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Post by artraveler on Jul 11, 2020 11:43:08 GMT -8
Greyhound
Greyhound is a production released for Apple TV. It was originally to have a theater release, but the KFF cancelled that. It is based on a C. S. Forester novel, The Good Shepard, and is set in the North Atlantic during the critical years of the battle of the Atlantic in 1942. The short book published in 1955 gives the reader a close look at the perils faced on the convoys. George Krause (Tom Hanks) is a U.S. Navy Commander in charge of the escorts of a convoy crossing to England. The movie also bills Elizabeth Shue (Evelyn) but it is really just a walk on, and she has no part in the rest of the movie.
Commander Krause is leading an escort force from his brand-new Fletcher Class Destroyer (2500 tons). One of the first commissioned in 1942. For the time it is the very best of its class. Capable of over 35 knots, with sonar, radar, extensive range and depth charges. The other escorts are British and Canadian, not as new. I get the impression that the two English escorts are Flower Class, who have made the crossing before. This is Greyhound and Krause first crossing and exposure to navel combat.
Krause is played as very religious by Hanks and he brings it off without being overbearing or hypocritical. He is disturbed at the loss of life. Not only in his crew, and the ships under his protection, but also the U-boats he is called upon to sink. The viewer knows that as he is kneeling to pray after reaching safety that he is not only praying for the allied loses, but also the German. It is well we remember that in the first years of the war that many officers and NCOs were career and had moved slowly along the promotion ladder without ever firing a shot. A situation that was bound to produce conflicts of personal and professional nature. Krause has those conflicts and dealing with them is the burden of command.
This is not a great war movie, but it is a very good war movie, perhaps a little too emotional on the part of Hanks, but that is really a quibble. This movie ranks as good as The Cruel Sea, (1953) a book written about the same time as Greyhound. The Cruel Sea covers the entire war and the movie with the very talented Jack Hawkins makes a good bookend for Greyhound. However, the convoys cannot be documented in fact or fiction without the third novel of the era, H.M.S. Ulysses (1955). This novel by the talented Alistair MacLean and covers the mostly little-known convoy route to USSR port of Murmansk.
It is a shame Ulysses has not been made into a movie as these three provide the viewer and reader insight into the trials of war at sea on the convoy routes. If you have the ability to get apple TV. This is a freebie and you will not regret the time.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 11, 2020 12:18:30 GMT -8
The Reverend William Nelson Pendleton was a West Point graduate who joined the Confederate artillery and spent most of the war as the artillery chief for the Army of Northern Virginia. He was a decent organizer, but not that much of an artillerist. (He's also buried in the same cemetery as Stonewall Jackson. Elizabeth and I came across of his grave there on a trip to Baltimore that included a couple of stops in Lexington, Virginia.)
But there was a (possibly apocryphal) incident during his time as a battery commander that is worth mentioning. When his battery faced some Union troops, he reputedly said, "May the Lord have mercy on their poor souls. Fire."
Leonidas Polk was the Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana who also graduated from West Point. He joined up and was immediately made a Major General, for which his qualifications were his religious devotion and his friendship with Jefferson Davis. He later became the third most senior lieutenant general in the Confederacy when they added this rank for corps commanders.
James Longstreet and Edmund Kirby Smith ranked him, and William Hardee and Stonewall Jackson followed. The last pair -- I don't recall the ranking -- were John C. Pemberton and Theophilus Holmes. Longstreet, Smith, Hardee, and Jackson were all good choices, though only Polk currently has a US Army fort named for him. Maybe he, like Bragg, earned it on the Jubilation T. Cornpone principle.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 13, 2020 15:06:45 GMT -8
Having bought an iPhone recently, I have a years subscription to Apple TV. I'll check it out.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 15, 2020 7:38:44 GMT -8
I read an article on Apple News last night that noted how this movie was a yuge hit and drawing a good crowd toward Apple TV, although speculation is that many of these are using free trials and won't be back.
But Apple TV has a paltry and obnoxiously political correct lineup of junk. Why anyone would pay for it is beyond me. But (and I haven't watched it yet myself) if they keep adding big works like this Hanks movie, they could expand their base.
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Post by artraveler on Jul 15, 2020 8:15:11 GMT -8
Apple has a long road to pave to reach the levels of Netflix and Prime but if they can produce quality like Greyhound they could be a player in this market. Like I said, Greyhound is not a Great War movie, but it is a very good war movie and worthy of the time spent to watch.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 16, 2020 13:16:58 GMT -8
Let me finish this rather awful Gary Cooper western ( Man of the West) and I'll start Greyhound. How in the world this movie rates 7.1 at IMDB, I don't know. It's got a good cast; Lee J. Cobb, Julie Boom-Boom London, and a few other faces you'd recognize even if you didn't know the name. It's such a perfunctory, show-up-and-collect-a-paycheck movie that you have to wonder why they bothered. |
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Post by timothylane on Jul 16, 2020 13:32:28 GMT -8
They do have some interesting supporting cast -- Jack Lord aka Steve McGarrett (and also the first Eon Productions Felix Leiter) and John Dehner (with multiple major roles on The Twilight Zone and The Wild West). Although I didn't recognize him back then, he also was on Bonanza as a Creole claiming to be Jean Lafitte.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 16, 2020 13:45:48 GMT -8
Yeah, John Dehner is one of those faces I recognize but don’t know the name. And Jack Lord just got his ass kicked in one of the dumbest fistfights I’ve ever seen.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 16, 2020 16:03:00 GMT -8
What a lame ass excuse when the blonde didn’t want to go to the Bahamas to get married to Tom Hanks. I would have just told her to take a hike.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 16, 2020 16:27:48 GMT -8
A good opening sequence of submarine hunting in the first 25 minutes.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 16, 2020 16:30:37 GMT -8
What an impossible task to try to cover all that water with just a few destroyers
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 16, 2020 17:08:57 GMT -8
Those deck gutters can’t hit the broadside of a barn.
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Post by artraveler on Jul 16, 2020 17:11:31 GMT -8
There is only one DD, Greyhound, the rest of the escorts are corvettes. Not much faster than the top convoy speed, about 15 knots. Greyhound really is the greyhound of the ocean with a flank speed of 37 knots, about 40 mph. We built hundreds of the fletcher class and most of them that survived the war served into the 60s. They were fast, reliable, adaptable to many missions and an excellent platform for anti-submarine operations.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 16, 2020 17:25:27 GMT -8
Thanks for the history lesson. I didn’t realize those other ships were lesser ships. I think there was a lot of Hollywood involved when they showed Tom Hanks ship getting so close to some of the other ships. But it guess it was exciting.
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Post by artraveler on Jul 16, 2020 17:34:54 GMT -8
Give the deck gunners a break. They are in a heavy rolling sea and the ship is listing 20 degrees side to side at 30 knots hitting any target in those conditions is like hitting a mosquito with a revolver at 100 feet while drunk.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 16, 2020 17:48:03 GMT -8
I overall thought the movie was pretty good. I don’t know if there was really that kind of trash talking going on from the German U-boat commanders. But maybe there’s some historical reference to that.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 16, 2020 17:51:03 GMT -8
You could tell that the U-boats were no match for the airplanes. I wish they would’ve done a little more of that. It was pretty cool when the plane unleashed its bombs.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 16, 2020 17:53:22 GMT -8
The HX convoys were the fast convoys from Halifax to Britain (the slower ones were SC convoys). They were a bit faster than submerged U-boats, but not as fast as surfaced U-boats. Many U-boats attacked convoys on the surface after sneaking in among the ships, sometimes sinking a lot of ships that way. (Otto Kretschmer, the leading submarine ace of World War II, was especially noted for doing this in U-99 before his boat was sunk in March 1941, during a period in which the British got 3 leading U-boat aces, the others being Prien and Schepke. Kretschmer survived, unlike the others. The rescue of himself and the crew is reminiscent of the movie version of The Enemy Below, which may have been inspired by it.)
There were hundreds of HX convoys, several a month, so HX-25 would have been early in the war and probably wouldn't have had so many ships. It certainly wouldn't have had an American destroyer among its escorts, much less a Fletcher class (they weren't available then). The wikipedia article on the HX convoys (I hoped there was one) noted that HX-84 (made famous by the attack on it by Admiral Scheer, only able to sink 5 ships because of the delay caused by the courageous and gritty fight by two British ships, the armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay and a lightly armed merchant ship) was in October 1940.
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Post by artraveler on Jul 16, 2020 18:03:02 GMT -8
I believe the first Fletchers went into service in the summer of 42 and the movie is set in June 42 so it is possible.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 16, 2020 18:25:45 GMT -8
I looked it up, and some Fletchers (including the class ship) were completed in June 1942, but none were used in Atlantic convoys until October as far as I can tell. And it wouldn't have been HX-25, which was my point. By then it would have been more like HX-200. Presumably there's a reason they didn't want to mention a real convoy, and just decided to use an early name much later in the war. They certainly knew about the air gap where shore-based aircraft couldn't reach (and which shrank through the war).
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