this post packed with spoilers

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waterfield
It was free. Lots of tension and as you said plenty of action. However, I don't get how those destroyers could turn as fast as they seemed in the film. I don't have any idea of their weight but must be immense and then turning through water especially rough sees as depicted in the movie. I know on a regular two engine boat that if you want to turn to port quickly you can reverse the port side diesel and ramp up the starboard side much like turning a bicycle. And that's all I know.

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'Greyhound' battles for realistic destroyer action: How accurate is Tom Hanks' World War II drama?

[www.usatoday.com]

Tom Hanks enters dangerous seas in his World War II drama "Greyhound."

Hanks' Navy officer Commander Ernest Krause leads the destroyer USS Keeling (code-named Greyhound), escorting vital troops and supplies to England through the infamously dangerous section of the North Atlantic while battling wolf packs of Nazi U-boats.

"Greyhound" (streaming Friday on Apple TV+) states onscreen that's "inspired by actual events," with Hanks adapting the screenplay from C.S. Forester's 1955 novel, "The Good Shepherd." Director Aaron Schneider says it was crucial to continue Hanks' streak of realistic World War II dramas following his starring role in "Saving Private Ryan" (Hanks also wrote and produced "Band of Brothers" and "The Pacific" mini-series.)

"Tom has history of telling great war stories that also maintain a respectful level of accuracy, which is a way of honoring the service," says Schneider. "I wasn't going to be the one that screwed that up."

Here's what "Greyhound" gets right (and wrong).

The fictional source material describes real historical events in the 'Battle of the Atlantic'

Everything from first-time commander Krause to the Keeling destroyer are fictional. However, Forester, best known for his "Horatio Hornblower" book series, was fastidious in his quest to detail the 1942 crossing of the perilous 5-day "Black Pit" stretch of the Atlantic, where the Navy convoy were too far from land for valuable air support.

"C.S. Forrester was rarely wrong about anything in his books and wrote 'The Good Shepherd' with the help of two senior Naval officers working as his advisors," says marine historian Gordon Laco, who served as one of two "Greyhound" military technical advisers. This ethos was transferred to the movie.

The complicated tactics Krause employs to battle the U-boats and rapid-fire technical interactions on the ship's bridge convey the accuracy, though there were dialogue tweaks to enable viewer comprehension. "You don't want to be so technically perfect that the audience has no idea what they're seeing, then you've lost them," says Laco.

"Greyhound" relies heavily on CGI scenes depicting the expansive sea battles. But the sea drama was shot on USS Kidd, a decommissioned WWII-era Fletcher-class destroyer, and a highly accurate interior sound stage set on gimbals to recreate water movement. For example, even the gain control knob – which controls static on the radar – was period correct when Hanks turned it.

"I'm going to put the effort in to make sure that when we switched this knob, it's the right damn knob," says Schneider.

Special effects were needed to make the Kidd's long-dead onboard analog computer seem like it was still working. But the ship's dominant, inoperable, Oerlikon 20 mm cannons were restored to pristine condition with added pneumatics so that the gun barrels recoiled back and forth, at over 100 times a minute, to precisely simulate firing.

"We even took pains to show we had the same rate of fire," says Laco. "They were loud as hell."

The intense drama has historical precedence

During one close encounter (seen in the trailer), Greyhound comes within feet of an aggressively attacking U-boat on the surface. While played for drama, there were instances of such proximity at sea, such as a point-blank 1942 encounter between a German U-boat and the Canadian destroyer, HMCS Assiniboine. That ended with the U-boat sinking after a furious close-up gun battle. "They were literally blasting each other with pistols, rifles, revolvers." says Laco. "The cook even came out of the galley and threw an empty case of Coca Cola bottles down the submarine hatch."

As for the torpedo that precariously runs along the side of furiously turning Keeling, harmlessly bouncing off, that's a real scenario. The Germans relied on contact fuses in the North Atlantic, says Laco, with a stud on the torpedo front setting off the 600 pounds of TNT upon contact.

"A torpedo hitting at an oblique angle so the front tip didn't hit is something that could happen and did," says Laco. "But the ship would have to be extraordinarily lucky to survive it."

In the middle of the "Black Pit" fraught waters, the Greyhound crew assemble on deck in their dress uniforms to bury at sea three fallen seaman. "That was rehearsed and choreographed," says Schenider. "We needed to make it completely accurate, and we did it by the manual."

The fallen comrades had to be removed from the ship, making the ceremony necessary. "You couldn't keep the bodies, they would become objectionable," says Laco. "Despite being in combat, they would stop engines and let the ship glide. Those who were not manning guns would take part in their best uniforms."

The German taunting broadcasts didn't happen

"Greyhound" features haunting moments when the unseen German U-boat hack the convoy's inter-ship intercom. The German speaker broadcasts blood-curdling messages proclaiming certain doom over the ship's loudspeakers. While effective storytelling, these mind games are not based in history.

"It's certain that the Germans sometimes stumbled onto the transmitting frequency and could listen to the escorts talking to each other," says Laco. "It would be very difficult to transmit on that frequency. But the scene does show it's not just machines they are fighting. They were fighting other men."

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from [screenrant.com]

What Greyhound Gets Right About The Battle

One of the big things Greyhound gets right about The Battle of the Atlantic is how, broadly speaking, unglamorous the whole thing was. According to Frank Blazich (the lead curator of military history for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History), it was "a very complicated battle that require[d] massive amounts of coordination, the development of new weapons technologies, tactics [and] science.” Greyhound does a nice job of illustrating this; Krause and his crew are forced to continuously patrol their convoy to prevent any German U-boats from sneaking past their watch, and even when they catch one their counter-attacks are frequently obstructed by the shortcomings of radar and sonar technology at the time (making it all the more difficult to pinpoint a U-boat's exact location once it's dived underwater). This can also lead to other problems, like when the Greyhound gets too close to a U-boat to destroy them with its big guns and resorts to using smaller weapons instead. Per the Smithsonian, this specific fight bears a resemblance to the real-life duel between the U.S.S. Borie and U-boat U-405 in November 1943 (which resulted in U-405 sinking and the Borie suffering such massive damage it had to be "scuttled" afterwards.

Due to the nature of its story (a tightly-paced, virtually non-stop series of battles between the Greyhound and various U-boats), Greyhound admittedly has a harder time depicting just how tedious Naval warfare could be. As Blazich put it, "It’s very hard, rough work, and it can be very boring. U-boats can go on entire patrols and never see another ship." Greyhound never shows the conflict from the Germans' perspective either, which is why Blazich feels Wolfgang Petersen's classic 1981 WWII submarine warfare movie Das Boot makes for a good companion piece to Hanks' film. Life was relatively better for U.S. Navy sailors, but they still had to deal with being relentlessly chilly and wet (due to the never-ending salt spray of the North Atlantic) and having to go long periods where nothing happened before having to stay on high alert for extended amounts of time. Greyhound is arguably more accurate in this regard; in one scene, it reveals Krause's feet are actually bleeding from wearing his shoes and pacing so much while he's captaining for hours on-end (before he slips into more comfortable footwear).

Still, for a film that only runs just over 90 minutes long, Greyhound more or less accurately summarizes what The Battle of the Atlantic was like: it was cold, wet, and exhausting, and the Allied's destroyers were frequently obstructed in their attempts to protect their convoys by the limitations of their detection equipment. A miniseries adaptation of Forester's novel might've been able to dive deeper into the sheer monotony of the military campaign and how it affected Krause and his men psychologically, but otherwise Hanks' movie makes for a visceral (and, in a general sense, accurate) dramatization of real-world historical events.

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from [slate.com]

The Sea Battles

Despite how closely Hanks and Schneider follow the book’s plot, The Good Shepherd underwent a sea change while becoming Greyhound, and the easiest way to illustrate this is simply to compare a tiny scene from the book and the film. Early in the story, Krause, pursuing a submerged U-boat in a circular pattern, decides to abruptly change direction in hopes of catching the U-boat by surprise. Here’s how it’s rendered in the novel:

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Krause took a sudden decision.

“Right full rudder.”

A fifth of a second’s hesitation in McAlister’s reply; the tinniest sharp note of surprise or protest in his tone. It was as if Keeling were breaking off the battle. McAlister was spinning the wheel round clockwise; Keeling lurched, rolled, shipped a hundred tons of water as her circular momentum was abruptly nullified and then reversed.

[…]

Keeling wallowed as she made her turn, shipping green water.

“Contact bearing indefinite,” said the talker.

And here’s how that moment looks on screen:

It’d be a pretty close match, except that those ellipses in the excerpt from the novel are taking the place of more than 800 words, words that explain in great detail what Krause is thinking, what he’s trying to accomplish with his maneuver, the performance characteristics of his boat and the German U-boat that are relevant to his decision, the political considerations inherent in commanding a multinational convoy, and previously unmentioned biographical facts about Krause’s athletic career, all chosen to drive home the point that Krause is an extremely cool and methodical thinker under pressure. It goes on for five paragraphs. Here are two of them:

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There was a further consideration that might have influenced Krause; it might have influenced him but it did not. He was handling his ship, so to speak, under the eyes of the battle-hardened crews of the Polish destroyer and the British and Canadian corvettes. They had fought a dozen actions and he had never fought one. They would be keenly interested in the standard of the performance the Yank would put up, especially as mere chance had put them under his command, especially as he had called them off one pursuit already. They might be amused, they might be contemptuous, they might be spiteful. Some temperaments might have given some consideration to this side of the matter. It is a fact that Krause gave it none.

To analyze in this fashion all the tactical elements of the situation, and then the moral factors which led to Krause’s uttering the order for right rudder, would take a keen mind several minutes, and Krause’s decision had been reached in no more than one or two seconds without any conscious analysis at all, as the child running round the table suddenly reverses his course without stopping to think. A fencer’s parry changes into a riposte in the tenth of a second, in the fiftieth of a second; that comparison might have additional force because (although it was not often remembered now) eighteen years before, and fourteen years before, Krause had been on the Olympic fencing team.