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...

British cover of Normandy '44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France. Note the shorter subtitle.     © 2019 Griffon Merlin Ltd On June 4, 2019, Grove Atlantic's Atlantic Press Monthly published James Holland's Normandy '44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France (published by Griffon Merlin Ltd in Britain as  Normandy '44: D-Day and the Battle for France ), a new history of what the late Stephen E. Ambrose called "the climactic battle of World War II." The timing of the book's publication was. as the British expression puts it, "bang on." Two days after the book hit bookstore shelves or was sent to customers who bought it on Amazon and other online stores as pre-orders, most of the West (including the U.S., Canada,  France, Great Britain, and their former enemy, Germany) observed the 75th Anniversary of D-Day and the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Holland, who produces, writes, and narrates BBC ...

© 2014 HarperCollins (Reissue cover) In 1984, Simon & Schuster published the first edition of Max Hastings' Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy, a book that re-examined the Allied invasion of northern France on June 6, 1944 and the bitter campaign that lasted two-and-a-half months and culminated with the liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944. Based on extensive research, hundreds of interviews with veterans and other eyewitnesses, and benefitting from new insights gleaned from the declassification of the "Ultra secret  - the long-concealed fact that the Allies had broken the Germans' "unbreakable" Enigma cypher codes - Hastings' book sought to look beyond the legends and myths that had surrounded Operation Overlord and explain how the Allies defeated the German Wehrmacht in Normandy despite a "quality gap" in weapons (except artillery and aircraft), training, tactics, and overall soldiering skills that favored the Germans. At the ...

© 2018 Oxford University Press On May 2, 2018, the New York-based North American division of Oxford University Press published World War II at Sea: A Global History by Craig L. Symonds. As the title implies, Symonds' nearly 800-page book is a one-volume account of the naval battles that took place during the Second World War from the beginning of the war in Europe on September 1, 1939, to Japan's surrender (fittingly) aboard the battleship USS Missouri six years later. Written by a renowned naval historian and Professor Emeritus and former history department chair at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD,  World War II at Sea: A Global History tells the story of history's largest clash of arms from the perspectives of the Axis and Allied navies, the admirals that led them, and the officers, sailors, Marines, and airmen that fought - and often died - in such diverse places as the River Plate, the Denmark Strait, Cape Matapan, the Coral Sea, Midway, the North Cape, Savo...

©2013 Burford Books  On March 17, 1998, Burford Books, an independent book publisher based in Ithaca, N.Y., reissued Walter Lord's Incredible Victory: The Battle of Midway as part of its Classics of War series. Originally published in 1967 by Harper Collins and reissued in paperback several times between 1968 and 1998, Lord's third book about World War II battles was one of the most popular and influential books about the Battle of Midway (June 4-7, 1942) and its impact on the Pacific War. Along with Gordon W. Prange's Miracle at Midway, Incredible Victory laid the groundwork for the mythologization of the war's second carrier battle as a modern-day David and Goliath story in which a badly-outnumbered American fleet defeated the mighty Combined Fleet of the Japanese navy. In the spring of 1942, the Japanese Empire was at the height of its power. In the first five months after the devastating attack on the U.S. base at Pearl Harbor, Japan had defeated American, Bri...

Cover art by Thomas Hart Benton.© 2001 Naval Institute Press The diesel-electric powered submarine was one of the deadliest weapons used in naval warfare during the two World Wars. During both wars in the Atlantic, Germany's U-boats did extensive damage to Allied shipping and twice threatened to starve Britain. After December 7, 1941, during the campaigns in the Pacific, the Japanese submarine force, tied to a rigid doctrine of stalking enemy capital ships, scored a few outstanding kills of carriers and the USS Indianapolis but did little to harm Allied cargo ships. In Clay Blair, Jr.'s Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan, reissued by the U.S. Naval Institute (the same publishing company that gave readers Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October  novel) after several decades of being out of print, is a fascinating and detailed look at the officers, sailors and submarines of the Silent Service and their nearly four-year-long campaign against Japan...

© 2005 Potomac Books On November 1, 2005, Potomac Books published Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway. Co-written by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, this was the first major book about the pivotal naval engagement that ended the Imperial Japanese Navy's offensive phase in the Pacific War since Gordon W. Prange's Miracle at Midway (1982). Based on extensive research of Japan's military and naval archives, as well as re-examining many American accounts of the battle, Shattered Sword not only tells the story of Midway from the perspective of the Japanese, but it also endeavors to bust myths about the 1942 battle that ended Japan's six-month-long string of victories over the Allies and began to see the balance of power shift to the U.S. Navy. Even though 78 years have passed since the Battle of Midway (June 4-7, 1942), it is still considered one of history's most important naval battles. When Japan's fearsome Combined Fleet set ou...

Cover designed by Kristen Haff. © 2014 Penguin Books The Battle of Crete - the first large-scale military engagement conceived and executed by airborne forces in history - has long been overshadowed by other World War II battles that took place in 1941. Planned by Luftwaffe General Kurt Student (the "Father of Germany's Airborne Force") and approved by a reluctant Adolf Hitler, Operation Mercury was a daring if rather risky endeavor: the capture of the Greek island of Crete by a large airborne force that was to be reinforced primarily via an "air bridge" from the mainland and only tangentially by a seaborne force embarked on a modest flotilla of caiques. Hitler greenlit Unternehmen Merkur almost at the last minute with one proviso: that the invasion of Crete be carried out with resources available in the Greek theater of operations and not much else lest it interfered with the Fuhrer's larger plan to invade the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The staff ...

Cover of the Bantam paperback edition © 1983 Bantam Books  Nook edition artwork © 2018 Barnes & Noble On March 27, 1957, Holt Books published Walter Lord's Day of Infamy, a documentary-style nonfiction account of the Japanese attack on the American Pacific Fleet based at Pearl Harbor and various other U.S. military installations on the island of Oahu, Territory of Hawaii, on Sunday, December 7, 1941. Based on meticulous research and interviews with over 80 eyewitnesses and participants on both sides - American as well as Japanese - Day of Infamy is a detailed, hour-by-hour look at the chain of events that took place between the night of Saturday, December 6 and 12:30 P.M. on December 8. 1941 - ending the narrative with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous "Day of Infamy" speech from which Lord derives the book's title. Unlike Gordon W. Prange's massive At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, Lord's slimmer - and mu...