Greyhound! A new WWII movie with Tom Hanks.
Lots of CGI and lots of nagging little inaccuracies in the trailer but as the son of a WWII Destroyer sailor who spent most of the war in the North Atlantic, I am looking forward to this film.
This is WAN's thoughts on the trailer - will be interesting to see what the thread's thoughts are on it.
Part I
At the
12 second mark we see three ships - the nearest one is obviously American, the middle is definitely not American and can not really tell about the third off in the distance. The American ship is obviously a Destroyer. The hull number is 548 - some quick research shows that DD 548 was to be a Fletcher class destroyer but that the order was cancelled. So the film makers chose wisely for the hull number. I am not a naval expert but to me it looks like a Benson/Gleaves class destroyer (Might be wishful thinking as that was the class of ship my Old Man spent his war on). We see the two forward 5 inch gun turrets, the prominent gun director up top, the life raft and life boat behind the forecastle. It's 1942 so at that time the Benson/Gleaves made up the bulk of the navy's destroyers.
Here is the USS Corry which was a Gleaves class from roughly the same angle.
The ship in the middle has squarish gun turrets, green paint instead of red lead at the water line and a prominent E80 painted in the middle of the hull. None of those things indicate a US Navy escort vessel.
The E80 looks like a Royal Navy or Royal Canadian Navy pennant number. The Old Man hated working with the Brits but liked the Canucks so hopefully she's Canadian.
At the
17 second mark we see a conning tower of a U-Boat operating on the surface. It has a slavering wolf with demonic red eyes. It is my understanding that the Kriegsmarine discouraged this as it helped to identify the boats, but most U-Boats had some sort of custom emblem. Boys will be boys after all. They normally were not that large and surprisingly most of them were not nearly as menacing as the wolf or the skull that shows up on a different boat a few seconds later. A typical example is Bear drinking Milk from U-489:
Not exactly something to haunt your dreams!
At the
24 second mark we see a U-boat launching a torpedo at a destroyer silhouetted on the horizon. While it looks cool in the movie, it is obvious that it is a terrible shot. Definitely not nearly enough lead. They'll miss by a mile! Also it would be a pretty militant U-Boat skipper to tangle with a destroyer in daylight I would think. Much better to operate at night. We see lots of action through out the trailer during the daytime. Probably a concession for visibility sake for the audience. At the
26 second mark we see the torpedo hit pay dirt - US destroyer gets nailed right between the stacks. Almost surely fatal. Not unheard of but unlikely - I think U-Boats torpedoed only about 5 US Navy DD's through out the war. They really concentrated on merchant shipping.
I have no idea what is going on at the
29 second mark - US Destroyer just raking a U-Boat running on the surface from a range of about 20 yards in broad daylight. No one is manning the U-Boat's deck gun or 20mm!
At the
36 second mark we see Hanks. He's not a young fellah and his lady (whom we see at the 44 second mark) is not exactly in the bloom of youth either. He has a officer's uniform on with two thick gold stripes on the sleeve sandwiching a thinner gold stripe. I believe that indicates he's a Lieutenant Commander. Which means at his age he must not have been too damn successful. He does have a ring on his right hand - perhaps an Annapolis class ring? The Skipper of my Dad's ship was a Commander and was an Academy man. He graduated way down in his class which is probably why he was just a Destroyer Captain and was in his mid to late 30's at the time. Hanks really should be about three decades younger but what the hell!
At the
38 second mark we see the DD cutting through the water and letting the viewer know that the ride is rather rough. Definitely not cruise ship smooth.
Then at
46 seconds we see the convoy - to me the formation of the merchant's looks correct.
At
54 seconds we hear Hanks tell the PBY that it is his first crossing and the crew giving him a bit of stink eye. If it is earlier in 1942 - as we can surmise from the blurb with the Christmas tree, the crew were probably all regular Navy and very well may have done quite of bit of escorting before the war was declared. My Dad joined up after Pearl Harbor (not out of fervor but rather to avoid being drafted into the Army and sleeping in mud) and by the time he got through Basic and Torpedo School, he didn't go to sea until Mid-1942.
At
64 seconds we see a depth charge being launched from a K-gun. Looks right on to me. At
1:06 we see some sort of escort vessel dropping depth charges - not sure what it is but it might end up T-boning the DD passing perpendicular to it. Perhaps it is a US Coast Guard cutter or maybe a Canadian Corvette. The scene rolls to an oil slick at
1:07 with Hanks announcing somberly "We have a kill" to cheers from the crew. From what the Old Man told me and from pictures that I've seen, the trauma inflected by depth charges on a submerged submarine is rather more drastic than a mere oil slick. Lungs, guts, limbs and all kinds of flotsam should be in that slick as well. Is the Hun pulling a fast one here?
To be continued.......
The trailer as a whole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uOpseqTD4Q
