A paratrooper senses danger on all sides. The danger’s not that way; it’s every way. He drops into enemy territory and moves toward each point of the compass — because that’s where the trouble is. He engages the enemy with regularity, and his lifespan is rather short.
Stephen Ambrose, in his history Band of Brothers, follows “Easy Company,” a unit of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment that suffered 150 percent casualties in World War II. This statistic reflects how often Easy was in the thick of it, and how regularly it was furnished with replacements, in the ten months between Normandy and Berchtesgaden (where Hitler’s abandoned Eagle’s Nest was secured). But it was the iron thread of a handful of its members — including Easy’s ablest and bravest — that drew Ambrose to the story of how this brotherhood was built and sealed in the last, bloody chapter of the war.
HBO has daringly adapted this story in a ten-part series, which begins September 9. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks are the executive producers, so one expects a lot — perhaps another Private Ryan. Visually, the HBO movie comes close. There is no shortage of artillery blasts, separated limbs, head wounds, and morphine injections, which usually precede a soldier’s death. There is a cast of thousands. The locations are convincing replicas of bombed-out Norman towns, and bombed-out Belgian towns, and frozen forests.
As Easy saw so much action, the series benefits from the balanced hands of Hanks and Spielberg — the story itself doesn’t get lost in mortars and blood.
Easy, along with Dog and Fox companies, was formed within the 2nd Battalion of the 506th. It was an elite force, whose members joined voluntarily. Some of them said they did it for the extra $50 in monthly pay; many didn’t stick around long enough to collect. The training at Camp Toccoa, Ga., was grueling. Men were “sorted” out through a natural attrition. Only a third received their silver jump wings.
The company saw its first action on the eve of D-Day, June 5, 1944, depicted thrillingly in the Brothers segment directed by Richard Loncraine. A storm of C-47s drone at the viewer. The sky is flak and fire. Below and behind the planes are hundreds of white puffs. The paratroopers descend into the hell of Normandy, and their war begins.
Easy’s men were trained by Lt. Herbert Sobel, played by David Schwimmer. Sobel is a taskmaster at Toccoa and the central bad guy, and not the only one in the story of Easy Company. An unsettling aspect of a soldier’s history can be its honesty. Men who didn’t run from war can nevertheless be disgraced for what they did in it. This is the fate of Sobel, and Ambrose in his book is kinder to this flawed man than is the series.
For the most part, the HBO Brothers is faithful to Ambrose’s. The actors, outside of Schwimmer and perhaps Donnie Wahlberg, are unknowns. Dick Winters is portrayed true-to-text by Damian Lewis. Winters was the heart of Easy Company: stoic, graceful, sober, shrewd, and, of course, brave — all the qualities that helped raise him from lieutenant to battalion executive officer. If he was its heart, the company had several souls. Among them were the lovable drunkard Lewis Nixon (Ron Livingston), the ever-loyal Carwood Lipton (Wahlberg), the South Philly-tough Bill Guarnere (Frank John Hughes), and Ronald Speirs — the drama’s legendary warrior, played solidly by Matthew Settle.
Together these men form not only a collection of brothers, but somewhat of a complete man, faults and all.
There are eight directors for ten episodes, and almost as many writers. Along with a freshness of perspective this brings some difficulties. Each writer-director team wants to send the Ambrose message of bonds built in adversity. So you are apt to get a capsule of how an outsider becomes an insider, at last gaining entrance to the inner sanctum of Easy. This can happen subtly, as when a soldier, having been sufficiently shot at, gets a hand up into a truck where there was no hand before.
Promotions, in the broad wake of the wounded, were regular, and Easy never enjoyed much continuity at the platoon level. Episode to episode, this adds a certain coldness, whereas in the Ambrose history a degree of warmth is constant. Even those who fought in the company and were wounded and managed to return to the line are portrayed as having to earn their way back into Easy’s ranks. This repetition can be tiresome, and is out of step with Ambrose’s text.
But this is just a tactical error. As a whole, Band of Brothers can wear the label of television epic proudly, and it is another reminder that this is no longer Audie Murphy’s war. While honor and valor were abundant in World War II, Ambrose has found less hubristic reasons for why these traits emerge. Like other of Ambrose’s citizen-soldiers, the men of Easy Company served one wartime god — the god of going home. Getting there, they realized, meant putting in a good day’s work — and doing so every day until finally the end came.
When Private Ryan was released, there were stories of how veterans would leave the theaters saying, “Now that was our war.” Hollywood, it seemed, had at last gotten it right. If one overlooks the profound failure that was this year’s Pearl Harbor, a new tradition of “getting it right” may be locking in. It is very much the Ambrose tradition, informed by the testimony of veterans themselves. Of this tradition, Spielberg and Hanks are the excellent caretakers.
— This article first appeared in the September 17, 2001, issue of National Review. It has been slightly amended from the original.