User Reviews

Colonel Gallagher needs to be flown back to his base. So, he hitches a ride on a new B-17 being transported to the base anyway. When he climbs aboard, he's shocked to see that the pilot is Tony Powell...a man who was washed out of his unit for cowardice. Now his job is transporting planes and avoiding combat situations. But he cannot completely avoid combat and some German fighters end up knocking the B-17 out of the sky. He and Gallagher manage to make their way to an island in the North Sea...where they are captured by Germans from a nearby sub. Part of the reason they were captured easily is that Powell refused to fight and quickly surrendered! What's next? See the show.

The other review currently posted on IMDB is right....there is no way a German U-Boat would fire a torpedo on a fishing boat. This is because torpedoes were like gold....and Captains didn't just fire at anything with them. And, what strategic value would there be destroying a fishing boat?! If you can look past this, it's an otherwise decent episode.

This is a well-constructed thriller, populated by nicely defined characters, all well played. But it has one or two major flaws in its central premise -- the first is that U-Boats were not supposed to primarily engage enemy warships, but were normally assigned to disrupt supply lines (i.e. tankers, supply ships etc.); the second is that no U-Boat commander on any mission would ever have wasted a torpedo (much less two torpedoes) on a fishing boat -- torpedoes were too valuable to use for such targets. They'd have surfaced and used their deck gun. On the basis of pure character study, however, the episode is well-written, and no better or worse than most of the second season episodes of this series, which is better than I remember it from the time in which it was on.