The epic land battles of World War II, including D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, typically get most of the glory in films about the war. Many historians, however, believe that World War II was won miles away from Normandy and the Ardennes. In the early stages of the war, German submarines were sinking the merchant ships that the United States was using to supply Britain at an alarming rate, putting London’s ability to continue waging the war in jeopardy. If the Allies hadn’t won the “Battle of the Atlantic” — the precarious contest with Nazi Germany for control of the seas — they never could have invaded Normandy. As the military historian John Keegan has put it, the Battle of the Atlantic “was truly both a battle and a war-winning enterprise. Had it been lost … the course, perhaps even the outcome, of the Second World War would have been entirely otherwise.”
Greyhound, directed by Aaron Schneider and written by Tom Hanks (based on the novel The Good Shepherd by C.S. Forester) and available now on Apple TV+, is a crisp, 90-minute tale about one high-stakes skirmish in the Battle of the Atlantic. Hanks and Schneider set the mood appropriately: They conjure the dark days of February 1942, when victory was anything but certain, using clips from radio broadcasts in which Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt explained the stakes involved in the naval war. “The price of the war has fallen upon the sailor men,” Churchill intones, “and we have lost nearly 3,000 lives in the hard, unrelenting struggle which goes on night and day and is going on now without a moment’s respite.” “The goods will be delivered by this nation,” Roosevelt declared, “whose Navy believes in the tradition of ‘damn the torpedoes — full speed ahead.’”
Our eyes, which begin in the clouds, are soon taken down into the steel-gray waters of the North Atlantic, where a convoy of Allied ships, protected by a few fighters flying above, are trying to make their way to Britain. Next, we see an Allied destroyer crashing through the choppy waters. It is the Greyhound, the lead warship charged with safeguarding a convoy of 37 troop and supply ships on its hazardous sea journey to Liverpool. The Greyhound is captained by Ernest Krause (Tom Hanks), a temperate, pious, seemingly battle-tested man — only later do we learn that this is only his first Atlantic crossing as a convoy captain. Two months earlier, in San Francisco, he had asked his girlfriend (Elisabeth Shue) to join him during his training in the Caribbean. He wanted to ask her to marry him there. “I can’t, Ernie,” she told him, refusing to come with him to the Caribbean. “The world has gone crazy. Let’s wait till we can be together.” She does, however, give him a little Christmas present: a hand-sized model destroyer. Krause keeps the destroyer at his bedside table in his shipboard cabin. The camera often lingers on the model destroyer, as well as on a verse from Hebrews, a book in the New Testament, that Krause has written on a piece of paper and hung on his cabin wall. His love and his faith, the film seems to tell us, are the forces that will get him, and the American people, through this terrible war.
Hanks’s screenplay does not take much time at all in developing any characters other than his own. Even his right-hand man, Charlie Cole (Stephen Graham), is a cipher, left to plot out sailing trajectories and listen to Krause when the captain is looking for a senior sailor with whom to discuss strategic naval matters. A subplot involving ship messmate Cleveland (Rob Morgan), who looks after Krause’s alimentary needs and for whom Krause clearly has affection, is also given short shrift by Hanks’s strictly business screenplay.
But this is war in the middle of the Atlantic, not a psychoanalyst’s couch in Manhattan: There is no time for breakthroughs in cross-cultural empathy or penetrating feats of self-discovery. Matters are as urgent as urgent can be — and all the more so when the Greyhound’s reconnaissance spots a U-boat about 15 miles away from the convoy, which the crew must track down and destroy before it can get to the supply ships. After fighting it off with the help of some depth charges, the sailors celebrate, thinking the coast is clear. But they quickly discover that there are several more U-boats in the waters around them. Their entire convoy is in for a life-or-death struggle with a wolf pack of German submarines bent on their destruction.
Greyhound excels at portraying the hazards and heroism of naval warfare. Part of the price of this excellence is an incessant stream of seafaring terms that will either impress you with their accuracy or leave you totally lost. I’m not just referring to standard terms like “port” and “starboard” but to the relentless barrage of nautical jargon — “meter,” “bridge,” belay,” “right standard rudder,” “left standard rudder,” “hydrophone effects,” “slow revs,” “RPMs,” “surge currents,” “TBS traffic,” “fire aft,” whatever “overrevving screws” are, and, my favorite, “modified zigzag.” The good news, though, is that watching Greyhound is kind of like watching an adult film in Finnish: You don’t really have to understand the words to know what’s going on.
Less understandable, though, is a radio transmission the Greyhound picks up from the German U-boat Gray Wolf, taunting them, in perfect English: “Greyhound, Greyhound, Greyhound. This is Gray Wolf. We hunt you and your friends, Eagle, Dicky, and Harry. We watch your ships sinking into the deep. We hear the screams of your comrades as they die. How many of them will there be before you join them? The Gray Wolf is so very hungry.” And then the German mariner howls ridiculously before ending his harangue. This rant strained credulity so much that I still have a hard time believing it was actually in the movie.
Shortcomings aside, this is in many ways a rather noble film. My thoughts, while watching it, turned frequently to my grandfather of blessed memory, the honorable Frank Freedman, who, before serving as mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts, served in the Navy during World War II, protecting our coastline from the depredations of German submarines. Twenty years ago, he took me to see U-571 with him, a movie about a squad of American sailors trying to recover an Enigma cipher machine from a damaged German U-boat. Greyhound, though also telling its story from the point of view of a single American ship, is broader in scope and sweep than U-571, giving us a more global picture of the perils of naval warfare during World War II through the experience of a single American ship. Helmed proficiently by Capt. Hanks, Greyhound is a tense and vivid depiction of the Battle of the Atlantic and a fitting tribute to those brave American sailors who kept us safe and won the war — and to whom we still owe our thanks.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer from western Massachusetts and a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of the novel A Single Life and the forthcoming book Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
