Many years ago I read the book Band of Brothers. I’m just watching the TV series for the first time years later. There have been threads on this before, most pretty old.
It’s very, very good. It looks beautiful. It tells a very interesting and important story. As always, I have questions.
It surprises me that it cost $12m per episode two decades ago. Sure, they wanted to use real weapons, wanted authenticity, used lots of extras and created massive indoor paper snowscapes and village sets. And it looks very good. But why not just film in a snowy spot?
Sobel is despised for being a hardass, authoritarian stickler with no sense of humour. But in real life, didn’t he win a Bronze Star (in Korea, perhaps)? The military must have had many such men. But these men, kissing up and kicking down, tend to think highly of themselves. Would he really be that jealous of Winters? Why did he try to court martial him over trivialities?
The respected officer who hands German prisoners smokes before shooting them. Is this known to be true? Did anyone much care at the time?
Do they really still teach, at West Point, how to attack a fixed position based on the strategy shown in the series?
Authenticity is a tough nut to pull off. Did the show have any inaccuracies or anachronisms?
I read they spent all this money promoting the show, then aired it around 9/11. That must have affected things. How?
Is “The Pacific” nearly as good?
What did the show do best? What important things did it omit?
For those who served, what was the pettiest thing you were ordered to do? Anything equivalent to the “spaghetti run”, or worse?
The medics get to some injured men extremely quickly, despite limited supplies and capabilities in the field. Obviously some things are “made for TV” (soldiers in combat probably keep their helmets on). Was the portrayal somewhat realistic?
To those who like the series, how many times have you rewatched it? Why?
Unclear but this suggests it was for his actions on D-Day.
Sobel’s place was to train men, not to lead them into combat.
“Captain Sobel was a good training officer, strict, he wanted his men to be the best. I admire him for that. But you could not trust his judgment in a battle situation.” - Sgt. Buck Taylor, quoted in Wikipedia
So it grated on Sobel that XO Winters had the troopers’ respect as a leader but not him. He ended up being sent back to the States to train more paratroopers after trying to bring charges against Winters a second time.
Not really. It jumps around to cover guys who are in simultaneous different places and ends up being disjointed.
Not sure. I have BoB and Pacific on DVD but hardly watch them; I will have BoB on TV if I see it in the listings and there’s nothing better on. Which is pretty common.
Dick Winters called Speirs and asked about shooting the group of prisoners. He was willing to send a letter acknowledging that it was ok to put in the book.
There are other interviews wit WWII veterans that they didn’t always take prisoners. It depended on the situation. Sometimes they needed to advance quickly and use the element of surprise.
I’m rewatching the series. The later episode at the Concentration Camp is heart breaking.
Easy Company vets held reunions for decades. Retelling stories and sharing battle experiences. Fortunately many of them were still alive and healthy enough to help Stephen Ambrose with research for the book.
The book and series are an amazing preservation of Oral History. All those Easy vets are gone now. But what they experienced will always be available for people to watch.
The show premiered September 9. HBO suspended its marketing campaign after September 11. The first episode had about 10 million viewers, and by the last episode it had about 5 million viewers. That’s a pretty big fall in viewers, but the final episode had to compete on that same night with Game 7 of the World Series and the Emmys. In the middle of its run, HBO added to its programing a marathon of the first couple of episodes for people who might have skipped it after September 11 and that marathon had decent viewer numbers.
A period piece three years in the making with a large cast, large crew, extensive and expensive sets and props, many expensive and intricate action sequences, a fair amount of expensive CGI. Spielberg, Hanks and HBO not exactly being known for cranking out low quality cheapies.
Nature is unpredictable and uncontrollable. In addition to zbuzz’s note above, the more important fact is that productions like this are filmed over lengthy periods. If you’ve got a three-page scene in the script, it could take a week of filming if there’s a lot of physical action. Even if it’s largely dialogue and therefore quicker to shoot, it’s entirely possible that it takes fewer days to shoot, but that those days are non consecutive, because there’s sun the first day but then clouds the second day and you have to wait. Plus, you might need to do a reshoot on something, or even just a pickup shot. Or you shoot your primary actors walking into the location and get all their close-ups, and then you bring in their stunt doubles and shoot all the explosions a week later.
Film production is complicated. If you’ve never worked on a shoot, you have no idea how long everything takes, how long the various groups of people are standing around for each department to finish its work so the next team can do their thing. If you’re an actor, for every ten hours you spend on the set, you’re twiddling your thumbs for at least nine of those hours.
If I’m a line producer or a production designer, and I get a script that has half an hour of screen time in a snowy location, I immediately imagine hours of difficult equipment movement in the environment, on top of a continuity nightmare from day to day, including having snow machines on standby in case things unexpectedly warm up, and I strenuously argue for a soundstage where we can fake the exterior and have total control over the environment.
You may have heard about John Carpenter making his Thing in the early 1980s, building a set in Alaska during the summer and then going back in the winter when it was snowed under. That’s a famous story specifically because it was such an unusual approach (man bites dog, as it were). But also, if you look at the movie, the actual shot-to-shot continuity on the exteriors is limited. Moment to moment, scene to scene, they go inside and outside and inside again, so discontinuities are less visible.
Knowing how these kinds of things are filmed, it makes perfect sense to me that they’d want to construct their snowscapes inside.
“The Pacific” is less focused on the war than “Band of Brothers,” suffers from having many characters to follow, often centers on their uninteresting personal lives over the war, and sometimes comes off like a soap opera. That said, there are several excellent (and graphic) episodes involving the actual war in the Pacific that are quite harrowing. Overall, we were not as impressed as we were with BOB, but it’s still a good watch, despite its flaws.
The Pacific was much more morally ambiguous than BoB was, things like the shooting of prisoners as contrasted with very weird stuff like using the skull of a dead Japanese soldier as a quasi mini basketball hoop. When I read stuff like that, I felt little urge to stream it or buy the discs, while I’ll regularly rewatch BoB.
With the recent 8th Air Force miniseries Masters of the Air (I am currently finishing the book note), my hope is that the US Navy finally gets its due, but I can imagine it being the most expensive (adj. for inflation) than the other three. If it were up to me, I’d focus on 3 groups of sailors: a squadron of carrier-based bombers, one of fighters, and the patrols of a Gato-class submarine and its crew. The other series never had any higher-ranking officers on screen I believe, such as Ike, Doolittle, or Nimitz.
The relatively poor reviews of MotA tho may mean that such never comes to fruition even if someone was thinking about doing such a project. The RAF probably should get its due as well-I am ignorant of any possible British projects past present or future however.
What many (the vast majority of) people don’t realize is that anyone awarded the combat infantry badge for WWII (that is, was in the infantry and was in combat for at least the briefest of moments) was retroactively awarded a Bronze Star in 1947. Apart from that, it’s also a lot easier for an officer to get a medal as a matter of course (as opposed to extraordinary effort) than it is for most.
Or, maybe Sobel really did something exceptional. IIRC, one of the real life NCOs portrayed prominently in the series (Lipton, I think) said he felt Sobel got a bad rap, and I can respect that. A lot of media designed for popular consumption could be cited for lacking nuance in its depiction of officers, and particularly unpopular officers, whether it’s historical fiction or space opera. Not that I was ever an unpopular officer—oh heavens no!
…honest.
I am sure there is a website cataloguing several, but to me the most egregious error (that I know of) is (spoiler for episode 3 if you haven’t seen it):
the series devotes an entire episode to the story of Private Blithe, who goes from reluctant fighter to born again killer, only to have the episode inform us that the solider died of wounds, when in fact the soldier recovered and went on to have a distinguished career in the military. This error was in the book. Too bad Ambrose didn’t think to plagiarize that section from a more reliable source.
I think you’re misremembering the book. Sobel was supposed to train Easy Company and also lead them into combat. He was a hard-ass training officer, but he focused on minor matters as well - the book described him as a “classic chickenshit”.
He was also terrible at many of the skills required of a combat officer - he couldn’t read a map for example.
As a result of the dissatisfaction with him, Sink made him the CO of a Parachute Jumping School that had just been opened. But that was in England, where the 501st was stationed and training for D-Day.
In the book, Ambrose tells the stories about Spiers shooting his own non-com and killing a group German POWs. But those are all stories that were told about him, no one would admit seeing it themselves. But in the series, they filmed the murder of the prisoners and presented it as fact.
And regarding your second paragraph - there’s an enormous difference between not giving the enemy a chance to surrender, and murdering them hours after they have surrendered.
You’re absolutely right. I should have made that distinction.
Once prisoners are received they have to be treated well, fed and housed.
They never explained why Spiers executed prisoners.
Wild Bill Guarnere was notified that his brothers were killed just before D Day. He was looking for revenge. AFAIK he’s not shown harming prisoners in the series. He was probably ruthless on the battlefield.
The Pacific is more unsettling. I’ve only see shorts like this one. I don’t want to watch the series.
Does the Army have a website to look up service records?
I knew a guy who was in the 506th and parachuted into France on/the night of D-Day. I was told he was in Easy Company, maybe as part of its HQ. He passed away about 20 years ago.
The only time I heard him speak about his experience was when we were having crabs at a friend’s house. There was a woman from England and she was talking about Europe and France. She asked him if had ever been to France.
Vet: “I have. I didn’t much care for it.”
English woman: “How could you not like France? It’s such a great country to visit.”
Vet: “It’s not so great when the Germans are trying to fucking kill you!”
Technically, the series did not show Spiers shooting prisoners. They showed him handing out cigarettes after Malarkey talked to someone from the same state (who allegedly IRL worked across the street from him). Gunshots were heard off screen. The men discussed it a few times. But the implication is clear.
And it was both. He was supposed to train them until they went into combat, and then he was supposed to command and lead them in the field. It’s not like the original plan was to replace him once the company was ready - he was the CO of Easy company and expected to be so when they went into combat.
Halfway through the series, while indoors after the Bulge as the convent choir sings, they show the men Easy Company has lost (more than half of the starting number) fading away. I wonder if they were consciously channeling the well known quote about old soldiers. Or just increasing the drama and gravitas.
My understanding is that even most of the lower officers were “civilian volunteers”. No doubt they brought a wide range of abilities and aptitude to the job. Sobel may have been as much of a clueless martinet as depicted. But it’s not like he was given a chance to respond. Or even that volunteering in itself was not noble, if he did so. But the spaghetti stunt was low.
I wanted to look up my Dad’s service records. I think his Navy records are available. He switched to Air Force after my birth. I haven’t tried requesting them.
There was a huge fire that wiped out a lot of Army and Air Force military service records.
I’ve wondered how badly that limited Stephen Ambrose’s research. It’s a crap shoot whether someone’s records survived.
Snowy spots are hard to find in England, with any reliability. And it also snows on the approach roads, and the trunk roads. The HS146 hanger at Hatfield, where they filmed it, is climate controlled so they could have it any temperature they liked.
