Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 16, 2020 18:51:34 GMT -8
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Post by timothylane on Jul 16, 2020 19:51:05 GMT -8
I notice that one of the surviving Fletchers is The Sullivans, named after 5 brothers killed when a Japanese I-boat sank their ship, the AA cruiser Juneau, in the immediate aftermath of the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. That was a most confusing battle, in which two US admirals were killed on the bridges of their ships (probably with the ship captains), and the captain of the Japanese battleship Hiei was hit be machine-gun fire from a destroyer that was too close to torpedo it. The Japanese lost 2 destroyers in the battle, and the US lost 4 destroyers and the AA cruiser Atlanta (the ship on whose bridge Rear Admiral Norman Scott was killed). Many ships were seriously damaged, including most of the American ships. (The Japanese had 2 battleships plus various cruisers and destroyers; the Americans had 2 heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, and 2 AA cruisers as well as 8 destroyers, and at that stage were generally inferior to the Japanese at night fighting.) In addition, the Hiei and Juneau were sunk in the aftermath.
After that battle, the Navy decided not to have more than one family member at a time on a ship.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 16, 2020 19:52:09 GMT -8
Ultimately, I think Artler undersold this movie a little. I think it’s pretty solid. Here’s the Kindle version of the C. S. Forester novel, The Good Shepherd. It would be interesting to know if this was true to life. I guess you could say there were a whole lot of sailors and commanders and Hanks likely could have been a spittin’ image for at least one of them. No, the religious aspect is not overbearing, depending on how sensitive your radar is set. However, it’s surprising some scenes (of a man actually praying to God) weren’t blotted out on condition of it being shown on Apple TV. This generally pro-American, pro-Christian, pro-white-male movie probably made it onto Apple TV only on the strength of Tom Hanks’ public reputation. From the junk I’ve seen on Apple TV (and it’s not so much politically correct as it is just junk), this movie is way out of place. So catch it before counter-culture destroys another piece of art and history. Your radar is set correctly on that. We got way too much of the weepy Hanks. And the point of people watching their language around him seemed out of place on a Naval vessel where if they didn’t invent most of the cuss words, they perfected them. One of my favorite lines from Patton (who was apparently a devout Episcopalian) is: Reporter: General, do you read the bible? Patton: Every god-damned day. Hanks is just too damn nice of a guy. And, really, the downside of this movie is the lack of grit and balls. Some of it ends up being more of a glorification of Tom Hanks: Nice Guy. But, okay. Most of us like Tom Hanks because, well, he’s a nice guy…at least on screen (and probably in really life too). But a little dose of Patton in this movie would have done it some good. I did see The Cruel Sea with Jack Hawkins fairly recently. Good movie. But I hadn’t heard of the book, HMS Ulysses, by Alistair MacLean. I sent myself a free sample of the Kindle version as a reminder to perhaps read it. |
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 17, 2020 15:21:45 GMT -8
At the end of the movie, they note how many Allied ships were lost in the Battle of the Atlantic. I forget the number but Wiki lists 3,500 merchant ships and 175 warships. (Tonnage data here.) Hanks was right to do a movie about this underrated feature of the war. As Wiki notes, “The Battle of the Atlantic, the longest continuous military campaign[7][8] in World War II, ran from 1939 to the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, covering a major part of the Naval history of World War II.” But it was a big war, especially considering what was going on in the Pacific. The mind staggers. What Hanks has done is to likely receive a Golden Ticket from Apple to produce something else spectacular. There are deep pockets and then there are deep pockets. I don’t believe anyone has deeper pockets than Apple. The budget was a relatively modest $50,000,000. That’s not even a rounding error for Apple (who apparently recently paid Samsung a billion dollar penalty for not reaching some minimum quantity in their order or something). And you can tell that Hanks and the producers were competent at stretching that budget. I know they were following a novel. But the budget is likely why there was no inside view of what was going on from a German sub. That’s a hell of a lot more money to make those sets, etc. And we really didn’t get much of a glimpse of the Greyhound itself. Again, likely a budget move. But what they did (selective though it was) looked and worked pretty good. So…you produce a good movie on a relatively modest budget, it’s not one of those god-awful 3 hour “epics” (read: hole you dump money into), and it pleased a company that has the money to do more of this kind of stuff and desperately needs it. Expect more to come from Hanks & Apple. Artler did indeed find another good one. |
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Post by timothylane on Jul 17, 2020 16:27:32 GMT -8
They certainly knew their facts in the movie, even though HX-25 was an early-war convoy (probably in 1939) and no Fletcher-class destroyers were used as escorts in the summer of 1942. That's always a good start, particularly since there may have been good reasons for both decisions.
As for the table, I notice that their monthly totals of losses don't include losses from mines. The spike of U-boat sinkings in March 1941 (5) is when they got Kretschmer, Prien, and Schepke. Note the sudden change in the monthly outcomes from March to May 1943. There were a lot of reasons for it, which amount to a whole lot of trends reaching fruition in the latter month. Some of the shipping losses to U-boats after mid-1943 were probably distant from the northern Atlantic. Doenitz started sending his U-boats far afield because they could accomplish nothing worth the heavy losses on the main shipping routes.
Torpedo Junction, used as the title of the Homer Hickam book used as one of the sources, referred to the ocean off Cape Hatteras. In the first half of 1942, most of the Allied shipping losses were in American and West Indian waters, especially off Hatteras.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 17, 2020 18:58:33 GMT -8
Here’s an interesting map showing The Black Pit, the limits of air cover, and where the losses occurred. Here’s a nice photo of one of the anti-submarine Leigh lights that was “used for spotting U-boats on the surface at night.” This is mounted on a VLR Liberator. Once the Allies got their anti-submarine operations up and running, it certainly then became very dangerous to be in a U-boat. I would have loved to have thrown about another 20 million at Hanks’ movie so that we could have seen some of the stuff. I'd never heard of Leigh lights. But then it would have been later in the war and his picture was of a specific time and place. Still, maybe “Revenge of the Allies” could be a worthy part II movie.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 17, 2020 19:20:13 GMT -8
The Leigh light was one of the things that made the Schnorchel so essential for U-boats. They had come across in Dutch submarines under construction when Germany conquered the Netherlands, and had been working on it since then. Eventually they got it working, and for a while it made detection more difficult. Allied centimetric radar at the time couldn't detect something that small. By very late in the war they could, which reduced its value for evading detection.
It also allowed U-boats to have air while traveling by battery, and made it possible to use their motors without surfacing. How useful this was against sonar, I don't know, but until late in the war (when the Allies had the resources to organizer hunter-killer groups that sought the U-boats out instead of waiting for them to attack convoys) that only mattered in the vicinity of convoys.
This makes it easy to understand why 90% or so of U-boats were lost during the war.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 17, 2020 20:33:49 GMT -8
I hadn’t heard of the Schnorchel. Very interesting. I’d certainly heard of snorkels. But from the photo at the link, that was one major appendage. Let that be part II or III of “The Battle of the Atlantic” in the Tom Hanks trilogy.  This photo gives you a pretty good idea of the scale of the boats. |
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Post by timothylane on Jul 17, 2020 20:56:36 GMT -8
I believe it's the U-505 one can tour in Chicago, which Elizabeth and I managed to do on our 2000 trip there for Chicon. But assuming that long tube with what looks like a small trashcan atop it was the Schnorchel (snort to the British, snorkel to the Americans), I think it's the first time I've ever seen a photo of one in all my reading on U-boats. Thanks.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 18, 2020 9:38:46 GMT -8
It may not have been an elegant retrofit, but it seems the Schnorchel was a functional one. And seeing that boat out there beached, as it were, gives you an idea (at least gave me an idea) that these are larger than I typically picture them in my mind when watching one of these movies.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 21, 2020 8:49:47 GMT -8
John Podhoretz has a review of Greyhound on the Washington Free Beacon that might interest you. I found it interesting. The link is:
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 21, 2020 13:25:42 GMT -8
Thanks, Timothy. The guy makes a great case for reading the book. And I liked this quote: Thus it's all the more disconcerting to me to see all these people so willingly mask themselves. That ain't producing heroes.
And what an extraordinary description of the man:
Suffice it to say, I don't manage moods well.  But I love the way he put that. |
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Post by timothylane on Jul 21, 2020 13:43:09 GMT -8
Well, the fact that it's by C. S. Forester is itself a good reason to read it. I've read every Hornblower book, including the Hornblower Companion. Forester also did a short alternate history of the Nazis actually invading Britain (unsuccessfully) and a straight history of the cruise of the Bismarck (perhaps the most overrated battleship in history).
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Post by timothylane on Jul 21, 2020 13:59:52 GMT -8
Well, I wore a mask (briefly) for the first time today. The nursing home requires it now for anyone going into the halls, even if it's on a shower bed, though at least I didn't have to wear it during the shower itself (and took it off as soon as I could after getting back to my room). It was unpleasant, but not as bad as I expected. No doubt this was partly because it was fairly loose (one size fits all, I assume). Of course, that makes me doubt it accomplishes much even by the normal standards for masking.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 23, 2020 7:27:51 GMT -8
I feel like we just lost Donald Sutherland like in the movie. Oh, the humanity!
Listen, I’m not chiding you for wearing the mask. But you’ve now had a personal experience of the irrationality of it all. These masks are useless except for virtue-signaling, easing the minds of the Nervous Karens, and holding to the letter of illegal diktats.
One might note that for all the masks and shutdown efforts, they’ve had zero effect and arguably have made things worse.
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Post by artraveler on Jul 27, 2020 6:15:33 GMT -8
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Post by timothylane on Jul 27, 2020 6:49:25 GMT -8
They were the people who published The Hunt for Red October because no other publisher saw any merit in the novel. Some might suspect that this was an early indication of the danger of leftist domination of an industry.
Incidentally, I recently saw an ad for Greyhound. It looked good, but of course that's the purpose of an ad.
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Post by artraveler on Jul 27, 2020 6:56:41 GMT -8
I had forgotten that. Although Tom Clancy had a lot of trouble getting published with his first works after Red October he never had that concern again. One of his best, IMHO, was Red Storm Rising, dealing with a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. It matched very closely the war games we worked when REFORGER was running.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 27, 2020 7:21:43 GMT -8
I've read Red Storm Rising, which of course has nothing to do with Clancy's main series character (I don't think Jack Ryan even appears), who really wasn't important until later. (This can happen. Peter Lovesey's first Sergeant Cribb novel is Wobble to Death, in which Cribb only shows up when murder happens and must be investigated. After that, Lovesey decided to make him a series character, no doubt because he found another situation in which it was reasonable to include. I think the same thing happened with Jack Ryan. Clancy decided to use him when he needed such an agent in his third book, and at some point decided to make him a series character.)
Larry Bond was once a GOH at InConJunction, and in one of his scheduled appearances he discussed the writing of Red Storm Rising, in particular the different ways he and Clancy approached the material. Bond would come across some techno-wizardry and want to include it; Clancy would think of it in terms of how characters would deal with it. (Bond is also a game designer, so he had one of his military games going on through the weekend. Because Godzilla is always a minor theme at InCon, it featured the Japanese Self-defense Forces against Godzilla coming through Tokyo Bay. I looked in on it occasionally.)
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 27, 2020 7:30:02 GMT -8
Yes, an interesting article about the making of the movie. The logistics involved make my mind numb just thinking about it. But the attempt to be authentic is certainly appreciated.
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But I love the way he put that.