Above Us the Waves (1955) on Netflix
The German battleship Tirpitz lies deep inside a Norwegian fjord, beyond the reach of British bombers. Commander Fraser trains a force of frogmen to attack her with human torpedoes.
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- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb6.6/101,852 votes
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Plot summary
The Royal Navy keeps half its fleet ready against the German battleship Tirpitz, which lies in a Norwegian fjord, sixty miles from the open sea. Commander Fraser wants to prove that frogmen riding human torpedoes can attack a ship at anchor, though Admiral Ryder and other senior officers doubt an unproven weapon. At a Scottish base Fraser assembles and trains a force of commando frogmen, among them Lieutenant Alec Duffy, Lieutenant Tom Corbett, Abercrombie, Ramsey, Smart and Hutchins, on the Mk I Chariot and on diving to great depths and escaping back to the surface. Refused permission to strike at Tirpitz, the team set dummy limpet mines on the admiral's own ship.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Above Us the Waves (1955)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For Above Us the Waves, Donald Sinden re-enacted a wartime deed of the film's adviser, Commander Donald Cameron: when a floating mine slid along the tow cable towards Cameron's X-Craft midget submarine in the North Sea, he lowered himself over the prow and pushed it clear with his feet.
- The film altered details of the real attacks: the boat Arthur that carried the Chariot human torpedoes became Ingebord, and the real X-class submarines of Operation Source in 1943 were X-5, X-6 and X-7, with X-5 the craft lost, while the real X-3 went down in an earlier training exercise and its crew escaped using Davis escape apparatus.
- Producer William MacQuitty was an experienced diver who had spent over 500 hours under water, and he personally supervised many of the film's underwater sequences.
