Sea Control - Sea Control 190 - Greyhound with Doyle Hodges

Episode Date: July 25, 2020

Links:1. Texas National Security Review2. Horns of a Dilemma Podcast3. The Good Shepherd

Hey folks, Jared here with a special treat for you today. I have my old boss, my old CO, the old man. Relax, it's a term of endearment. Doyle Hodge is on the program. Doyle previously served as commanding officer of USS Ross, where I was one of his department heads. We decided to get back together to talk about the new Tom Hanks film, Greyhound, from a captain's perspective. I will warn you, the episode does contain spoilers, so if you haven't seen the movie yet, maybe watch it before you listen to this. I also have two instances of some extremely mild profanity. Bear with me, I was excited. Finally, my audio quality here wasn't great, so sorry about that.

The good news is that Doyle is clear as a bell, and he makes all the good points anyway, so it's a wash. With that, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. We are back in the Navy in the pop culture realm today, and we're going to be discussing the new Tom Hanks movie, Greyhound, with the editor of the Texas National Security Review and sometime host of the Horns of the Dilemma podcast, Doyle Hodges. Doyle, thank you for coming on.

How are you today? I'm doing well. Thank you, Jared. So, Doyle, can you introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us about your background? I think they'll understand very quickly while you're on this pod with me. Sure. So, I'm Doyle Hodges, as you mentioned. My job is I'm the editor of the Texas National Security Review.

Which I would commend to your listeners who aren't familiar with it. It's a joint project of the University of Texas and War on the Rocks. It's an academic journal. It's interdisciplinary in its approach to national security affairs and seeks to provide rigorous scholarship in a way that is accessible and free from jargon. But before doing that, I spent 21 years as a surface warfare officer, served aboard frigates, destroyers, cruisers, and commanded a salvage ship as well as a destroyer. Probably the hardest part of commanding the destroyer was the quality of the department heads who worked for me. I had an operations officer by the name of Samuelson, who was just a constant challenge. So to be clear, that is where Jared and I first met was when he came and worked for me as ops officer when I was in command of Ross.

And he was actually an excellent ops officer and really distinguished himself in that tour. After I retired from the Navy, I pursued a Ph.D. at what is now the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and focused on civil-military relations and national security issues, but certainly still have Navy and especially surface Navy kind of front and center in my perspective and interests. Yeah, you're absolutely right in your first assessment of me. Absolute pain in the ass in my part. Thank you for coming on today. I will tell you I did reach out to Tom Hanks' representation, and he turned us down.

So I don't know if that's on you or me. Sorry you couldn't be on the pod today. but to summarize we are a pair of surface warfare officers with some anti-submarine warfare experience between us and command experience i'm here i'm wearing my metaphorical SWO jacket i don't have the actual one yet though i do i i have placed it on order so given that it is the hottest day of the year thus far in dc today and that the SWO jacket is yeah uh let's just say i'm not among the the things i miss about the navy the opportunity to wear the SWO jacket does not rank highly among them.

You're missing out. I remain a vocal supporter of the SWO jacket. Anything that we can do and we can steal from the aviation community and upset them, I'm a proponent of. But to get back to Greyhound, it's based on a novel by C.S. Forrester. Doyle, I know you've read the book. I didn't read it until after I had had command. When did you read it, and what is your opinion of the book?

so i think it was about 14th the first time i read the good shepherd and i i picked it up as i recall at a used bookstore mostly because i was a huge fan of the hornblower series and saw another book by forester and i didn't know what i was getting into when i read it if you haven't read the book i would i would commend it to you it it is very cinematic in how it is written i think the good shepherd along with the ship are both books by forester that just sort of open in the middle of the action and keep going much like the movie does one of the things i really enjoy you know the sort of the two great classic maritime literature series are the the hornblower books and then the uh patrick o'brien novels uh jack aubrey and stephen matter and they're very

different but each have great qualities in their own ways and what's interesting is that although i think of the o'brien novels as being more literary and having more character development One of the things I really appreciate about Forrester is the sort of meditation on character and command that he offers in all of his books. But it's really, really obvious in The Good Shepherd because here you have an officer and it doesn't really come out as clearly as it might in the movie. But an officer who is in his first command is relatively senior and is put into a position not only of commanding the ship, but being the escort commander for the convoy. It's his first test with people working for him who have been war tested for a couple of years. And it is a task that is impossible to do without taking losses. And so this sort of incredible stress and pressure that's placed on him as he is put into this position,

knowing that he's going to take losses, trying to mitigate them, trying to coordinate the efforts not only of his own ship, but also of all of the escorts and coordinate with the convoy, it really is just a terrific read. I highly recommend it. I was going to ask, you've sort of given a description of what the book is about. Would your description change based on if you were describing the book to a civilian versus describing it to a naval officer? I think it would. I think it really depends on what you want from the book. I think what I got from it when I was 14 is very different than what I got from it when I read it again before I went back to command.

Because I think as a naval officer, I would tell them that it's a book about command. It is a book about dealing with the stresses, the challenges, not having the resources you need, having missions that must be accomplished, and how you balance those things, the toll that it takes on you and what you do. On the other hand, you can also read it as a good adventure story of just what you see in the movie, something that opens in the middle. It has relatively rapid action and keeps going. So I think you can describe it in a couple of different ways and not be inaccurate, depending on how you do it. Yeah, I would tend to agree with you. As I was talking with my wife about it before we watched it, I kind of described it as a point of view take on the Battle of the North Atlantic. And then when I talked with, it's really about the burden of command, and it's not big decisions to me.

For me, it was all the banalities that make the captain's life so demanding just by the quantity. And there were two scenes that really jumped out at me. The ones everybody gravitates to are, hey, do you go to the back of the convoy or rescue the guy in the water? That's not what I was thinking about. The Bird of Command scene to me is that scene immediately after the first battle when Tom Hanks grabs the 1MC. He makes an announcement. Everybody cheers. And then there are six different questions that come at him from different characters, one right after the other.

It's, oh, the boilers. Can we bring up death charges? Do we secure from general quarters? hot chow boom boom just one right after the other and that to me was the captain's life is just a never-ending string of these decisions about every possible detail and having to reach him in seconds and each of them is consequential yeah and being ripped from his sleeve and being up on the bridge and then that sort of hesitation to have someone bring him the things that he needs his gloves his boots etc but at the same time not being able to leave himself to go get it you know i think one

of the things that resonated with me that i think would resonate with anyone who's had command of a surface warship is just the sort of balance between exhaustion and making good decisions and trying to figure out you know how you manage to not allow yourself to get so run down that you can't do what you need to do but you're still there when you need or you're needed to be there yeah the other scene for me was the uh the slippers at the end which i think it's a bigger deal in the book than it was made out to be in the movie and the way it comes across in the movie the way it's sold a little bit is oh this is this reminder of home and in the book the way that i read the book was like no this is he has finally been broken by the number of decisions that he's

had to make and he's now going to relax his sense of discipline in front of his crew members and put these slippers on and say how many uh how many nights did you actually sleep in your chair up on the bridge you know it's it's interesting my first command tour on safeguard i did it more often and my second command tour on ross one of the things one of the lessons i learned from command of safeguard was that i wasn't any better or quicker in making decisions if you woke me up in this disorienting place i i actually did better if i got the phone call and had a process of getting to the bridge gave me a little bit of time to get my wits about me and figure out what was going on. I was more likely to make bad decisions if I was so convinced that I was critical that I

was sleeping in my chair. Yeah, that's understandable. So then let's just start with your first impression of the movie. How did you feel about it after you watched it? I loved it. I really, you know, obviously there's things and a friend of mine who's a naval historian who I quite respect took all sorts of issue with minor issues of historical accuracy and all kinds of things. And there are elements that are different from the book, but it's not about whether this is a guide to how you can historically recreate the Battle of the Atlantic. It's about whether it communicates the sense of being at sea and communicates the stress and the challenges and everything that was there. And all those same things that you and I just discussed from the book

came across to me from the movie it was just it was right there it begins you know with immediate action and it never really lets up at all it just keeps going going going and the pace the stress the uncertainty all of that i thought they captured so well and just did a terrific job of communicating that one of the things that's interesting is you know the book develops kraus's character the captain's character quite a bit he is rather introspective he thinks on things that have happened in his life the movie so far as i can recall i don't think anyone ever calls him by his last name the only way you know his name is if you watch the credits and so it doesn't spend a ton of time with character development in the way that the book does but at the same

time it communicates that sense of it just really well i thought yeah i could not believe how quickly it was over when you say relentless uh that is exactly how i felt and i thought it was true to the book spirit while at the same time being a not great representation of what anti-submarine warfare is actually like which asw is commonly referred to as awfully slow warfare this is just a laborious process it is although you know i i think there's a couple of things one is that And you and I grew up with ASW largely being about passive ASW against long-range targets using systems that analyze very faint sound signals at great distances. That wasn't ASW in the Atlantic. Remember that a submarine in World War II, especially 1942, wasn't a submarine the way we think of it today.

It was a surface ship that could hide underwater for short periods. And so the type of ASW they were doing where detection ranges would be maybe 1,000, maybe 2,000 yards, where the submarine posed a surface gunnery threat in addition to a torpedo threat, where the convoys are steaming at night with no lights, with zigzag patterns, with absolutely rudimentary radio, all these sorts of things. i'm gonna you know obviously i've not experienced that personally but i can certainly see where that would be a much different experience of asw and awfully slow warfare wouldn't be the way you thought about it under those circumstances no you're absolutely correct and i probably should have looked at it through a slightly different lens uh just to come back to your point i'm sure the i guess we'll call them historical shortcomings too about 10 minutes in Tom Hanks gives some conning comment that's not how you write about this moment I think my daughter

woke up in the other room I had a little pause where I went and took care of her and then came back when I sat back down I was like all right stop worrying about the historical accuracy of some person just enjoy the story a little bit more and then things became much better but yeah well a friend of mine who's a retired SWO commented that she had never used the command meet her in the course of her career and and you know if you watch the movie if you watch the movie you would think that was the most common comic command and you know yeah i think you know we all have this tendency to want to be nitnoid about it but again when i think about it one of the reasons that we so rarely used it is that very rarely would you be driving by eye you would be

coming to a course you'd be studying you'd be doing these things now put yourself in a situation where you have no or rudimentary radar you're steaming inside 500 yards of 90 merchant ships you're doing it at 36 knots you're trying to figure out where an enemy submarine is i can see where you might actually be using the command meet her because all you're really trying to do is to stop the swing of the bowing and keep yourself going the direction you're trying to go so i i can't tell you that yes they did no they didn't but it's plausible and i wasn't going to let that get in the way yeah meet her was actually one of my favorite moments of the film because it's my favorite command to use i probably got to use it two maybe three times in my entire career just

doing ship handling exercises so i was like on the point of standing up and cheering uh when he used it and then he came right back with it multiple times uh too much jargon not enough jargon or just right for you so you know i think you and i are probably the wrong people to be able to answer or evaluate that question because you know to someone who didn't grow up steeped in this the command meet her might seem like jargon you know to us it's like we can you know have a 10 minute conversation about how much we we enjoy using this from my perspective i thought they did a decent job of translating the experience in a way where the lack of terminology at times wasn't overly distracting, but it was still accessible. And my yardstick for that is also my wife who watched

the movie with me and didn't come away saying, boy, I couldn't understand this or that. Now, granted, again, she's been married to me long enough. She's probably more expert on naval jargon than the average person off the street. But I felt like they hit a pretty good balance where they didn't do everything with precise naval phraseology, but at the same time, it wasn't so terrible that it could be distracting. Although, yeah, it's funny because there are things that we just don't think about in terms of what constitutes jargon. And I remember I was able to get my brother underway for about a half a day with me when I commanded a safeguard. We had gone out to go do an ammo offload. We were coming back in and I was giving line handling commands.

and we were heaving around on line one and i said a vast heaving line one and he just thought that was the funniest thing in the word he's like no one uses the word of vast um like that's the word that's what you would use and so yeah the uh the ability to recognize jargon may not be uh may not be a strong point for you and i yeah to me i i came down in the just right and again i'm kind of playing off watching my spouse absorb this who she has not really been exposed to me doing surface warfare officer things. She's been exposed to me doing administrative staff officer things. So she has not been underway with me or any of that. But I

think it may have been too much for some folks because as he's getting a contacts report to him, I found myself starting to plot them out in my head and getting confused. I was like, oh, okay. This may be the point where it's just a little too much for you. yes i will say my opinion this is the best recent navy movie and it's been a while since we've had a good one uh do you want to recap some of what we suffered through i know you said you haven't seen some of these yeah you know that you gave me a list of midway hunter killer battleship in annapolis and the only one of that list i've seen is midway and i will confess that this was

actually one of my concerns before watching greyhound was because the cgi in midway was so terrible um and because some of the trailers for greyhound made the cgi relatively prominent i was really worried that i was going to be watching the equivalent of a video game graphic and again i think one of the things they did really well is that i didn't find it that way i didn't find it distracting um midway it was a welcome distraction from the acting um but uh you know in the case of greyhound i didn't find that distracting hunter killer i've not seen liam neeson apparently does have some particular skills and and i guess uh submarining is among them um battleship i will say that i only know people who come into like two categories on

battleship they either love it as an escapist navy fantasy or they just can't get over it and they're like okay forget it um and annapolis um yeah i i barely even recall that that movie was out but but the bottom line is you know i guess the new top gun would fall into a relatively recent navy movie certainly top gun the original but when you and i were discussing other ones what do we have we have crimson tide we have hunt for red october but if you want a surface warfare movie um boy you got to go back a long way to get to that um and as i mentioned to you you had no way out where kevin costner was a surface warfare officer uh you have a a brief 10 minute opening scene where he implausibly runs out and saves a guy who didn't get the word about the weather

decks being secured during high winds and heavy seas and uh that's that's about all you got you You know, so I it hit me in my happy place. I was I was very, very pleased that and not only that it was a good Navy movie and it was a good surface warfare movie. But, you know, this is, as some of my friends have groused, only available on the particular network it's on. And I don't know, am I allowed to say which network that is or is that like product placement? I don't know. I mean, it's on. Look, you can look it up. It's on Apple TV. sure so i i i think it's uh entirely appropriate that apple decided that their big move that was gonna make people subscribe to apple tv or at least take the week of free subscription before

they canceled was a surface warfare movie because what would draw people in more than that i mean can you imagine you know it just we've been waiting 60 some years you just mentioned all those what was the last surface worker movie you're back into black and white yeah yeah i think you are so you're in harm's way you're mr roberts you're kane mutiny and i think those are kind of the three that go on the surface warfare wall and and you know i mean you you just hit like my my major you know major navy movies especially kane mutiny and mr roberts kane mutiny which actually was in color but kane mutiny while it does have some naval operations for the most part is is not a surface warfare movie and neither is mr roberts they are movies about people

about stresses of character about command all set in the context of a ship but in terms of a movie where surface warfare operations were front and center yeah i can't think of can't really think of one at all maybe they were expendable going back to the pt boats yeah i think uh in harm's see i i i actually disagree with that i i think there's i mean certainly the opening of in harm's way right that's great you got the whole pearl harbor attack you got the destroyer getting underway and leaving the the captain behind and you have the the classic line i got lost in mother love and navy war but if you think about it for the majority of the movie it's not actually surface warfare operations he goes ashore at guadalcanal he does all these other sorts of things so again

you're you're focused not so much on surface warfare operations as telling a broader story of the war in the pacific and it's you know it's okay as that goes i would put it in the category of movies that i would certainly watch if they were on and that are a little bit cheesy but uh enjoyable but uh yeah this sort of if if there's anybody worse than forrest gump for being in the wrong place at the wrong time it's you know john wayne suddenly who's present at every major event and you know is is doing all these sorts of things yeah i would actually say probably midway or torah torah torah are uh probably also they're they're great for navy operations movies but again both focused appropriately with those battles on aviation how do you feel about the

final countdown an absolute classic underappreciated probably should have received an oscar in its own category you know the music alone is terrific though the whole idea of the f-14 going up against the zero you can't argue with that sort of thing that's that's solid i just like it for the first few minutes there where it's showing the 1980s carrier flight deck and just the range of aircraft that were present yes instead of everything being a hornet platform of one flavor or another that uh so let me ask you is this a navy movie a surface warfare movie an anti-submarine warfare movie or this is my personal favorite theory a movie about phone talkers clearly it's about the phone talkers so i i think i think it is broadly a navy movie certainly you know we

as surface warfare officers identify with it but given that there wasn't a distinction between navy and surface warfare at the time it's it's hard to necessarily call it a slow movie it was a navy movie because that was what the navy did in world war ii was was this you know there were submarines and aviation but if you thought maybe that the first thing was thinking of of ships i wouldn't call it an anti-submarine warfare movie i i would say anti-submarine warfare is the device that moves the action along but uh really what it is is it's as we were saying it's it's a movie about command about challenges about stress about all those decisions and it's set in this wonderful action and has all this richness of ships and driving seas and all these things going

on around it and you know i think all those come together in a way that really make the phone talkers shine that's that's what allows them to have the pathos that they do so the phone talkers for me and it was you know it's kind of a joke but i i really liked the use of the phone talkers they're knowing looks uh they know when to call up the other officers like hey you need to get up here and there aren't a ton of enlisted personnel featured in the story if the story has a tertiary character it's george cleveland right and but otherwise it is very narrowly focused on hanks because as we discussed earlier it's really about the burden of command but that phone talker is a stand in, I think, for a lot of different

enlisted personnel who are really the connective tissue that make all the different parts of the ship work together cohesively under the commanding officer's leadership. It's interesting, you mentioned Cleveland as the tertiary character. There are only three characters

in the movie whose names you learn in the course of the movie. You learn them because they are casualties and are buried at sea and their names are called as that occurs, which I guess I should have said spoiler alert before I said that, because now it occurs to me since we know Cleveland's name, I've just told you something. But that's actually one of the things that I appreciate about it. I think one of the things that I really value from my

time as a surface warfare officer is the way that a ship is simultaneously something that reflects very much the personality of its leadership but also cannot function without every person working together and you know those two things almost seem contradictory but they're not um and the way in which there's no individual superstar the captain is not really a star the captain's doing what's expected of him that that was his job it isn't that he suddenly steps up and becomes uh you know the exo in crimson tide who's everywhere fighting every fire doing everything no he's he's doing the captain's job and everybody else is doing their job and they're doing it together and without that they simply can't get through this nearly impossible task that they're

faced with so i i think it's great i will uh i will definitely put a spoiler alert uh warning podcast when i cut the intro for this uh and i i knew what was going to happen so it's okay don't worry about it what were you most excited to see as you came on screen was there anything that caught you off guard you're like oh man that yeah i was trying to think i can't really think of anything that took me by surprise or took me off guard in that regard um you know i i think probably in terms of excitement not as a development in the movie or or something that was showcased it was just like i said that i i thought the cgi which i was really worried was going to be distracting was really good and i'd say probably if there's one thing that was excited

to see it's how well they captured the motion of a ship without doing it to the point where it becomes distracting you get this clear sense that you're in the atlantic and heavy seas you're not going to make a viewer seasick but at the same time the sort of constant movement and these sorts of things was there and i think it actually is really important to building the sort of mood of the movie because you don't have these sorts of rock steady shots or these sorts of things they're always emotional that's probably what i was most excited about if and that seems like an odd thing to be excited about but i think it sets the context really well and it helps to make the movie as persuasive and as enjoyable as it is for me 10 minutes in i started explaining

to my wife what a maneuvering board was less than 10 minutes until one made an appearance on screen do you do that it's like i i have done that and then uh the other one was the uh the blue cover i kind of forgotten about the blue cover i don't know were those still uh were those still around when you came in they yeah i'm older than you jared but i'm not that much older than you uh no i i have never seen anyone wearing the blue cover in practice but you're right that that is it's a good look i liked it quite a bit there you know another thing that i actually really just one of those small details but and it goes back to the experience of command is how he was changing clothes and you brought up the issue of the slippers but when they suffered

casualties when they had a burial at sea he changed into blues from working blues to service dress and he was then in service dress for some subsequent actions that went on but that's a I like that sort of little touch because it's very accurate in terms of the experiences. As the captain, it's important that you are appropriately attired for the event and the solemnity of the event and doing those things. And I really liked the idea that they thought of it and they had him be the type of commander who would do that. I thought that was neat. Did you do any burials at sea while you were in command? I should make clear for our listeners, we're not talking about taking combat casualties,

But there is a program through which veterans can be buried at sea from U.S. naval vessels where you will receive the remains in advance. You hold a ceremony while you're out at sea and you're doing it on the back of the fantail. The family gets a copy of the chart normally marked where their relative was buried, as well as a note from the commanding officer. Yeah, we did. And it's one of those things that can seem like a little bit of an inconvenience when you're given the tasking, because usually it comes at a time when you are trying to get out and do some unit level training and exercise the ship the way you want to exercise it rather than performing for a group that's assessing you from off board. But it's actually also kind of cool because it is something that's very meaningful to the families that are involved. And, you know, I think we've all heard the horror stories of not judging the wind correctly or something else.

But I don't think you can have command on the East Coast and not have done a pretty good number of them just because they, at one point, had a decent backlog that they were trying to work their way through. And I will say, actually, we only ever did cremains. I never did one with a casket, only ever with cremains. Yeah, I'm not sure I've ever even heard of one being done with a body, other than ash. Yeah. Was there a best swill moment for you? Oh, wow.

you know it's again i mean there's so many slow moments choosing one is is kind of difficult but i i loved the the ship driving i loved the the commands that he was giving as as he went through that i loved the coordination with cic and the xo down there you know plotting stuff as as they were going i loved the fact that they you know again it's not a perfect historical recreation but they didn't present sonar as this powerful seesaw sort of sensor. So you had gotten to inside, pardon me, inside minimum sonar range and you, you went from there. Yeah. I'm not answering your question well, because I,

I have a hard time like narrowing down one thing as a slow moment per se. Yeah. I don't know. How about you? So one malfunctioning electronics is yes. Relatable. Yes. The windshield wipers. You're absolutely right. That's exactly – and the – well, I don't know. It could be this or it could be that, and that frustration. You're absolutely right. I had forgotten about that.

Yeah, I remember the windshield wipers on Ross. It was a struggle until he went through a significant yard period. The other one that my wife asked me about. So they're driving through at one point, and Tom Hanks says they're going to cut through the convoy, and he makes a turn and doesn't realize that he's coming up on the merchant, and they pass. and there's like 30 yards clearance yeah it just reminded me of uh being up in the northern arabian gulf one time we're operating in the vicinity of an anchorage and i just cut the engines off because we're going to do drift ops while we sit up there in this box for the evening and this

moored vessel it's got it's got its anchored light or it's uh anchoring lights on here it's everything's all lit up and it appears to be anchored it's showing you that it's anchored in AIS and I'm watching it looks like it's moving and then I get BM2 screaming at me, the Bosun's made second class from up on top

where our lookouts are sitting, screaming at me sir that ship's underway and my wife triggered me when she says how did they not see that it wasn't 30 yards but it was much closer to a large moving vessel that I wanted to be

i was like that's that's what being on a small ship maneuvering quickly in and amongst a bunch of merchant ships feels like that is exactly it yeah now i'm gonna need to step away and go take a shot yeah yeah and that's yeah that's one of the other things that that just strikes me is you know again our experience of destroyers is something that's close to 10 000 tons if not greater right they in the movie they asserted that the the destroyer was a fletcher class which in the book i believe it's a wilkes class if i recall correctly but uh or my hand class actually i'm sorry but you know my hand class was 1500 tons a fletcher class was 2000 tons so tiny absolutely tiny and packed with people as many people as you had on a

a dg 51 right you got 350 people on there so more than a ddg 51 these days you know and five five inch guns and boilers and all this stuff and yeah it's it's like just incredible the ship handling so different because the difference in sizes and displacements and speeds i mean these things are going 38 40 knots because that's what you needed to do to be able to sprint around the convoy you know i think i grew up with gas turbine ships and you know you hear the phrase 31 knot berk and you think yeah he was fast no 31 knot berk meant he was going slower because one of his vessels was damaged and could only make 31 knots you know so uh which you know that's also the it's amazing how much quicker stuff happens at that speed one of those things when i had the

salvage ship our top end was 12 knots with the following current and very cool water for good heat exchange with the diesels and i when i got underway for the first time in command of ross we're heading down thimble shoal's channel at 15 knots and i think it's been five years since i went this fast in a warship and yeah stuff i mean it develops differently so uh yeah the ship driving is is great about that and i i really appreciated that part of the movie were you surprised at how muted the violence was not really you know i i think this is something that you certainly get from the book and if you've read much about the battle of the atlantic you know the the sort of horrifying thing is the violence is muted when it's not on your ship right because a merchant

ship's there and then it's gone and maybe you've got you know there's one instance since we're putting spoiler alerts out there one instance where they recover four survivors from a merchant ship that sunk by one of the U-boats. That wasn't an era of merchant ships with crews of 25. That was an era where a merchant ship had 200, 250 maybe, because it had a large steam-powered engine and all these things to maintain. Yeah, cargo movement wasn't happening with highly automated systems um so the violence from the outside looks muted and then if you're happened to be on the ship that's hit it's sudden and final and i mean that that was the nature of the battle of the atlantic i mean you know 3500 merchant ships it's astounding um you know we

there aren't 3500 merchant ships probably certainly not under u.s registry but i i don't I don't think any country has 3,500 ships under their own registry anymore. Maybe Liberia or Panama flags of convenience, but it's just – so yeah, it didn't surprise me. I mean I appreciated that they didn't try to dramatize it and make it into something that – like I said, I think I alluded earlier to Crimson Tide and this whole sort of like the hero of shipboard firefighting. Here comes the XO. although that reminds me of a wonderful broadside cartoon with like three people sitting around a table going i didn't care for the movie i didn't care for the movie i really liked it and the captions find the xo in this picture um but uh yeah so no i i thought it was it was a good

representation of it and you know i mean they lose a number of merchant ships in the course that convoy as they did in the book as as they did in real life and it's muted because you weren't aboard those merchant ships so uh yeah yeah i like that it happened for the most part off screen even when they're taking hits uh you're not really you kind of see it from the character's point of view is it's something that happened back after right of course he has to deal with the uh with the aftermath of that but you're not just confronted it's not like the first 17 minutes of uh saving private ryan it's left a little bit to the imagination yeah um did you have any other thoughts otherwise i'll wrap it up here no i just like i said i i really really enjoyed the movie i

i thought that it did justice to the book without attempting to be a perfect recreation of it and similarly i think it did justice to the experience of the battle at late of the atlantic without you know attempting to be a map to historically recreate it yourself um i i would really encourage your listeners to uh to pick up a copy of the book because i think you can still get an awful lot from the book having seen the movie the movie of necessity kind of focuses on the things that occur externally whereas so much of the book is internal action in the captain's head as he thinks about tries to deal with these things and i think that's that's a richness that only comes from the experience of reading it so i would encourage your your listeners to read it

And it's one of those where I wouldn't say, oh, the book is better than the movie or the book is worse than the movie. The book is different than the movie. I really enjoyed the movie, but I would say it's still well worth the experience of reading the book as well. Well, that's all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Doyle Hodges. Doyle, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Sure. So I would encourage your listeners to go check out the journal's website, TNSR.org.

All of our articles are available for free. We are an open access journal, so there's no membership there. And working on an upcoming special issue of the journal, which should be interesting to readers, as well as working on content for the Horns of a Dilemma podcast and occasionally things at War on the Rocks. Well, thank you again for coming on. For our listeners, we'll have links to the journal that Doyle is referencing there available in the show notes. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Thanks, Jared.

© transcript Emily Beynon We'll be right back.