Greyhound- Battle of the Atlantic Movie
Guardedly optimistic.
Visceral hatred for Das Boot, and U-571 was just pathetic. I’ll view with interest, and critique at leisure.
Category: Historical, Navy
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Looking forward to it.
I’m interested. Grandpa manned AA guns as part of a Liberty Ship’s Naval Armed Guard Detachment. Tom Hanks’s war movies tend to be good for the most part.
Nothing will ever beat “The Enemy Below,” though.
Tom Hanks from what I gather is in this flick. I’ve never watched this POS Demorat liberal in any of his movies. Das Boot I loved and it was filmed at the La Pallice sub pens. we went to La Pallice for liberty after the 1964 Op Steel Pike. The PR Nazi party photographer was based on the man that was actually on that Boot during the war and he was a technical advisor while making the film. I forgot what happened but most of the Vets hated this guy. In real life, The pens were bombed and the Boot was damaged but at the time, their were not anyone on board. The beards were grown before filming and then edited in for later filming scenes. As I have mentioned in past comments, I don’t go to the movies nor watch anything involving these Flag hating holley weird actors/actresses. I can’t see my box office receipt going to any demorat fund raising dinners. These POS really hate this country including us “Deploribles”
Agreed. I thought Das Boot was a very good movie, and really enjoyed watching in more than once auf Deutsch.
I go to see about 2 movies a year at the most and a few years I haven’t seen that many. I don’t want to fund these perverts and their agenda to destroy my liberty.
Won’t spend the money at the movie house, I, like many others here, refuse to support Hollyweird. I will give Hanks this kudo, he does seem to try and make the pictures as authentic as possible. May catch it down south in a few years with SiL and his Dad. SiL has every movie channel on cable known to mankind. He was a tea kettle operator on a boomer. (The Wyoming) His Dad was on a destroyer in the mid 70s. Too bad the Hollyweird folk’s politics, in real life, don’t match some of the characters they portray. Lot of them think the real world is like the motion picture world…Action…Cut…Reset…Back to 1.
I’m really looking forward to this movie. Of all the ship types I was TAD on, tin cans are my absolute favorite. “Sprucans”, ironically at least in this instance, are called the “Electronic Greyhounds.”
As far as “Das Boot” is concerned, that’s a flick that I really love.
My first exposure to the movie was when I was TAD to USS Pollack many, many, MANY moons ago. The COB, an old diesel boat guy, decided that everyone on Pollack had to watch this movie, so it was shown every…single…day for about a week.
The first indication that this wasn’t going to go the way the COB planned was the scene when the boat was leaving La Rochelle on patrol. Juergen Prochnow was in the sail and as they weathered the waves, he intoned, “I missed the sea!”
Immediately, food items and anything else on hand were vigorously thrown at the screen, accompanied by vocabulary known to Sailors everywhere.
That’s the way the showings went for the rest of the week. in other words, thoroughly “enjoyed” by the bubbleheads.
I’ve only seen bits and pieces of “Das Boot.” It’s on my list.
Tell ya what, though, the subtle jokes about “Das Boot” that Juergen Prochnow slips into “Beerfest” as Baron Von Wolfhausen are funny as hell!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EVOTVjWBhtk&feature=youtu.be
As a submariner, Das Boot is only one of two submarine movies I actually liked and didn’t think was total shit.
The other? Down Periscope. Humor was spot on. And oh, if you don’t know who Marty was in your command, then it was probably you.
BAWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. You’re spot on Sparks!
Hanks seems like a genuinely good guy and his movies tend to be more historically accurate than most. But how much longer are these guys going to play the lead themselves? Hanks is 63. Leahy was 67 when recalled to AD for WWII.
I figure Hanks is probably somewhere left of Lenin, but I suspect I could still have a pretty good history nerd conversation with him.
Well, with the current trend of geriatric action stars (e.g., Terminator Umpteen: You Kids Get Off My Lawn!) he may be making World War II movies for a while yet.
Tom Hanks and wife Rita Wilson have tested positive for corona 19 down in Australia while he is making a movie down there. I wish the couple a speedy recovery, but I continue to refuse to spend a single penny on the crap they and anybody else in hollyweird has starred in and produced. Hollyweird can go fug itself…
The movie looks like ‘World of Warships’ game play. I don’t think too many tin cans and u-boats fired point plank broadsides…”Fire as she bares!” is this Horatio Hornblower? I can understand paying homage to those who fought in the longest battle ever…put a little less CGI and more reality please.
P.S. How can anybody loathe Das Boot?
Not the movie, it’s what it represents. You do know what the ‘AW’ rating was originally called, right?
*grin*
Read “Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors” by Hornfisher.
It is the story of the Battle Off Samar
Destroyers and Destroyer Escorts (tiny) firing to the last round as their decks are awash as they sink, in a hopeless effort to prevent heavy cruisers and super battleships (humongous) from sinking the escort carriers they screened, and then killing McArthers Philippine invasion beachead.
The men of those “tin cans” -won-. Impossibly. Spectacularly. They -beat- the IJN in what should have been a turkey shoot.
Read it.
Read all of his books.
Best author about WWII and the War in the Pacific in my memory and library collection.
Read “Ship of Ghosts” to find out about the USS Houston and the exploits of the crew and the people of Houston following the original USS Houston.
A true story of what actually happened in WWII. His books are ten times as good as any fictional novel about WWII ever written.
“This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can. That is all.” —LCDR Ernest E. Evans, Captain of USS Johnston (DD-557), all-around badass and proud Cherokee Indian “Just a little longer, boys! We’re suckin’ ‘em into 40mm range!” —A gun captain on USS White Plains (CVE-66) as the escort carrier’s single 5” gun engaged incoming Japanese heavy cruisers. Gun 51 of USS Samuel B. Roberts (DE-413) was knocked out after the destroyer escort salvoed her torpedoes into the cruiser HIMS Chokai. All remaining 5” ammo was sent aft to Gun 52, though there wasn’t much left by that point. Then her fire control was knocked out. Gun 52’s gun captain, GM3 Paul Carr, switched his mount to local control and kept shooting, setting Chokai on fire with HE rounds and phosphorus illumination rounds. Carr had just notified the bridge that he had two 5” warshots remaining when a malfunction caused one of them to cook off in the breech. Most of the gun crew were killed outright. Carr was found with his guts all over the deck, clutching the ship’s last 5” shell. He was still conscious, but in shock, and begged the men who found him to help him load his gun, not realizing that the gun was gone. USS Johnston inflicted so much damage by herself that for most of the action she was misidentified as a Baltimore-class heavy cruiser. When she finally went dead in the water, with her magazines completely empty, her boilers ruptured, and both her bridge and auxiliary conn shot away (Captain Evans survived the hit to the bridge but had all of his clothes blown/burned off; he moved, bare-ass naked, to the fantail and fought his ship by shouting orders down a hatch to men cranking the rudder by hand—John Paul Jones would be impressed), a Japanese destroyer was ordered to close and shell her point-blank JUST TO MAKE DAMN SURE. That destroyer’s captain had his own crew man the rail and salute Johnston as she went under. Damn, there I… Read more »
This is the same Hollywood that just put an entirely CGI dog into Call of the Wild opposite Harrison Ford. A freaking DOG is very obviously CGI through the whole movie. The single most trainable animal in the world and they prefer to make it a cartoon.
The minute they can replace the actors with CG they’ll do it. The only upside is there won’t be any more BS hypocritical political statements from actors because there won’t be any.
We can only hope…..
My wife and i saw Call of the Wild the other day. Don’t waste your time. It’s an embarrassment to the memory and artistry of Jack London.
The preview was more than enough to keep me away.
The animal rights group PETA has been badgering Hollywood for years to do this very thing; use CGI instead of real dogs (and other animals) in movies because of the alleged cruelty and hardships that real dogs have to endure while making movies. So PETA got their wish with this one. I haven’t seen the movie (and I love the Jack London novella) because this notion just seems so very wrong and misguided to me.
CGI animals were fine for the most recent “Lion King” incarnation (and they looked great!), but those animals talked and sang songs and interacted like humans, so I could accept it as a make-believe fantasy.
USS Borie (DD-215) fought U-405 in a close-range broadside gun engagement, then rammed the U-boat, riding up onto the U-boat’s foredeck and becoming lodged there, was boarded by the U-boat, and fought off the boarding action with small arms, tools, improvised weapons, and hand-to-hand combat. One Borie Sailor shot a German in the chest with a signal flare, another knocked a German overboard with a thrown 4” shell casing. U-405 was sunk and Borie had to be scuttled. USS Buckley (DE-51) fought U-66 in a close-range broadside gun engagement, then was rammed by the U-boat, then rammed the U-boat back, riding up onto the U-boat’s foredeck and becoming lodged there, then was boarded by the U-boat, and fought off the boarding action with small arms, tools, improvised weapons, and hand-to-hand combat. Buckley Sailors on the fo’c’s’le who didn’t have firearms handy swung wrenches, spent 3” shell casings, even coffee mugs. U-66 was sunk and Buckley limped into Brooklyn Navy yard with a bent shaft, a dented bow, a gash in her side, and 36 prisoners. She was fixed up and later got a second confirmed kill on U-879 in the final weeks of the war. USS Growler (SS-215) fought a Japanese subchaser in a close-range gun engagement, then collided with the subchaser as she took evasive action to avoid a ramming attempt. The subchaser raked Growler’s bridge with small-arms fire, critically wounding Captain Howard Gilmore, Ensign William W. Williams, and Fireman 3rd Class Wilbert Kelley. Recognizing that the subchaser was backing off to bring her heavier guns to bear, Gilmore ordered XO Arnold Schade “Take her down!” Gilmore, Williams, and Kelley drowned, but Growler escaped and returned to Brisbane with 18 feet of her bow bent 90 degrees left from the collision. Gilmore received a posthumous Medal of Honor. Submarines were known to engage escorts, including destroyers, in surface actions, especially at night, in the first half of the war. Some escorts, like subchasers and British Flower-class corvettes, were actually outgunned by some subs. This never entirely stopped, but it became less common as destroyers got bigger and meaner and… Read more »
USS Laffey (DD-459) went toe-to-toe with the japs in multiple gun engagements off Guadalcanal, the final one being the Cruiser Night Action of November 13, 1942 (which happened to be a Friday, in case you were wondering) where, among others, she engaged the battleship HIMS Hiei, causing uncontrollable fires that eventually doomed said battleship, though Laffey herself was shot to pieces and sank in flames after having traded not only shells but also paint with Hiei and a half-dozen other Japanese ships. Laffey holds the record for most confirmed Japanese flag officer kills by a single ship.
USS O’Bannon also distinguished herself in the Cruiser Night Action, mauling Hiei and several destroyers at close range, but took substantially fewer hits than Laffey and survived the battle. Unfortunately, one hit started a fire aft that necessitated jettisoning her entire load of depth charges, which rendered her unable to effectively engage the submarine that sank USS Juneau the following day, with tragic consequences. A year later, another Japanese submarine took on O’Bannon in a close-range broadside gun engagement, but the Fletcher-class destroyer came out on top. This action is the source of the apocryphal story about O’Bannon Sailors throwing potatoes at the sub’s gun crews. O’Bannon finished the war as the Navy’s most decorated destroyer, with 17 Battle Stars.
…Very much looking forward to this – my wife’s granddad was a gunner aboard one of the old four-stack DDs in WWII, and ended up liking things that went boom so much that he got his doctorate in physics and became the Safety Director at Dahlgren.
Fake Green Beret/Secret Operator Marty LeBlanc was on a slow yellow submarine to Lebanon. Marty knows a thing or two about the “silent service.” He gives this Tom Hanks movie two thumbs up for authenticity.
“Wilson!”… oh, wait, sorry.
Watching Midway once again, the 2019 version.
I don’t care what anyone says, I like the movie.
They treat all the people with the respect they earned and truly deserve. Reading as much as I have about Midway, I can attest that this production is very close to what actually happened in that most historic battle of the US Navy.
The way they treated Bruno Gaido, was spot on and gave him all the kudos possible for that incredibly brave young man now resting at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean…..
That such men have lived…..
CGI heavy, yes, but they feature a lot of the actors currently employed by Amazon and other small studios with their series productions.
Good stuff !!!
I liked it too. Admittedly, some parts are a bit cheesed up, and I don’t really give a rat’s ass about John Ford, but it was still good. Ed Skrein AKA Francis from “Deadpool” did a pretty solid job. I was shocked at the level of historical accuracy: I’d rate it about 75-80% legit, which is pretty damn good considering the vast majority of “true” stories barely achieve the 40-50 range, of that. They even accurately marked individual SBDs, instead of just copy-pasting the same one fifty times. Their replica TBD was so good it was accepted by the USS Midway museum after filming finished!
You mean someone on this blog is actually saying something positive about a “Hollyweird” War Movie? Do you folks realize that the director of this version of “Midway” — Roland Emmerich — is a German, and also gay? And he’s the same guy who directed a terrific movie about the Revolutionary War titled “The Patriot.”
Maybe y’all need to download a couple of other recent military movies made by some of these (as you call them) “Left of Lenin perverts.” That’s a label you could hardly apply to Clint Eastwood, who made a great war movie a few years back called “American Sniper.” And if you haven’t seen “Blackhawk Down, I’d recommend purchasing the Blu-ray disc and then watching it with the volume cranked way up.