A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

On Quora, Cory Dun asks: How realistic is the miniseries Band of Brothers as far as the airborne divisions are concerned? Was Easy Company a real parachute infantry company? I replied: Cover of the 2001 "miniseries tie-in" edition. © 2001 Home Box Office and Simon & Schuster Band of Brothers  is a 10-part adaptation of Stephen E. Ambrose’s 1992 non-fiction book  Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Nest,  which itself was a companion book to his 1988 book  Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944.  Based primarily on interviews with surviving E (or Easy) Company veterans, correspondence, unit histories, diaries, and other resources,  Band of Brothers  was a look at a light infantry unit (albeit an elite one) that fought in many of the major campaigns in Northwest Europe from D-Day all the way to V-E Day (May 8, 1945) and through the summer of 1945. Because it is a dramatization of a non-fiction b...

Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...

One of the truly outstanding scores composed for a television series was the late Michael Kamen's music for the 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers , a 10-part adaptation of the late Stephen E. Ambrose's eponymous non-fiction book about E Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. Executive produced by Ambrose, Tom Hanks, and Steven Spielberg, this monumental miniseries follows an elite light infantry unit from its training stages at Camp Toccoa, GA to the 11-month campaign in Northwest Europe, starting from the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944 to the surrender of Germany and E Company's capture of Hitler's private "Eagle's Nest" in Bavaria. When I finally saw the first episodes of Band of Brothers on the History Channel 14 years ago and heard the strains of the "Main Theme" (Track 1), the credits had not finished rolling, and because the style was similar to John Williams' music for Savin...

Cover art by Home Box Office, Inc. (C) 2010 NAL Caliber Books   Pros:  Interesting concept; vivid anecdotes; compelling characters Cons:  None After the phenomenal success of their HBO miniseries  Band of Brothers,  executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks turned to their friend Stephen E. Ambrose, author of the book they had just adapted for TV, and started thinking about future World War II projects they could collaborate on. The Second World War, after all, was a topic Ambrose knew backwards and forwards from his stint as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's official biographer and his subsequent career as a history professor. Ike had - before entering politics in 1952 - been one of America's top generals during the war, rising to the title of Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force and five-star general before the end of hostilities in 1945, so it was not a stretch for Ambrose to pen several best-selling books about the U.S. ...

Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’s first C.O., First Lieutenant (later Captain) Herbert M. Sobel, was ...

The Pacific  is what I like to call a “cinematic bookend” to the Emmy Award-winning 2001 HBO miniseries  Band of Brothers.  It’s not a sequel because it doesn’t follow Army soldiers in the European Theater of Operations. It’s more of a “companion series” because it’s about three Marines (John Basilone, Robert Leckie, and Eugene Sledge) and their experiences in the war against Japan. Because Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman teamed up with most of the writers, producers, and directors of  Band of Brothers,  the 2010 miniseries was not made to compete with the earlier show. It was made in part to address Pacific War veterans’ concerns that Hanks and Spielberg focused on the ETO  twice  in less than three years ( Saving Private Ryan  was released in 1998) and that  their  story wasn’t being told. (This, too, was a complaint that the late Stephen Ambrose received after he wrote a series of books about the war in Europe. He ...

For the most part, the various battles depicted in  Band of Brothers  (the Normandy campaign, Operation Market-Garden, the Battle of the Bulge, and the patrol near Hagenau) are depicted as accurately as possible in a made-for-television miniseries. Sure, the miniseries  does  get a few things  wrong,  such as its claim that Private Albert Blithe died in 1948 as a result of a wound he received at the battle for Carentan (Part Three: Carentan). This particular error has vexed the Blithe family since 2001; the real Private Blithe not only recovered from his wound, but stayed in the Army until his death (from health issues not caused by his World War II injuries) in 1967 at a U.S. Army base in West Germany. He was a Master Sergeant at the time of his death. This  faux pas  did not originate in Stephen E. Ambrose’s 1993 book; it originated with the episode’s writers, probably as a result of interviews with other veterans who  thought  Bl...