alters the usual rules.

Second, the use of the term "ship" rather than "boat" is not by any means incorrect. While the traditional slang expression that submariners use for their ships is "boat", "ship" is technically correct and in the earlier days of nuclear submarines there was some conscious effort expended by some people to try to get people to start using that word in place of "boat". While by the 1980's, certainly, this effort had not paid off, this movie takes place many years earlier, and "ship" remains technically correct to this day and is used in giving formal commands such as, "Diving Officer, submerge the ship!", etc.

The third criticism of misplaced and unfounded accusations of goofs that aren't by people who might be better described as goofs themselves is my personal favorite. Some real know-it-all (a real "qui no sabe" for sure) claims that the amber appearance of the window that Ernest Borgnine and his escort look through at the reactor at one point must be erroneous because radiation is blue! Truly the mark of what in submarines would be something even less accepted on board than what we would call a dink nonqual nub, this is an assertion that would have any real nuclear submariner rolling around laughing on the deck plates, except that in their usual way their first inclination would be to give the offending "load" who made that claim withering looks that should make him feel no more than two mils tall. In fact, that bit of film studio art department representational work is actually 100% precisely accurate, something that really took me by surprise the first time I saw it. If there is one thing any lay viewer of this movie now knows about nuclear submarines after seeing this movie that he did not know before, it is what the viewing window in the reactor compartment tunnel deck on a typical nuclear submarine looked like (and may still look like, for all I know over thirty years later). The fact is that nuclear radiation is entirely invisible, but the glass of the window the characters are looking through is composed of a substance which is opaque to radiation, for obvious reasons, and this composition just happens to result in an amber tint to the glass, and that's about it. Anyway, that part of the movie is absolutely dead right.

There are numerous other goofs or at least questionable aspects to various things you see in this movie -- for one thing, it seems to have a ridiculous amount of extra space and empty berths in it compared with a real submarine (and yes, while since the 70's at least the slang term for berths in the U.S. Navy is "racks", in earlier days it WAS in fact "bunks" -- I just don't know when or how the change took place), and for another, the stuff that Jones says about the torpedo tube door interlocks is ever so much mumbo-jumbo and entirely fictional -- but I'll save all that for some other time.