I’m watching the series again and one of the more haunting characters from the film, for me, was Blithe. Prompted by my second viewing to look up hysterical blindness, I ended up seeing this entry on the wikipedia page for the actual Albert Blithe:
I own the blu-ray box set and watched all of the extra stuff but don’t remember seeing that correction. I’ll look for it this time.
What I found haunting and compelling about the character in the film is that he was portrayed as a bit of a mess out in the battlefield, dazed and confused before, during, and after battle after battle, wandering around and acting not quite right, dismissed/tolerated as inferior by other men in Easy Company, and then he dies in 1948 as the result of getting shot in the neck in battle.
In actuality (again, according to Wikipedia), the guy enlisted 2 more times after WWII, made over 600 jumps, was Trooper of the Year in 1958, and died of a perforated ulcer in 1967, buried with full honors at Arlington.
The error and the creative license that it implies on the part of Stephen Ambrose seem particularly egregious to me. I feel bad for Blithe’s family and their efforts to correct the facts and his portrayal. I’d be quite curious to somehow be able know how far off the portrayal in the book and film was (aside from the inaccuracies about his death) compared to the recollections of the veterans interviewed by Ambrose and any documents related to his research. And in turn, how for those recollections and documents may have been from who Blithe really was, if we can ever truly know such things about other people.
In the book, ISTR that Blithe’s disorientation and confusion was attributed to the air-sickness medication that the Airborne troops were given for the first time before the jump into Normandy. Some genius/idiot decided they should be given the medication before combat even though they’d never had it before, and had made many training jumps under simulated combat conditions, with those getting consistently airsick being transferred out. Many troopers had a bad reaction to the medication itself. Same with the leg bags - something they’d never trained with that was handed to them right before the real jump, only to find they had a tendency to tear loose when you exited the airplane, resulting in lots of unarmed soldiers (including Dick Winters) wandering around the French countryside.
I thought that was probably the best made and most compelling episode in the series, so I was also a little disappointed to find out the story was factually inaccurate. I didn’t feel that cheated though, as I expected a certain amount of dramatic license. On an emotional level, it felt authentic, if that makes any sense.
I also feel sorry for the family for the way in which his story was misrepresented.
Blithe, in the end, ended up a good soldier. IIRC, he volunteered to lead a scouting probe of a house and was shot. To me, that scene meant he was no longer a mess and a good man/soldier to have in the company…
No, I remember that scene too. Didn’t somebody get shot (not Blithe)?
Winters being calm and accepting with Blithe’s blindness is one of the standout scenes of the series for me. How did Winters know to do that? Was it part of his personality – if he was judgmental he hid it well – or was it covered in his training?
That’s how I remember it, and it’s what I got from the scene, that he’d gotten over whatever issued he’d had in the beginning, and was going to turn into a very good soldier. Then he got shot in the neck, making his transformation tragic.
I can’t remember where I heard this, so I have no cite and no idea if it’s accurate, but part of the reason Blithe was killed off in the book was the other Easy Company men did think he died - he really was injured in battle, but returned to war when he recovered, just didnt’ end up serving with the same men. They never saw him again, and assumed he died.
In the film he just starts to come out of his cloud, he kills an enemy soldier and takes the rare flower off of his body, then volunteers for a patrol to check out a farmhouse, where he is shot in the neck.
For me, the jarring part of the error with respect to the film is that the haunting mood is underscored by the fatalism that Blithe never recovers from his neck injury and dies from it.
It makes good cinema but there was no such tragic fatalism in this man’s actual life. The creative license that I have a problem with is milking that false fatalism for all that it is worth, even if it made for compelling entertainment, because the film was supposed to be a well-researched and a portrayal that was striving for accuracy and authenticity.
I would not have any problem whatsoever if Ambrose had just created a fictional character to be the bearer of the drama that he used Blithe as the vehicle to deliver.
Apparently, he attended the first Airborne reunion but none after that. And even if all of those interviewed though he had died from his injuries, not doing follow up fact checking for a featured character for such an undertaking is just really really sloppy.
BOB had a very good 11th episode that they hardly ever show - it is interviews with the real vets. After HBO showed the full series the last 2 months the 11th episode was shown on Direct TV channel 101. I assume it is on the box sets.
Lordy, I can’t believe I’m defending Ambrose here, but…
My copy of Band of Brothers (book) mentions Blithe all of twice in the index. Neither place mentions that he died – although it does have the hysterical blindness episode. Scanning the Postwar Careers chapter, I can’t find mention of Blithe’s fate. So I’d lay this particular fiction on the miniseries writers.
Much as I lay the character-assassination they did to Webster for the sake of story.
Now, Ambrose did apparently get all the details wrong about Floyd Talbert going all PTSD mountain-man before dying. Although that gaffe didn’t make it into the miniseries.
edit: And, yes, the DVDs have the veteran interviews. That’s the best part of the miniseries, really.
I can vouch that it is in there. It’s only there if you have the “In the Field…” special feature activated. It’s not included in the normal episode as they didn’t change anything from the originally aired versions.
What do you mean? I’ve watched BoB multiple times & haven’t noticed any character assassination. The episode The Last Patrol indicates that some members of Easy Co. thought he was goldbricking because of the length of his absence after being wounded, but it doesn’t state that it was true. If anything, the episode portrayed Webster as being very concerned about the ragged state he found Easy Co. in.
I mean that the actual person Webster bears utterly no resemblance to the character that they made up for the miniseries. Webster’s own autobiography – Parachute Infantry – makes the difference between the reality and fiction quite apparent.
The real Webster was not on the Last Patrol, and never would have volunteered. He comes across as somewhat of a goldbricker and a whiner in his own book. He certainly would not have freaked out and pulled a gun on a German baker out of rage over finding the concentration camp.
Ambrose had read Webster’s autobiography in researching his own book, so it looks like the re-write of reality for the Last Patrol was done by the miniseries writers in the cause of “better story”. Although, really, that’s the worst episode of the bunch.
Incidentally, I believe that Joe Liebgott’s kids were also irritated at their dad’s portrayal as Jewish, since he’d been raised and passed as Catholic, apparently to avoid being perceived as Jewish.
Webster’s yelling at the German soldiers they were passing on the road after the war was starting to wind-down, and his apparent bias that anyone living in Germany was by definition guilty of looking the other way from Nazi atrocities, and his peripheral involvement with (i.e. not preventing) the murder of the man in Austria…and there may be another one or two seeming character flaws that I’m forgetting…I thought it was a compelling turning of the tables with Webster experiencing both ends of the spectrum of irrational hatred, but it doesn’t necessarily shine a positive light on him.
Yeah, that’s the stuff. It’s like whenever the writers needed a PoV character to do something to express what the audience may be feeling (yell at Germans, volunteer for patrol), Webster was their go-to guy. Even though it made his characterization erratic, at best.
Although the real Webster really wasn’t fond of the Germans, he wasn’t the sort of guy to go shouting at random Germans or waving guns in their faces.
I really recommend his autobiography, though. He was a good writer, and his personality comes through very clearly. Which I find irritating, because I like the guy in the book, despite his flaws; the guy in the miniseries just annoys me.
Not necessarily more sympathetic. I liked the real Webster just fine after reading his book. I think the miniseries is inconsistent in his portrayal. But the big thing is that the guy in the miniseries bears no resemblance to the real Webster.
Which is a problem for a miniseries purporting to be depicting real events.
I vaguely recall one of the other veterans’ books – maybe Winters’ – mentioning that Johnny Martin really didn’t like Cobb at all, and finally got him busted out of the unit after the events in the Last Patrol. You can see him being taken away by the MPs in the miniseries as Easy Co pulls out in that episode, actually.