Greyhound (2020) based on C.S.Forester’s novel The Good Shepherd, adapted as a screenplay by Tom Hanks and directed by Aaron Schneider

You know what to expect with a Tom Hanks film. You expect Tom Hanks. So if you’ve got 37 merchant and troop ships crossing the Atlantic, you’ve got a Nazi wolf pack of U-Boats waiting to sink them—sneering over the ship’s intercom, ve have ways of making you sink—and you have a few British ships acting as escorts and a rookie boss (captain) in charge of a Fletcher-class destroyer and overall defence strategy, then we’d expect the U-boats to sink most of the merchant shipping?

Tom Hanks changes everything. We all know Tom Hanks would be able to pick up 37 ships, walk on water, plop them down in a puddle outside Liverpool docks, and let them enter safely. But he’s got to make things hard for himself.

Nobody really cares about the love interest. The woman in a fancy hotel that knocked back Captain Tom. No pun intended. But he’s that age, where he should have already been married about three times. Fling her overboard. Mutiny in the ranks.

Get to the action. Radar. A game changer. U-boats could shadow fleets and wait to strike. They were faster than the slowest merchant ships. But that was only when they were NOT submerged. Underwater their diesel engines gave off fumes and needed recharged regularly. They could be picked off from the air as one did in Tom Hankland. When they got close enough to attack: dive, dive, dive. Largely invisible and deadly.

There was an argument that Britain was losing the war in 1941-41 because of the hundreds of millions of tons of shipping sunk by U-boats.  War supplies weren’t reaching Britain and Britain couldn’t build enough ships quickly enough to replenish those being sunk. Ratios matter more than men. Russia can keep flinging soldiers at Ukraine. Ukraine had mobilised most, if not all, of its reserves of soldiers.  Those in battle stay in battle longer and longer and longer. Few outside those borders care. Win-win Putin, especially with his ally the moron’s moron in the Whitehouse, cutting off aid and threating to leave (and end) NATO. If Germany had diverted half of its shipbuilding capacity to building U-boats instead of conventional war ships, Britain would have been sunk?

Radar was primitive. Operatives weren’t fully sure how it worked and they had to learn on the job. Both got better. Obviously, Captain Tom Hanks had to reprimand the radar operator for watching porn onscreen while the Nazi wolf pack was attacking. The radar operator was told to keep to the job in hand.

Sink the Nazi bastards. Nazis always make good villains. Unless of course the shadow President of the US gives Nazi salutes. And the US President is a fascist. I’ll let Tom Hanks write that script. But don’t expect to see him playing the draft-dodging, insurrectionist, lying, thieving rapist any time soon. We certainly lost that propaganda war.

War, of course, has largely changed. As we seen in Ukraine, rifles can grow rusty. Drones do most of the killing. AI categorises and kills more Palestinian men, women and children per-square mile than a battalion of tanks could hope to achieve.

Look away if you don’t want to see the result.

Tom Hanks 4—2 U-boats.   

Notes.

Greyhound:

• Director: Aaron Schneider
• Writer: Tom Hanks
• Main Actors: Tom Hanks, Stephen Graham, Rob Morgan, Elisabeth Shue

Escorts across the North Atlantic:

• Lives Lost Before Escorts: The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest continuous military campaign in World War II, with significant losses. In 1942 alone, over 1,000 Allied ships were sunk by German U-boats.
• Lives Lost After Escorts: The introduction of destroyer escorts and improved tactics significantly reduced losses. By May 1943, the Allies had turned the tide, sinking 40 U-boats in that month alone.
• Number of Ships Sunk by U-boats: During World War II, German U-boats sank approximately 3,304 Allied merchant and warships.

The introduction of destroyer escorts and improved tactics played a crucial role in reducing the losses and ensuring the safe passage of Allied convoys across the treacherous waters of the North Atlantic.

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