I recently saw the movie ‘Greyhound’ – a Tom Hanks production that converts the book The Good Shepard into a movie. I’ve been reading comments to see what other people thought about it and I’ve noticed a lot of errors in people’s thinking.
Since this is a topic where I have some knowledge, I thought I would comment on some of the things people are saying, as well as some other issues that are worth mentioning.
Some quotes are repeated so I can address different parts of the quote.
In other cases I have broken a quote up into several pieces and addressed them separately.
1. However, they never would have risked giving away their position by broadcasting radio messages in the open.
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On the downside their portrayal of the U boats suffered from two (2) majors inaccuracies which, after 75 years and hundreds of books, are either the writers fantasy or lack of investigation. …
Second, the U boats did not broadcast propaganda on their radios to intimidate convoys. Quite the opposite, they were totally silent (except for messages to U boat command). The U boat commanders knew that the allies had radio detection gear and would use it to hunt them down.
Don’t expect everything to be realistic, though. Why did his feet bleed? Hopeless. And the submarine surfacing to attack the destroyer with machine guns? Hard to believe such thing could happen. As well as the Germans getting through to Tom Hank’s ship’s radio. Close to impossible, for at least two reasons.
When, for example did U-boats (very keen not to give away their positions for obvious reasons) ever radio threatening messages to convoy escorts?
It’s important to realize here that we are talking about short range radio (also known as TBS or Talk Between Ships). It doesn’t give away one’s position except to people who are already close (and probably know you are there). None of it was encrypted – they didn’t have the capability to encrypt real time traffic in that era. Nothing prevented surfaced U-Boats from finding those frequencies and transmitting on them in the clear (just like everybody else).
In practice, TBS was used frequently and there was very little risk that intercepts would help the other side. You can see the captain of the Greyhound using it to talk to the other escort ships on many occasions in the movie and that is accurate. Further, when the enemy already knows that you are there, it really doesn’t matter that they can hear you talking so long as one is careful. Informal codes could be used, but rarely were.
In the book, the author does have the Germans messing with the British escorts. But not like in the movie.
There certainly were documented occasions in real life where subs would send false radio messages to escorts. In the early war, when radar was rare and unreliable and escorts few in number, the subs were often on the surface at night for higher speed, for better situational awareness, to evade ASDIC detection (active sonar), and so they could easily hear and transmit to coordinate their actions. Nothing prevented the subs and escorts from transmitting on each other’s channels.
When we’re talking about long range radio – which often was encrypted or at least used a code – that does give away one’s position at great distances (HUFF-DUFF, high frequency direction finding), but the error on position measurements with the technology available back then was huge. For example, you’ll notice an error estimate early in the movie is given of 10 miles in distance. That was actually pretty good, still it’s far too large to serve to target any weapons available in that era – and that’s not even taking into account the inevitable error in bearing that will also be present. In other words, you have error in measurement of position in both distance and bearing.
Note that active sonar range in those days was ~1 mile, maybe as much as 2 miles in some cases, depending upon conditions and the specific equipment in use. I suspect 1 mile would be more likely for the era being depicted. That’s a lot smaller than the (estimated!) error in the radio direction fix – and it takes time for the ship to get close enough to use the equipment. The sonar can not be used when the ship is at full speed, so it has to slow down to use it. Also, the sonar beam is a cone, so the sub could be under the cone, or on the side, and not be detected. Finally, passive sonar could generally hear incoming ships long before active sonar would detect them, if the equipment was working properly and the operator had a good ear – which means the sub could often detect the incoming destroyer and start taking evasive action long before the destroyer was in active sonar range – and even (depending upon the weather conditions) before the destroyer was in visual range. It didn’t work the other way – the noise of the convoy interfered with the passive sonar on the destroyer.
A destroyer could leave the convoy to go after a sub shadowing it – but in the early war the odds of accomplishing anything are not great. The sub can move so far after the transmission that there is very little chance the destroyer will spot it. Sometimes a pursuit based on this information could be justified, depending upon available resources and the exact circumstances. In the book, that happened, but Greyhound did not sink the sub (unlike the movie). Later in the book the sub would be sunk, in cooperation with one of the other escorts.
Sometimes the destroyers would fire their main guns at long range against surfaced subs, trying for opportunistic hits. In these situations, they knew full well they probably couldn’t get close to the sub before it submerged even at full speed, and at least they could drive the sub under. Underwater the sub’s ability to keep track of it’s surroundings was reduced, as was it’s speed. With luck, it might not be able to catch up to the convoy for an hour or two. This tactic was especially useful when dawn was not that far away, since the sub wouldn’t risk being on the surface at dawn with a known enemy near (except in bad weather), so driving them down for a while might be enough to force the sub to disengage.
In general, in the early war years, it was unusual for a single destroyer to kill a sub: the odds are very much in favor of the sub escaping. Often, the best the escorts could hope to do was to force the sub down and away, with the goal of driving the sub away from the convoy for a time, and perhaps delaying any report it might make to it’s headquarters or other subs in the vicinity. Also, hunting the sub would consume fuel and munitions, and leave an opening in the convoy escort screen that could be exploited by another sub. So in general the escorts would be very cautious in going too far from the convoy – and the subs knew this. This would be especially true when the convoy didn’t have enough escorts – as was the case in this story.
It was a lot like air escort for bombers: for those of you familiar with this, part of the reason that African-American fighter pilots like the Tuskegee Airmen earned a great reputation was from their strict discipline in staying close to the bombers. In other words, they didn’t let themselves be lured away to chase a small group of fighters (operating as a decoy), as that would potentially allow a much larger enemy fighter group to attack the bomber formation unopposed by any fighter escorts. As a result, fewer fighter pilots became aces – but they did a better job keeping their charges alive.
See below for the issue of the feet bleeding, and the subs fighting on the surface.
2. The German U-boats never ran out of torpedoes (they only carried 12 and mainly used them against the merchant ships) but the destroyers quickly ran low on depth charges.
In real life, torpedoes would frequently go by or even under destroyers on their way to the convoy, since the destroyers were typically on the outside of the convoy. They were not normally the target, but they were in the way. Read up on I19 and the torpedoing of the USS Wasp and North Carolina for one well documented instance of this. The depth settings on torpedoes were usually set deeper than the hull of an escort since they were usually trying to hit the bigger ships – so torpedoes could go right underneath a destroyer and not explode. Don’t assume – just because you see a torpedo – that the destroyer is the target.
There is a segue in the movie intended to convey the fact that the action is continuing but they are not going to show it. That’s why the depth charges were low – they were used during the period that was not shown.
In the book, Greyhound worked in partnership with another escort attempting to get another submarine for many hours. They failed – something that was very common at that point in the war – and this series of many failed attacks consumed huge numbers of depth charges. Hollywood chose to not show this long sequence found in the book.
German Type VII U-Boats – the most common – carried 14 torpedoes. If there were between 6-8 total U-Boats in the pack, then they could easily afford to spend 2 torpedoes each firing at escorts and still have 70+ torpedoes for the ~35 merchant ships – and they only needed one torpedo to sink a merchant ship. Incidentally, the US Gato class — the most common US sub during WW2 — carried 24 torpedoes, a much larger torpedo load — that’s part of the reason US boats sank more tons of enemy shipping per boat lost than any other nation managed (and this in spite of the fact that US torpedoes were not reliable for the first two years of the war!).
3. Also omitted was the fact that Fletcher and similar destroyers all carried a load of torpedoes as part of their ordinance. Yet we only see depth charges and guns firing.
It would be rare for a destroyer to be able to use a torpedo against a submarine. WW2 torpedoes had a minimum range, and when a sub was forced to the surface it would typically be very close – in fact the destroyer commanders would try to close the location when their sonar operators heard the sound of a sub surfacing. This let them fire depth charges (set for shallow) at very close ranges at the surfaced sub, it let them ram the sub in situations where that made sense, and as long as they didn’t get too close they could get easy hits with guns.
It might take a lot of firing to damage a sub on the surface: the pressure hull is not armored, but it is enormously strong to resist the pressure of the water when the sub is submerged. Also, it’s rounded, which means many shells will just skip off the surface. That’s why they were firing at the conning tower. But a sub can take enormous damage to the conning tower without making it sink. The most effective hits are likely to be those at the base of the conning tower, where the mass of the conning tower helps prevent the shells from skipping off and creates the possibility the explosion will blow into the pressure hull and do real damage.
Making sure that one can get these hits is a big part of the reason for closing the distance. Also, the armor piercing ammunition available at the time was especially likely to bounce off, so they had to use high explosive or ‘semi-armor piercing’.
Limited firing arcs were another problem when it came to using torpedoes. Be aware the sub is actually more maneuverable than the destroyer – it can turn in a tighter radius. The destroyer would be trying very hard to keep out of the line of sight of the subs torpedoes – not to mention dodging any torpedoes that were launched if it couldn’t keep out of line of sight – and the frequent maneuvering required would limit it’s own ability to engage with it’s own torpedoes. There’s also the issue that missing the sub could result in hitting a friendly ship, perhaps one maneuvering in an unexpected fashion. If you read about some of the Solomon Islands night battles you’ll find a number of times where ships hit friendly ships in the confusion and darkness. So between the minimum range issue, and the difficulty of setting up a shot, and the friendly-ships downrange issue, torpedo use by escorts against surfaced subs was uncommon.
It’s a lot like modern police work – well trained officers are generally not allowed to fire unless they know there is something downrange that will absorb the bullets. They have to know where the bullets might go – and what might be in or move into the line of fire (which for police work can be very different from the line of sight).
Many convoy escorts had no torpedoes at all, because in most situations they were not useful weapons for that role – the space and weight otherwise used by torpedoes could be used for more depth charges or other weapons. For example, corvettes and frigates and sloops and similar ships. The exception would be if there was a possibility of an enemy surface raider, in which case the torpedo’s role as a ‘king hitter’ would become important and destroyers would certainly carry them if possible.
In the book, the Greyhound’s captain considers trying to use his torpedoes at one point, but never gets the opportunity. Later he has to jettison them because of a fire on deck – the gasoline supply for one of the boats catches fire – if he didn’t do that, the fire could have detonated the torpedoes, which would have instantly destroyed the ship and probably killed everybody aboard.
4. The idea that a U-boat would try to fire its 3.5 inch (8.8 cm) or 4.1 inch (10.5 cm) gun at a destroyer is ludicrous. US destroyers were armed with up to five, 5″ guns plus a half-dozen or more 20 and 40 mm cannon as well as a bevy of machine guns. So a sub would not engage in a surface gun battle with a destroyer except if the sub’s hull were breached and it could not submerge and only as an act of desperation (not the situation in the movie);
Also:U-Boats tended to stay below the water. Most escort commanders would never see one. But for Tom Hanks, they bob up like corks, trading shots with destroyers as if they didn’t have pressure hulls. …
On the downside their portrayal of the U boats suffered from two (2) majors inaccuracies which, after 75 years and hundreds of books, are either the writers fantasy or lack of investigation. First, U boats did not surface, particularly in daylight, to engage armed escort vessels since even a single bullet hole in the pressure hull would render the boat unable to dive and, thus, a sitting duck. Moreover no U-Boat captain would surface to engage any Destroyer let alone a Fletcher class armed with 5, 127 mm dual purpose guns🙄. I like Hanks he is a fine actor. The rest of the cast put in good performances as well. However it’s such a shame given the backdrop of the real struggle of the war at sea during WWII and how it was portrayed in the film,that such obvious historical inaccuracy was allowed.
Don’t expect everything to be realistic, though. Why did his feet bleed? Hopeless. And the submarine surfacing to attack the destroyer with machine guns? Hard to believe such thing could happen. As well as the Germans getting through to Tom Hank’s ship’s radio. Close to impossible, for at least two reasons. Also, The tactics used by the submarines were ridiculous. These subs surfaced next to the destroyer and fired their deck gun and machine guns at the destroyer. No sub skipper in their right mind would take on a destroyer like that on the surface.
It would be more accurate to say that subs rarely found themselves on the surface, during the day, in good weather, in the close presence of destroyers or other escorts, except when damaged.
Note that no ‘bullet’ could possibly penetrate the pressure hull. It was not armored, but was enormously strong to resist the pressure of the ocean at depth. Larger guns – those that fire shells not bullets – could penetrate the pressure hull. But it was hard to do: the rounded shape of the hull tended to cause many rounds to skip off – particularly armor-piercing rounds. Usually it took quite a few shots to get a good hit that would prevent the sub from submerging.
In the early war – and often even later in the war, depending upon circumstances – subs routinely operated on the surface when shadowing a convoy at a distance at night. This was because the submerged speed of the subs in that era was so much less than the surface speed, plus the sub had so much less visibility / situational awareness when submerged. These shadowing operations didn’t occur in immediate proximity to escorts, but they weren’t that far away either, a fact which could and did lead to surface encounters.
Also, operating on the surface meant a sub would not be subject to detection by active sonar. Passive sonar near the convoy would be very hard for the destroyer to use given the large number of sound sources in the water: every ship in the convoy would be radiating sound. In bad weather or at night, operating one the surface was a big advantage for the sub.
There are other situations where a sub might be unexpectedly on the surface. One such situation might occur when a particularly bold sub captain moved into the middle of the convoy at night and surfaced. In that situation, most sub captains (Otto Kretschmer is one example of a captain known for this tactic) would still use torpedoes. But – rarely – some would use their guns against anything they could, counting on the lines of merchant ships to shield them from a direct destroyer attack – remember that the destroyers are usually on the outside of the convoy – and if they judged it right – and the weather and lighting conditions were appropriate – they could get away with this and still have enough time to submerge and gain distance before they could be engaged. Once submerged they could just run under the convoy ships and the destroyer would have a tough time pursuing with the other ships in the way.
So in this movie we have one incident where a sub surfaces in the middle of the convey at night. Perfectly reasonable to use guns there, especially given that the convoy had far too few escorts. It’s a judgment call: getting the gun crew below decks slightly increases the time it takes the sub to dive, but having the merchant ships in the way of the destroyers gives a lot more time to dive if the sub crew is alert and careful.
In the later movie, we see two more incidents with a sub on the surface. In both cases, the surfaced sub was on the surface because of battle damage: 1) a depth charge fired by the Canadian corvette Eagle, and 2) a shell from Greyhound went through the water and exploded against the hull, penetrating the pressure hull.
In general, a sub on the surface that could not submerge (for whatever reason) would fire it’s guns at a closing destroyer or other escort if they could. This happened many times during the war.
A destroyer is thin-skinned and has little or no armor. A single shell in the right spot will blow up a destroyer, and the sub gunners are going to try for that “golden-bb”. That’s exactly what we are seeing later in the movie.
Sub crews were often very well trained in the use of their guns, and if they could get a few shells into the destroyer before the destroyer’s gun crews could respond, they had some chance of getting that lucky hit. Popular targets would be the bridge, the wheelhouse (for British ships, where the wheelhouse sits under the bridge), the engines, the hull below the waterline (including the magazines), the torpedoes, and the depth charges.
Note that destroyers typically had little or no armor – the Fletchers were unusual in that they did have some protection, mostly against shrapnel/splinters and not direct hits – but in general they are quite vulnerable. In the book the ship is Mahan class, an earlier design which would be even more vulnerable.
In some cases, the sub would be so close that the destroyer’s guns could not lower enough to hit – which is also shown in the movie and did happen in real life. The destroyer, of course, would try to use it’s lighter ordinance to clear the sub crew from the guns – and usually they succeeded. Sometimes they even used rifles (carried by all warships) and even grenades (on the rare occasions where they had them) when the enemy was too close for the fixed mounts. Read up on USS Buckley (DE-51) and U-66 on 5 May 1944 for one such encounter. If you want to see a similar ship, a museum ship close in size and type to the Buckley is USS Slater (DE-766) moored in Albany, NY.
In the book, the author emphasizes that sub hunting was a team effort: not just the team within a single ship, but the whole team through the whole convoy. Some of that comes through in the movie for people paying attention. For example, when the second sub is forced to the surface, it’s the depth charges from the Canadian corvette that do the critical damage. Then both Greyhound and the corvette fight it out with the sub on the surface. Note that the destroyer is far more heavily armed than the corvette, so there’s no surprise that it ends up being the one to finally sink the sub – but without the contribution of the corvette it wouldn’t have had the opportunity to use it’s guns.
The fact the destroyers are so vulnerable to a golden BB is one of the things that creates fear in the minds of the crew, something that the crew has to live with for as long as they are at sea in dangerous waters. It’s an ever-present threat: something that everybody on the ship knows, but there’s nothing they can do about it, so they mostly just try not to think about it. They do their jobs the best they can. The fact that they didn’t have armor or other ships to hide behind meant that best was usually very good. Wartime destroyer crews were often the most capable and experienced crews in any navy.
Courage is not the absence of fear, courage means taking appropriate and effective action in spite of one’s fear.
5. He is apparently injured during the fighting, but soldiers on. There are implications that it’s serious, but, like many things at the end of the film, it seems to just fade away into the land of “forget we mentioned it” and doesn’t have closure.
Don’t expect everything to be realistic, though. Why did his feet bleed? Hopeless. And the submarine surfacing to attack the destroyer with machine guns? Hard to believe such thing could happen. As well as the Germans getting through to Tom Hank’s ship’s radio. Close to impossible, for at least two reasons.
I found it boring most of the time. Sure, if you went back in time and filmed a battle on the high seas during WW2 then it may very well look exactly like this strange movie with some strange captain wanting someone to fetch his slippers during a battle with a German u boat. Who wants to watch that?
Mini spoiler alert…….. can someone please explain why his feet were bleeding and why that was even in the story. It reeks of a pathetic attempt to add drama
Boredom is a choice.
The blood is from his feet. He spent too many hours standing in wet sea boots, and has developed blisters which have started to bleed. That’s why he switches to the slippers. It’s just another indication of how long he has been awake, without being able to change clothes or take a shower, and under enormous stress.
Captains of ships would often stay awake for very long periods of time during these operations. In all likelihood they under-estimated the impact this had on their mental functions. Many people still do that in everyday life today. For example, when they drive long hours, especially male drivers.
The navy has done studies that show people’s mental functions and reflexes rapidly degrade after a couple hours – and they usually don’t realize this. Hence, people should stop every 90-120 minutes for a short break when they are driving long distances, and for really long distances they need a much longer break.
Failure to do this makes for a very dangerous driver – and as the studies show, the people doing it won’t realize how much their capabilities have declined. Overconfidence resulting from ignorance and arrogance kills people – and unfortunately it doesn’t just kill the stupid ones.
Hopefully in this day and age a captain would make sure to get some sleep during the intervals between combat (such as during the day for a convoy, where the biggest threats are at night). After all, training one’s replacement is part of a captain’s job – and that means the ships XO or Gunnery officer should be able to take command while the captain is down. I consider it a failure of judgment for somebody to stay awake doing a dangerous job for too many hours – and sometimes even criminal negligence.
6. Tired of shooting at an underwater target and finding your shells won’t explode? In this film, shells turn into torpedoes.
Naval shells will penetrate shallow depths of water (20 feet is easily possible) and still explode if they hit the hull (which typically runs far beneath the water).
That’s likely what killed the fast battleship HMS Hood at the Battle of the Denmark Strait in 1941 (see the presentation by Drachinifel on his YouTube channel at The Loss of HMS Hood – But why did it blow up??): the only explanation that accounts for all the known facts is a shell hit the water then hit the hull under the main armor belt, penetrated, and exploded inside the rear 4-inch magazine, with the fire quickly spreading to the 15 inch magazine, which blew up the ship about a minute after the initial hit.
Magazines were always located at the bottom of ships to provide maximum protection and cool temperatures – and hence well underwater except when the ship was in dry dock (in which case the magazine would be empty) – but even that level of protection sometimes wasn’t enough.
In the same battle, HMS Prince of Wales achieved a critical hit on Bismark that flooded an engine room with a shell that penetrated the water then hit the hull underwater, penetrated, and exploded inside the ship. This is known from the accounts of survivors from the later sinking of the Bismark. It is well documented historical fact.
In summary, naval shells can also hit and detonate underwater against a sub that is still close to the surface. It’s still not easy to do critical damage. Subs have rounded hulls, when tend to deflect shells – though perhaps not as much underwater – and the hull itself is very strong to resist the pressure of the deep ocean.
7. The graphics of his escort destroyer are terrific because it was filmed on the USS Kidd ( the last WW2 destroyer, maintained as a memorial in its original state).
It’s not the last WW2 destroyer. There are others both in the USA and around the world. Probably not in it’s original state either, since it wasn’t decommissioned until 1964. I don’t know of ANY museum ship still in it’s original state as of WW2. Even ships that were placed in reserve often had critical systems removed for use by other ships.
I’m sure the film team had to heavily compensate for changes to the ship in their 3d models.
8. The character portrays resilience, power, and accurately depicts the quality of skills needed to command a warship and this will make you appreciate the work the soldiers do for their country.
Not soldier, sailors, there is a difference.
They did show a troop ship carrying soldiers at the end: that was pure Hollywood. I don’t know of any circumstance where an Allied troop ship would have been traveling with a slow merchant convey and such a small escort.
The Allies took great care to protect troop ships, with usually a capital ship and/or cruisers present to supplement a much larger destroyer escort – especially in high danger areas. If they were in a convoy with merchant ships it would be a high speed convoy – most merchants aren’t designed for high speed but some are.
At least one troop ship was lost: Rohna with convoy KMF-26, but in general it was very rare to lose a troop ship because of these precautions. Some ~1100 people died when the Rohna was lost, which explains why they took such care with troop ships. That’s as many people as you might lose on a battleship or four destroyers when they are sunk, assuming relatively few survivors. It could have been worse: the Rohna was capable of carrying ~4000 people.
9. But let’s hold out for the super destroyer Tom Hanks was the captain of, it was going from side to side like a racing yacht yet no one got seasick! His guns could sink a u-boat underwater, and his lookouts could see periscopes at hundreds of yards!
Destroyer crews used to joke that the ships would roll on wet grass, let alone at sea. They got used to it very quickly. Few if any crew members would still be having problems with sea sickness by the time they finished months of at-sea training and went into combat. Maybe in really big storms …
Also, combat tends to help people focus and likely reduces the effect of seasickness for most people.
For the gun issue, see above.
The distance at which a periscope could be spotted depended upon the conditions, how much light was present, how long it was up, and how it was raised. A sub would have to raise the periscope much higher in when the sea state was disturbed in order to see over the waves, but the waves themselves would help hide the periscope.
In most cases it was not the actual periscope that was initially spotted, it was the white feather of the periscopes wake that gave it away. Even at night if there was any light present it could reflect off the wake. A disturbed sea state with a lot of white on the water would make it almost impossible to spot a periscope, but it’s very easy in some sea conditions.
I was able to quickly find historical accounts of submarine periscopes being spotted at distances from 200 yards to 2500 yards. The author has periscopes being spotted at 2 miles in the book, which is very possible.
Don’t forget that lookouts in WW2 had very expensive optical equipment for both day and night use. They were also typically young men selected for their excellent vision.
10. Nor does the movie explain how a middle-aged career Navy man with no destroyer experience (implied) magically becomes a captain of a Fletcher class destroyer in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Nothing at all is said about ‘no experience’ – nor was it implied in any way. Many navy men with sea experience never make it to command of a ship in peacetime – and that’s been true for ages. Getting from ‘lieutenant commander’ (lt cmdr) to full ‘commander’ (cmdr) is the big hurdle that most people never make (~1 in 10: some that do don’t deserve to make it, and many that do deserve to make it don’t!). It’s like the army where the big jump is lieutenant-colonel to colonel.
It’s also a lot like the corporate workplace, where there are many lower level managers, but very few executives. A lot of really good people never make it to the top positions – and those who do make it often owe their success more to incidentals such as personal connections than to any real ability.
This is part of the background that an educated adult brings to the movie.
The book explains that he did have prior sea experience on destroyers.
There is nothing magical about this promotion, they were making huge numbers of ships and they desperately needed good officers. As much as possible, they put the navy reserve officers into the smaller commands such as ‘destroyer escorts’, but they preferred to use the career officers for the full size destroyers and larger ships. The terminology here can be confusing: a ‘destroyer escort’ is a class of ship, but a regular destroyer can be assigned an escort role …
To help put all this in perspective, the US Navy would start the war with 790 ships (114 warships, the remainder auxiliaries). At war’s end, the navy would have 6768 ships – almost 10x what they started with. So they needed to find an enormous number of additional ship captains – plus there were lots of casualties to make the problem of getting captains for all those ships even worse. A destroyer captain goes into battle facing much the same risks as everybody else in the crew.
11. It just not feasible a naval commander in his first command would be put in charge of a multinational convoy protecting merchant ships across the Atlantic. He couldn’t compete with the at-sea experience of the commodore on the British ship for instance. Our new commander would soon founder and more experienced hands would have to try and save him from being the first ship sunk. It’s typical American bravura that makes the film for all its verisimilitude something of a joke.
You are completely wrong. Leave your anti-American prejudices at the door.
The commodore of a convoy was typically a ‘retread’ – a retired admiral or other retired officer brought back into service to do one last job for their country – and they were happy to do it even with a lower acting rank then they had carried before retirement. Being an admiral is mostly an office job, and many people in this position jumped at the chance to get a real job where they were actually doing something important – and doing it at sea. Despite the ‘acting’ rank, they did not command the escort, the job of the commodore was to keep the merchant ships organized and doing the right thing. It’s a sharing of responsibilities.
The escort command would be determined by simple seniority among the escort warship commanders. This is normal naval practice. There are many accounts of warship groups being led on the basis of seniority, when not going with seniority would have been a far wiser choice. It happened. Read up on the Soloman Islands naval battles between US/British/Australian forces and the Japanese for some examples. Another example is the Battle of the Java Sea.
Notice the fact that the US captain has a silver oak leaf – that makes him a full commander (cmdr). The other destroyer captains were ‘lieutenant commanders’ (lt cmdr). That was actually a fairly common rank for destroyer captains. Then as now it takes a long time to make the jump from lt cmdr to cmdr and relatively few people make it (about 1 in 10).
The fact that the US captain happened to outrank the Polish and British destroyer captains put him in charge of the escort. It’s that simple. The author mentions this in the book – and in the book the captain does in fact worry quite a bit about how this will be perceived.
In practice, the navy didn’t tend to give destroyer commands to men who were not extremely capable. In fact, the destroyer commanders tended to be the best officers in the fleet from the perspective of seamanship, leadership, and ship handling. They had to be, given the wide variety of jobs carried out by destroyers and the enormous amount of sea time those jobs called for – so they were selected accordingly. Typically they were men with a lot of time at sea in many different roles. Once they took command, they acquired even more skill in the course of many months of intense training at sea. The selection process wasn’t perfect, but this is not a story about one of the rare failures, it’s a story about the far more common successes.
Then – like now – it was really tough even for capable people to get a peacetime command – too many good officers, not enough ships – and many of the capable people lost out to people who had better political skills and connections. But once the war started and ship production ramped up and officers starting getting killed or crippled, there were suddenly openings for these bypassed people to demonstrate their very real skills.
12. If Hanks based his script closely on Forster’s novel, then C.S. is the idiot and shame on Hanks for being taken in. I see this invincible naval commander as part of a running theme through many American films where one lone man saves the world. It’s a pathetic, wishful-thinking impossibility and a premise that is frankly, insulting to viewers. Time for adolescent dreams of glory to be exposed to the light of day.
Actually, what the movie shows is how important teamwork was to success.
It was not all about one lone man – for a destroyer to be effective in combat required teamwork on a very high level – far more so than you need in sports.
How many sports teams have to coordinate the activity of 100-250+ people on the playing field? That’s the crew size of a World War 2 destroyer.
Not sure how you missed this: perhaps your prejudices are getting in the way of being objective?
13. As a woman (I don’t know if men feel this way, my boyfriend didn’t lol), I felt no emotional connection to the characters, there was no real explanation of who these people were before all of the action started, except for a super small portion in the beginning. That’s how I get invested in a show or movie, to get to know the people. It was what you would call suspenseful, I guess, but due to the lack of connection, the suspense didn’t hold much idea of consequence or reward… It was just flat lol. I really wanted to like this!
Think of this as an opportunity to learn a little bit more about what war was really like. If you go read some books on the Battle of the Atlantic you’ll get a much better sense of what you are seeing. You might also consider reading some of J.E. Macdonnell’s books for a different perspective on Destroyer service (Australian not American, but the basic issues are the same). You might also consider touring one of the many WW2 museum ships.
If you do these things, then you’ll understand and appreciate what you are seeing much more in this movie. Most things that are worth while require some investment of time to get the full benefit.
It wasn’t just men that died during the Battle of the Atlantic. Ships with women and even children on them were also lost. Sometimes the women and children survived – after a harrowing experience in the water – sometimes they didn’t. The DVD ‘Finest Hour’ has an interview with a woman who was on the SS City of Benares as one of 90 children being sent to Canada to escape the war – and one of the few survivors. It’s worth watching.
Be very thankful you don’t have to live through anything like that, in part because of people like the ones shown in this movie. Unfortunately, there are people in Ukraine today who are having to deal with equally horrific experiences, thanks to the sociopath in charge of the Russian Government. Strange how every generation or two humanity seems to have to deal with this same problem of sociopaths in positions of power starting wars.
I wonder if requiring some real courses in social science – including abnormal psychology – at the grade school levels would help over the long term to reduce the ability of sociopaths to rise to positions of power. Looking at modern politics, it often feels like our grade school curriculum is very 19th century and long overdue for updates.
13. I have a super problem with movie plot here is nothing just unnecessary fight with no complex because of that this film is really dull just about ordinary heroism !!!
Wow. Words fail me for a moment here … Unnecessary fight? Ok, maybe English is not a primary language here.
This movie attempts to tell the story of how hard, how brutal, how awful the Battle of the Atlantic was. At that, they were extremely kind to the audience – far more so than in Saving Private Ryan – a point that you would quickly realize if you ever read some of the real history.
But it was certainly necessary.
You are expecting Hollywood to do too much. Try bringing a little substance with you when you watch a movie with this: do some research, either before you watch the movie, or before you post a comment.
14. Sadly totally historically inaccurate. Poor military advisors for what could have been a good movie. Almost comical in too many scenes to mention but the best was the close contact battle scene as a destroyer scrapes past a U boat firing machine guns at each other. Thankfully the American destroyer was able to save the day as the British and Canada ships floundered under poor decision making
Go read about the encounter between USS Buckley and U-66 on 5 May 1944. What you think is absurd may need a bit of revision from a dose of real-world historical fact.
Truth is often stranger than fiction.
The allied ships did not flounder under poor decision making. That was NEVER said or implied in the movie. You’re jumping to conclusions.
Those were experienced ships with experienced crews who were doing their jobs well. In fact, the Canadian corvette drops the critical depth charge that forces one of the subs to the surface (getting a hit with depth charges against an underwater target is a LOT harder than getting hits with a gun against a target on the surface). Once at the surface, Greyhound probably does more to sink the sub – but that’s only to be expected since it’s far more heavily armed for surface engagements than the corvette (a corvette only has 1 main gun and some secondaries, while a full size destroyer has a lot more of each).
So a team effort.
One of the major themes of this story is that all-too-many convoys went to sea with insufficient escorts because there weren’t enough ships available. The crews had to do the best they could in spite of insufficient numbers. This convoy had four escorts: it should have had twice as many, but the ships just weren’t available. Go read up on convoy SC-94 or PQ-14 if you want to see what a properly escorted convoy looked like in 1942.
If you pay attention you note a point in the movie where the US ship returns to the rear to engage a sub there, because all the other escorts were busy dealing with other threats. That’s an extreme compliment to the other allied crews: he’s trusting them to take care of the much larger force of subs in front of the convey while he deals with the threat to the rear – because his ship is the closest to the rear just by pure chance and that’s the best allocation of resources given where everybody is. This way all the threats get engaged.
The worst thing they could do is let any sub have a ‘free shot’ at a merchant ship – they want to make it as hard as possible for the subs to get those shots off. Torpedo launch calculations are tricky and relatively time consuming – anything the escort can do to mess up the process greatly reduces the chances of a hit. Sinking the subs is a secondary goal – because it’s really hard to do, especially at that point in the war.
In short, the allied escorts were so good they were trusted to hold the front of the convoy – keeping off the majority of the enemy vessels – while the US ship races around from one problem spot to another.
As for bringing ships back to close escort, that was his job. He has to evaluate how long he can give ships to pursue an opponent before he needs to return them to the convoy to make sure another sub doesn’t sneak through the hole that was left by the escort leaving formation. It’s a tough call. A British or Canadian or Australian CO would have made exactly the same decisions. Often, in practice, the best they could hope to do was force the subs underwater for a while. Since the sub’s underwater speed was far lower than the convoy speed, this would take them out of the battle for at least a while. The author of the book looks at these issues in depth, but the movie can only treat them shallowly – which has apparently led you to completely misinterpret what was going on.
What do you expect from Hollywood?
The realism in this movie is already boring in the shallow minds of people used to super-hero movies, they can’t do much more in terms of explaining things – especially when movie executives tend to compulsively blunder by removing educational parts of movies to meet some badly-thought-out criteria for what a movie ‘should be’ in their own crippled minds. This movie was too short, maybe we’ll be lucky and get a Director’s Cut.
A similar point could be made about the fuel issue. It’s the nature of destroyers to burn a lot of fuel – I could explain the physics behind that but you can also look it up – and the escort commander has to stay on top of that – it’s part of his job. As before, a British or Commonwealth escort commander would have said exactly the same things. Destroyers running low on fuel is a very common theme in WW2 histories. It happened a lot. It’s the nature of the beast, almost never a failure on the part of the captain but just an inevitable consequence of physics and the jobs those ships were required to carry out. One point the anti-battleship nuts often miss is the enormous superiority of larger ships over ships like destroyers when it comes to storing lots of fuel.
15. The film was ok but I did not like the silly grafix that were applied to the fairwaters of the U-Boats. Things like this are cheapening to the overall credibility of the reality of the conflict.
Perhaps you haven’t seen the things that people in the real world painted on their ships and planes? Over 430 WW II German U-Boats painted insignia or emblems on their conning towers. Some of the art is pretty spectacular.
16. It’s not about greyhound the ship, it’s about the captain only. Its all Tom…and alas that wasn’t enough for me.
Strange how many other people were present in a movie about the captain only.
This movie is about teamwork as much as anything.
It took a big team to operate a destroyer – 150-250+ men. They can’t show everybody – but they certainly showed that a large number of people had to work together for those ships to be successful.
17. A well-told story of unglorified heroism.
Thank you for spotting that. So many viewers didn’t.
18. The first third of the movie is gripping. The lingo and actor exchange are fantastic. Total immersion. But, the last quarter… it left me wanting. It just felt empty. There was a resolution- it was as if you’re pushed up this long, tough hill and expecting a deep drop off over a cliff, but the cliff is only five feet deep.
I agree based on the first time I watched it. It felt cleaner on the second pass.
I suspect the movie industry executives did their usual screw up and removed critical elements from the movie to meet some delusional and arbitrary criteria for what makes a good movie.
I often suspect the movie industry would do better to randomly hire people for executive roles. The existing selection process doesn’t seem to work very well. Maybe we could do the same thing for selecting politicians.
19. Not sure about the cheering at end of movie – doesn’t seem real but perhaps there is a factual basis.
See the above comments about transports. That ship would not have been part of that convoy except under extraordinary circumstances.
But for what it’s worth, it was common for crews to cheer when air support showed up and drove away the enemies. Or when something extraordinary happened, such as two girls being found alive on a piece of wreckage from a sunken cruise liner (see the last interview in ‘Finest Hour’).
20. I was in the army for 12 years. I don’t doubt these sailor’s expertise. … Yet when firing down range, the men couldn’t shoot for anything. They were so far off
Refer to the section above on how difficult it is to damage subs.
They were in fact hitting the subs frequently – you just couldn’t see it well due to the rain and mist and night. The fact that the sub didn’t immediately blow up and sink may be more a reflection of your expectations from computer gaming than your army experience.
It’s worth noting that in one of the first equivalent tank v tank encounters in Korea, at fairly close range, the US tank commander couldn’t see his gunner’s shots hitting. It happens. It turns out the shots were going in the front end of the T-34 and out the other end, with no easily visible signs of a hit …
It’s certainly true that the gunners missed with many of their shots. Your army experience isn’t a good guide to naval gunnery. A ship is moving in three dimensions – linear movement in three dimensions plus pitch, roll, and yaw, which means six different “types” (not a great word, but I can’t think of a better one) of movement are happening at the same time, three linear and three rotational. The target is also moving in three dimensions. Both are moving pretty fast compared to a human target. Weather, ice, and darkness are also problems.
Water and wind and ice blowing into people’s eyes makes it hard to shoot. Waves obscuring the target further complicate things. Accurate shooting is really hard in those conditions. You might imagine shooting from the back of a truck at speed, while standing on a balance ball or something similiar, and with a friend throwing a bucket of water at you every so often, to get a feel for things. Definitely not like shooting from a rest on land at the range in good weather.
Warships can be pretty accurate in some conditions. But you notice they went to ‘local’ control. That’s the least accurate. It means the ship’s fire director (optical and/or radar), and any analog computers it has in the main fire control area are not being used. They go to local control because it’s hard to see the target and they don’t have time to use all the fancy stuff – they would rather get some hits quickly and hope for the best than get no hits at all. Doing this means you don’t get all the corrections that are possible.
You might think of it as the naval equivalent of ‘point shooting’ with handguns in close quarters combat, if that’s something you are familiar with. Or maybe just shooting with the front sight only, if you prefer. A trade-off between speed and accuracy. Destroyers are thin-skinned and carry a lot of stuff that can easily go ‘bang’. They want to get those hits in before the other side does, if nothing else maybe they can keep the sub crew from manning their exposed guns …
In practice, in that era, land based gunnery is a primitive science compared to naval gunnery. It’s one of the things that make coastal defenses pretty useless against ships, unless they have all the fancy stuff and a crew trained to use it. Think of that when you tour any old coastal defenses that might still be around – such as those in San Francisco. It was very rare for coastal defenses to be able to repel a naval attack or even damage warships except under special circumstances.
One of the key things that broke the stalemate at Omaha beach in Normandy was a group of US destroyers running into extremely shallow water and opening fire on the German defenses at point blank range (or what ships consider point blank range). The destroyers won that gunnery duel (with the important help of a few tanks on the shore), ultimately allowing the infantry to get off the beach. That, incidentally, is why it make absolutely no difference whether the German panzers were committed early or not – and whether or not Hitler was asleep and people were afraid to wake him. Naval gunnery stopped German tank counter-attacks at several of the landings in the Med – and would have had no problem at all stopping one in Normandy. In fact, the British battleship Warspite did wipe out a German tank unit preparing a counter-attack in Normandy.
But in these circumstances, none of the fancy stuff is available because the target is too close and there just isn’t time. So many shots will miss.
Another thing Hollywood is doing here is shortening the typical engagement distance – where accuracy would have been much worse. Presumably they judge the audience too unsophisticated to believe the more common engagement ranges. However, there were some historical engagements at very short ranges like this, so it’s not entirely Hollywood.
21. The “depth charges” went off immediately on film. So why not just let them loose when the target is right there.
There is definitely a time compression effect introduced by Hollywood – probably to keep the feeble-minded from getting bored.
Boredom is a choice.
22. Not sure why this movie got so many poor reviews from critics, although the difference between critic reviews and audience reviews these days really highlights how out of touch critics are with what normal people expect and enjoy.
All too true. A friend of mine has a formula: if the critics hate it and the audience loves it, then it’s going to be a great movie!
In practice, in the real world, they did sometimes use depth charges against close targets, set for shallow! PT boats and destroyers would do this. There was some risk in doing this that you might get damaged by your own weapon. That particular tactic was never part of this story, and they took enough liberties as it was that I’m not going to suggest they should have added that.
23. What do critics know!? I usually wonder if they watched the same movies I watched when I read the reviews. This was a great movie. Not enough emotion to make the viewer feel it, what the heck does that mean, the business of war requires cool heads. I believe they did a great job showing how it must have been for those men.
Great points.
24. Wow… that is a LOT of information / threat / decision-making coming at one person non-stop, and the speed and accuracy with which the Commander responds is nothing less than awe-inspiring. Many would freeze under that kind of pressure…
Very true. Some of the fast pace is Hollywood time compression.
But there were plenty of occasions in WW2 where naval officers had to make a decision on very short notice, under conditions of considerable physical discomfort, high stress, and extreme fatigue. Destroyer skippers in particular were able to dodge bombs dropped by aircraft on many occasions – not an easy feet!
Destroyer skippers during WW2 were a very special group, and generally quite capable.
Destroyer crews were also very special – they tended to see far more action and get more sea time and more different types of tasking than the bigger ships did, which gave them a variety and depth of experience that simply couldn’t be equaled by the crews of the larger ships that spent far more time in harbour.
25. My father was in the Royal Navy then, on a corvette escorting the convoys. Film just as he described it. I remember him saying that the knew if they’d sunk a u boat if an oil slick.
Actually, the subs would sometimes deliberately release oil to try to fool their hunters. In the early war it could easily fool an inexperienced escort team. Later the escorts learned to look for a much bigger oil slick to confirm the kill, possibly with things pulled from the water (some of them pretty horrific), as a sub could sink without producing a large oil slick, depending upon the circumstances. Another reliable way was to listen for the crunch of the sub imploding as it sank (passive sonar). That happens in this movie.
26. Good films tell a story, this film doesn’t even try.
Not at all true. This film is telling the story of the battle of the Atlantic, from the perspective of one ship and one convey.
Actually, it’s a mix of several different stories, which in real life happened to different ships and different people, but which have been combined together here into a single story.
You should be very thankful it’s a story you didn’t have to live through.
27. Just wondered how can such a big ship turn so quick.
Hollywood time acceleration to keep people with short attention spans from getting bored.
In practice, a destroyer is not really a big ship. A Fletcher class destroyer as shown in the movie is 376 feet long (Mahan class in the book at 341 feet, still pretty big for a destroyer). Compare this to an aircraft carrier or battleship (USS Iowa 887 feet, USS Essex 820 feet). The destroyer looks even smaller in comparison when you realize how narrow it is. A good place to see this is at Battleship Cove at Fall River if you get a chance to visit: they have a pt boat, a sub, a destroyer, and a battleship all in close proximity.
But yes, in practice these ships did have a pretty large turning radius at high speed. That’s why full size ‘fleet destroyers’ – a ‘fleet destroyer’ is the largest type of destroyer, designed to keep up with the big fast warships – were not the most common escorts. The much smaller and slower types of ship – ‘corvettes’ and ‘frigates’ and ‘sloops’ and ‘destroyer escorts’ – though not capable of keeping up with the big carriers – had a much better turning radius, which made them much more effective and useful in many sub hunting situations involving slow merchant convoys. One of the primary advantages of the sub was it’s turning radius, so having escorts that could keep up in turns with the sub made a big difference.
The big destroyers were also more vulnerable to storm damage, due to being so highly optimized for speed (very long and very narrow – making them relatively fragile compared to the others) and would frequently take storm damage in storms that the corvettes and frigates just rode out without issues. This was another reason to prefer the smaller ships as escorts for the slow merchant convoys.
Despite all that – by warship standards destroyers tended to be very nimble ships. It’s worth noting that the captain of HMS Repulse (a battlecruiser, a much bigger ship) dodged no less than 19 torpedoes before finally being hit in 1941. Given how much more nimble a ~350 foot destroyer was in comparison to a ~794 foot battlecruiser, that gives you an idea of just how hard it was to hit a destroyer with a torpedo.
Also, if you read accounts of the war you will find lots of occasions on which destroyers dodged bombs dropped by aircraft.
28. I didn’t like the role black men played as cooks and servants were they enlisted soldiers. RACISM was evident as usual. Thank you
This was historically accurate. Would you rather have the movie lie to the public about how it was?
It was very rare then for any nation to have a mixed military. The British Commonwealth forces were one of the few exceptions, with some units staffed with large numbers of people from India, or the Gurkhas from Tibet, and so forth.
One of the most important things that US President Harry S. Truman did was to desegregate the military, under his authority as Commander-in-Chief. He assumed office at the end of war when FDR died so his decision didn’t affect the war.
As a result, today the USA has the most racially mixed military in the world – and they step hard on people who demonstrate racist tendencies when they find them in the ranks.
Both of these are good things. Having a mixed military means the US military – to a larger extent than any other military in the world – can deploy to a foreign land and have soldiers that ‘look like’ the natives. This helps enormously when interacting with civilians in foreign lands. The zero tolerance policy helps keep the remaining racist idiots (there are always some out there, it’s just another form of mental illness) from making too much trouble.
29. I guess Tom Hanks has never been in the US Navy and had no one to advise him. Early on 2 sailors were brought into his mess for fighting the night before for discipline while he was having breakfast. That would never happen in the real Navy. The fleet commander would never even be aware of this. Those sailors would have been written up and then gone to Captains Mast at some future date with some lower level officer.
That was a long time ago – things might have changed since then, so maybe any experience you have isn’t relevant?
But perhaps you missed the fact that he is the Captain of the destroyer? That was a Captain’s Mast? Serious offenses always ended up before the Captain. This is a small ship, and small ships did things that way. It’s a lot less formal than you find on big ships.
Also, this is wartime. A lot of the normal peacetime practices get modified and streamlined in wartime.
I strongly suggest you tour a museum ship destroyer – there are a number around the USA and also the HMCS Haida in Canada (a Royal Navy style destroyer). Space on those ships is very limited – and they had quite large crews during WW2. You can get a feel for that just by seeing how many people they packed into the bridge in the movie. So discipline proceedings have to take place in a room the regular crew doesn’t use (for privacy), and which has enough space. Not many places like that on the ship.
30. Anticipating a well written and constructed drama from one of my favorite actors, I was quite disappointed at the number of lost opportunities to develop the characters – resulting in a cookie-cutter approach to men with what could have been compelling stories. No particular character development or back stories.
I think you are missing the point of this movie. It’s largely about how people learn to work as a team in war while confronting fear and the ongoing threat of death or being horribly crippled.
It’s not a movie about an individual hero, or even a few individual heroes, because that wasn’t what the war was about.
A full size destroyer had a crew of 150-250 or so people – and they all had to pull together to survive. A big ship can afford to take hits on it’s armor. But a destroyer has little or no armor, and is thin skinned and carrying lots of flammable and explosive things. A single hit in a bad place can kill everybody on the ship. A series of less critical hits can still sink the ship – with the crew possibly having to abandon ship in extremely cold and/or shark infested waters.
All of those things happened in real life, many times. The US Navy lost 71 destroyers in WW2, British and Commonwealth forces – fighting a longer war – lost 153 destroyers. Some were lost with all hands – meaning nobody survived.
This movie is also about sacrifice, and responsibility. The captains of these ships had to stay alert and awake under brutal conditions for long periods of time, because they were responsible. Have you ever stayed awake for 36 hours or more, in wet cold, in combat or another life threatening situation? Not fun.
It probably shouldn’t have been allowed, since the human mind+body degrade considerably under those conditions – which means people make bad decisions and have stupid accidents. But in real life it happens a lot, so we need to come to terms with it.
31. I personally don’t like a country taking all the credit for an international effort.
That definitely wasn’t what happened, either in the book or the movie. Let go of your prejudices and look at the facts instead.
Did you miss the fact that the escorts – ships with crews from different nations – cooperated to sink most of the U-Boats?
Also, if you watch the scene at the end, with the aircraft sinking the last U-Boat – when the explosives drop you can see a RAF Roundel on the tail of the aircraft. That’s a British aircraft – or at least an aircraft being flown by the Royal Air Force and hence a British crew (or maybe Canadian, Australian, etc).
See above for more discussion on this.
32. Can anyone believe that U boats engaged battle ships in surface engagements?
Actually, there were no battle ships in the convoy. The ships involved were a number of destroyers and a corvette, all of which are far smaller than a battle ship. A battle ship can have a crew of over 1500, a destroyer perhaps 1/8 to 1/6 of that.
And, yes, U boats engaged these smaller ships in surface engagements on many occasions. In fact, generally when a U boat was forced to the surface due to damage taken underwater, the crew would try to fight it out on the surface. It was, in short, common.
It was very rare for the sub to escape once forced to the surface. I know of at least one occasion involving a US sub (at night, and not facing full fleet destroyers but rather smaller escorts). There are probably others I don’t know about, but I doubt there are many. It was especially difficult for the sub to escape when the other side had full size destroyers and not just the smaller – more common – escorts.
It says something about the morale and professionalism of the sub crews that they tried to fight it out, even knowing they were probably going to lose. War is hell.
33. This is a taut thriller from beginning to end. You wouldn’t think they could fit such excellent character work and acting into such a short, nerve racking film, but they did.Excellent work from all members of cast and crew
It’s interesting how some people see this – it’s definitely present – and others completely miss it. Curious.
34. The scenes with the brave and cunning Americans coming to the rescue of the inept Canadian and British ships seriously grated
Please leave your prejudices at the door. If you bothered to pay attention, you would have realized the Canadian and British ships were never portrayed as inept. In fact, they play a critical role in the team work that keeps everybody alive. You are just jumping to conclusions. See the above discussion on a similar topic.
35. The scene with the German sub cruising next to the destroyer was junk, why did the captain not al least try to ram the submarine?
There certainly were occasions where captains did ram submarines. But real life is not a video game. You risk your own ship being lost when you do that. Destroyers are thin hulled, so you want to ram at the bow if you ram at all, not side-swipe. Trying a ram a sub next to you is a really bad idea.
Remember, if you get a leak in the hull, traveling at high speed will make it worse. But a destroyer needs to travel at high speed in many situations. So choosing to ram can make the ship unable to properly support the convoy – and it’s already under-supplied with escorts.
36. Any submarine confronted by a surface warship would dive for the safety of the depths not slug it out on the surface. If anyone has seen “The cruel sea” or the German classic “Das Boot” they will understand what anti submarine work is really like, not a schoolboy comic worthy story that Greyhound turns out to be
The only situation where we have a sub fighting on the surface by choice is when it’s in the middle of the convoy at night – and the destroyers can’t get at it because the convoy ships are in the way.
On both of the other occasions, the subs were forced to the surface by battle damage. You may have to re-watch the movie, with more attention to detail, to see that.
See the above comments on this topic. It happened a lot in real life. It’s been a while, but if I remember Das Boot, the sub never takes enough damage for this to happen. They were lucky.
Aside from the Hollywood ‘massive time acceleration’, and the failure to show escorts working in teams as much as they often did, this was a good depiction of real anti-submarine work during that era. In many cases during real encounters, the subs were forced to the surface, where they would continue the fight until it was no longer possible. It was a combination of good leadership and high morale on the part of the sub crews.
37. The Battle of the Atlantic is an important subject but this project was doomed from the start. Being shipbound doesn’t provide for plot complexity like a film such as Saving Private Ryan could, and being the hunter instead of the hunted (as in Das Boot) can’t provide anywhere near the same depth of suspense.
What you missed here is that the Battle of the Atlantic was not about sinking subs. It was not about hunter and hunted. It was about getting the convoys through, under horrible conditions and with the constant threat of death and disfigurement, and a terrible responsibility for the lives of other men. If you focus on hunter and hunted you miss most of the story.
Getting the convoys through often meant not sinking the subs, because the time and fuel and munitions required to do so would make it hard to protect the convoy. The primary goal in the early war years was to force the submarines down, far enough away from the convoy that they couldn’t catch up with their slow underwater speed. A kill was a bonus, a luxury in the early war years. Later, with much larger escorts, they could detach pairs of ships to maximize the probability that a sub was sunk – but that wasn’t even remotely possible in the early war years.
Basically the Royal Navy screwed up massively in failing to build enough escorts, having completely forgotten the lessons taught in WW1. Or maybe it would be more fair to say the politicians massively screwed up and didn’t want to fund the necessary construction. Hard to say – I don’t have the necessary knowledge to make a definitive statement here.
I sometimes wonder if the modern US navy is making a similiar mistake by not having more smaller, shorter ranged ships (something like corvettes or sloops or gunboats) to let more people get command experience, in the event the navy suddenly needs to grow again.
38. too much hollywood bs in this movie doesn’t make seance because its kinda of weird that submarines are fighting on top of the water and not below it like they are designed to do
See discussion above.
39. I do not know how much justice has been done to the novel. But the movie surely shows the presence of mind a navy sailor needs in order to survive the sea warfare. My best part was the German u boats background music and when the Germans try to intimidate greyhound by contacting there radio.
Somebody who actually likes the radio interaction! Great.
40. Also what on earth was a U boat Captain doing relaying messages over the allies ships radio? Highly unbelievable.
And yet it happened in real life …
Not necessarily the way it happened in the movie.
But attempts at disinformation over the short range radio – certainly.
Perhaps truth is stranger than fiction, and thus unbelievable.
41. Great story of a navy commander taking his first Atlantic command in the protection of allied merchant ships with thousands of troops and supplies in ww2 ,thought I was watching a black and white old time classic it was so realistic, submarine scenes were amazing.
No, there would not have been thousands of troops. Probably none. See the discussion on transports above.
42. While entertaining, not a realistic depiction of the battle of the Atlantic. German u boats avoided destroyers like the plague- the destroyers has the upper hand way more than what the film depicted, and the subs mission was to sink the ships carrying war materials, NOT engage the destroyers. And the whole radio transmission from the subs mocking the destroyer ? TOTAL Hollywood- the radio transmission would give their position away- and submerged the subs only made 3 knots, destroyers on the surface made 25 to 30- the destroyers drove the subs down on sight
Late war, destroyers had the upper hand, especially in pairs or larger groups.
Early war, 1:1 a sub had the advantage and was most likely to escape.
Some sub captains targeted escorts deliberately, it happened. For a convoy like this that is heavily under-supplied with escorts, it’s actually clever tactics to sink the escorts, because then you can sink the entire convoy (30+ ships) and not just a handful or so (7 in this case). It’s a gamble, since the escorts are hard to sink, but everything in war is a gamble. In the book there were only two destroyers, and two corvettes – so after the Germans sank the first destroyer, if the German subs could sink the second destroyer they would then outgun the remaining ships.
For the radio transmission stuff see the discussion above.
In that weather the destroyers probably were not going to be making 25 to 30.
The destroyers could only drive the subs down if they were close or if they left the convoy to chase a sub – which might let another sub through the hole left in the screen. So in practice the wolf pack could hover around the convoy on the surface just ‘far enough away’ then close – still on the surface – at night. They might submerge before making the attack – depending upon how close an escort was.
This convoy was massively under-escorted – it happened, too many jobs, not enough ships. That made it especially tricky for the destroyers to leave the convoy.
43. It’s a shame that all the films about WW2 are funded by Hollywood, as a result, the British are portrayed as public school plonkers, and America has to save the day.
Strange how the movie has the British/Canadian ships (in the book one was Canadian, one British, one Polish) holding off the 6-7+ U-Boats in front while the US ship attacks the one at the rear (somebody had to do it, and they were closest), and yet this member of the audience considers the British/etc as being portrayed as incompetent idiots.
If they were incompetent they never would have been trusted to hold the front of the line against the majority of U-Boats.
Note also that it was the Canadian corvette that forced the second sub to the surface. That was the really hard job – and they did it. So the Canadian ship was portrayed as doing the harder job. Once the sub came to the surface it was doomed. The US Destroyer did more to sink it at that point, but that’s because it massively outgunned the corvette and could fire 4-5 main battery shells into the sub for every shell the corvette fired at the sub. Further, the destroyer’s shells were larger (5 inch versus 4 inch) which meant they would do more damage, though the corvette probably had a slightly higher rate of fire with it’s single main gun due to the lighter shells.
For those who want to see what a WW2 corvette looks like, HMCS Sackville is a museum ship in Canada.
Seems like there is some strong anti-American prejudice short circuiting people’s brains, causing them to shut down in order to not pick up on any inconvenient facts contrary to those prejudices.
44. Action packed look at the War of the North Atlantic showing one such escort mission. You can make up your own mind on how the U-Boats handled themselves; personally my thoughts are, it would be suicide to surface in a heated battle.
Yet another person who missed what happened …
45. Another Hollywood movie that shows there were no African Americans fighting World War I or World War II. Just like Wonder woman no African Americans in the history of the world. Great job Hollywood!
Agenda much? Did you miss the cook working as a loader on the gun – one of the characters with the most screen time?
Historical movies will reflect how things actually were. Would you prefer that they lie?
46. There was no understanding of why Tom Hanks got the promotion to the USS Greyhound. The crew were nervous around his decisions
See above for the promotion issue.
The crew were nervous because they were in combat. You would be nervous too if you were at sea in a thin-hulled vessel carrying all sorts of explosive and flammable stuff, in bad weather, in cold seas, with other people trying to kill you. It’s all part of the story. Be very thankful that you didn’t have to live it.
Notice that the XO was completely confident in the captain. Some of the junior personnel, with less experience, showed their fear in a form that manifested as the appearance of lack of confidence. That happens in war.
They didn’t know enough to know how good their captain really was – they were too new. The XO, on the other hand, had known the captain for many years, and knew exactly how good he was. The book goes into detail, the movie doesn’t but the message is there if you know what to look for.
47. Forester wrote tales of naval warfare (e.g., Horatio Hornblower series), and this book is a tall tale of naval warfare since no escort group of 3 destroyers and a corvette ever sank 3 to 4 U-boats during a convoy crossing in the Battle of the Atlantic, especially in early 1942.
Note that the escort for convoy HG76 sank four U-Boats in December 1941 (a fifth in the wolf pack would be sunk after leaving the convoy by another Allied destroyer not part of the convoy escort). Sinking this many U-Boats during a single convoy was rare but it did happen.
The escort for convoy Hg76 was a much larger escort than the one depicted in the movie.
The story in the movie merges together events from many different encounters. It’s a lot like the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, where they merged together different events that happened across a six mile long stretch of beach and many hours into a relatively short sequence that could be filmed in one spot and shown to the audience is short period of time.
And yet some of the other reviewers — clearly not realizing this — think that Saving Private Ryan is ‘more realistic’ …
People!