In the opening scene Lassen has blood all over the front of his shirt after killing a bunch of the German sailors. After they blow up the German patrol boat the blood is suddenly gone from Lassen's shirt.
At 45:48 into the movie, as Heinrich and Marjorie are sitting at a table in Herons' Casino Bar, Heinrich opens his cigarette holder in which there are 10 cigarettes. In the next shot, after he's taken one out, there are only 8 cigarettes left instead of 9.
"Mack The Knife," from Bertolt Brecht's leftist play The Threepenny Opera, plays twice in Nazi company. Brecht was a communist who fled Nazi Germany, and The Threepenny Opera was in fact banned by the Nazis for being "degenerate art."
Throughout the movie, documents and signage in German contain serious translation and grammar errors.
In Operation Postmaster, the Admiralty dispatched HMS Violet, a Flower-class corvette to assist the operation, not a destroyer, and certainly not the Town-class cruiser (presumably the surviving HMS Belfast as model). There is a single surviving member of Flower-class corvette, HMCS Sackville, preserved as a museum ship in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
During a German air raid over London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill is staying at his official residence located at 10 Downing Street in London, risking being killed in the bombing. During the war and especially during air raids, Churchill and all essential British military and government staff worked and slept in a huge underground shelter complex in London.
During the raid to steal the freighter which is fully loaded and further weighted down with extra armor the men tow the freighter with only one tugboat, despite having stolen two more tugboats. Once they were clear of the harbor and its breakwater they would have needed the two other tugboats to tow the ship because of currents and weather.
Luhr says "Horowitz and Meyer, West 47th Street. Have you heard of them?"
Marjorie responds, "I am familiar, of course, with Horowitz and Haim.
But they're in the WEST side of the city."
West 47th street is, of course, ON the west side.
West 47th street is, of course, ON the west side.
When Henry Cavill is talking to Cary Elwes about the mission, he reaches into a box of cigars. The cigars are Fuente OpusX, which weren't produced until 1995. Churchill also only smoked Cuban cigars, usually Romeo y Julieta.
A modern radar mast is visible on La Duchessa in several shots. While radar had been invented by the time the movie is set, it was advanced technology reserved for the military, and impossible to have for an ordinary Italian cargo vessel.
The cigarette lighters used by both Heinrich and Marjorie are fuelled by liquefied gas that was only adopted in the 1950s.
The film is set during the Blitz of London, which ended in May 1941. However, during the first sequence with Churchill, the newsreel being played shows the sinking of HMS Barham and the attack on Pearl Harbor, which happened in November and December 1941, respectively. Also, it seems odd that Churchill uses a reel of the attack on Pearl Harbor as an example of the casualties of the war in Europe, especially against U-boats.
The Duchessa and various other boats in the movie, like the tugboats, appear to be quite a bit newer/more modern than the film's 1940s setting.
When Heinrich Luhr orders the pursuit of the stolen Duchessa speaking German, English subtitles significantly differ from what Luhr is actually saying. Also U-Boats and S-Boats are mixed up:
"If we don't get the Duchessa back, we'll lose control over the Atlantic entirely. Then the Führer is going to come and will tear up our a...hole personally. So send off the U-Boats, I want my ship back."
"If we don't get the Duchessa back, we'll lose control over the Atlantic entirely. Then the Führer is going to come and will tear up our a...hole personally. So send off the U-Boats, I want my ship back."
Gustavus "Gus" March-Phillipps, as seen here, spelled his last name with three 'P' and not two, as the movie claims.
When Churchill is explaining the mission he says "If they're captured by the British..." but Fernando Po is under Spanish control.