The Sea Chase is a 1955 World War II drama film starring John Wayne and Lana Turner, and featuring David Farrar, Lyle Bettger, and Tab Hunter.

The plot is a nautical cat and mouse adventure, with Wayne determined to get his freighter home to Germany during the opening months of World War II, chased relentlessly across the Pacific then Atlantic oceans by the Australian and then British navies.

Captain Karl Ehrlich (John Wayne) is the master of the aging German steam freighter Ergenstrasse, home port Hamburg, docked at Sydney, Australia, on the eve of the Second World War.

It is only leaving Sydney, in thick fog during night, that Ehrlich discovers the spy is Elsa, who had seduced Napier and drawn out military information from him.

The wily Ehrlich leads his enemies on a chase across the Pacific Ocean, pausing only briefly for supplies at an unmanned rescue station on Auckland Island.

Luck is with the Ergenstrasse when the Rockhampton is called away to support cruisers facing the German pocket battleship Graf Spee in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Napier requests a transfer to the British naval patrols in the North Sea, believing that Ehrlich must pass that way in his attempt to reach Kiel.

For political reasons, German radio broadcasts a message through Lord Haw-Haw disclosing the Ergenstrasse's position near Norway, thus exposing the ship to the Royal Navy and the prowling Napier, now commanding a corvette.

Cast notes: Warner Bros bought the film rights to the novel, which was published in 1948,[4] and John Wayne was announced for the lead in June 1951, with Bolton Mallory reported to be working on the script.

[1] The fictional HMAS Rockhampton is played by HMCS New Glasgow, a River-class frigate built in Canada as a wartime emergency anti-submarine escort.

The script was adapted from a novel of the same name by Andrew Geer, which in turn was based on an incident involving the 1929-built German Norddeutscher Lloyd steamer Erlangen (6,100 tons).

Under the captaincy of Alfred Grams, the freighter slipped out of Otago Harbour, New Zealand, on 28 August 1939, on the very eve of war, ostensibly for Port Kembla, New South Wales, where she was to have filled her coal bunkers for the homeward passage to Europe.

She then headed for the subantarctic Auckland Islands, where she successfully evaded the cruiser HMNZS Leander and re-stocked with food and wood, cutting down large swathes of the Southern Rata forest.