Currently Watching "battle Of The River Plate" On Bbc2 For Inspiration...

[DeeBee]

"They have disappeared in smoke and flames"

"We're trying to get it over the side"...

"I cant feel my legs"

I'll get the hang of this 'Broads' slang if it kills me...

[Vaughan]

Another Naval expression from those days :

"It came away in me 'and, sir!"

[DeeBee]

[TheQ]

Love the section on the flagship commander calling the other captains to a meeting, claiming he had a hunch the Graf Spee would be off the coast of South America.. when in actual fact, he would have received an encoded message, from Bletchley park via the Admiralty on the expected position of the Graf Spee.

Also spotted the radar whirling away on the American USS Salem pretending to be the Graf Spee, the Salem being built in 1949 was a bit out of time period.

[Bikertov]

Don't you just love continuity and dating errors in films !

[stumpy]

38 minutes ago, Bikertov said:

Don't you just love continuity and dating errors in films !

My dear old Dad appears in 'The Yangtze Incident ' rowing his dad and big brother across the Orwell from Levington to Pin Mill - he was left with the boat to move it according to the tide. Apparently the family had been barred (again!) from the Ship and the Butt and Oyster was next nearest pub.

[Vaughan]

7 hours ago, TheQ said:

Also spotted the radar whirling away on the American USS Salem pretending to be the Graf Spee, the Salem being built in 1949 was a bit out of time period.

All the same, it is great to see Ajax, Achilles and Cumberland all playing themselves in the film.  Exeter had been sunk later, in the Java Sea after the fall of Singapore.

Bletchley Park and the Enigma code came a bit later, I think.  This was 1939 and still very much a "line of sight" war, much like the 1st War. 

The meeting of the ships' captains at sea never happened in fact but it was a good way to show off some film of the ships, introduce the main characters and explain the basic plot.  Commodore Harwood did indeed find the Graf Spee by estimating where he thought she might be going next.

An excellent film which is almost entirely true to the facts.  My father took me to see it in the cinema in Norwich, when it first came out.

[Vaughan]

By the way, did you know that the Graf Spee had to be scuttled because she had run out of diesel?

She was one of the first big ships to have a Diesel engine rather than steam boilers and she had bunkers of boiler fuel oil, with a distillation plant to refine it into "heavy" oil for the engine. Unfortunately this plant was in the upper superstructure and got hit and destroyed during the battle. The delay in sailing again was due to them trying without success, to get another unit sent to them.

So when she sailed, she only had about 8 hours steaming left, in the ready use diesel tank. This was all kept secret until after the war.