Mrs. Six and I are in the middle of the DVD set (ready for disc 4 tomorrow) and we have some questions or disagreements about some things that have happened.
Was Captain Sobel completely incompetent, or was he a good drill instructor who just fell apart in the field?
Why did Captain Sobel create the trumped up charge against his executive officer? The charge was so obviously bogus (he wanted to court-martial his second for being 15 minutes late to inspect a latrine) that it could only make him look stupid; this was tantamount to career suicide. Was he trying to get transferred out of combat, or was he just too dense to realize how this would play?
Captain Winters obviously didn’t want the promotion that took him away from Easy company. Could he have declined the promotion? Also, it seems extraordinarily stupid to me to take one of your best field commanders out of the field and put him behind a desk. Wouldn’t his skill at commanding troops in combat be a good reason to keep him there?
The movie certainly implies that Sobel was completely incompetent, petty, anal retentive and erratic. It was more surviving him that made them into a good unit then his leadership
I always thought it stemmed from a couple of reasons. Winters was not his favorite (you saw the look on Sobels face when he was told to promote Winters I assume) then he was threatened by Winters competence coupled with his humiliation with the fence cutting incident caused him to lash out at the only one he could think to blame.
From what I understand declining a promotion is career suicide in the military (could be wrong). Even if it wasn’t I doubt they’d give him much choice as stretched as they were for commanders that didn’t get shot already.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m still waiting for question #3 to show up.
As far as #4 goes, I think that Winters was too good of a strategist to risk in daily field operations. I’m sure that Easy suffered without him (without spoiling things for you later on), but on the whole I imagine the battalion benefited from his experience.
Sobel was an incompetent field commander. Obviously his anal retentive personality made him a good slave master and that made Easy Company tough. Like some elite units say “Sweat saves blood”.
He was just too perfecionist to cut slack… anal personality.
Where is THREE !!! YOU INCOMPETENT DUMB&$%# AHASAAFAfA
(Joking joking ! Imitating Sobel… skipping numbers isn’t a big mistake afterall… strange… but not a problem)
The allies sent several great commanders and pilots to the rear echelons and home… I suppose it was natural once you get promoted. Wasteful I agree. Thou with pilots it was good… they helped training newbies. As for Winters… it was just emotional attachment to his men.
The book describes in detail the unprecedented level of training that the men of Easy Company received under Bernard Sobel at Camp Toccoa. If I recall, Dick Winters specifically credited Sobel as essential to that training. I got the impression that Sobel was an excellent training company commander who really didn’t know how to command men in combat, and by transferring Sobel overseas, the Army did a great disservice to itself, Sobel, and the men he commanded. Had he remained at Camp Toccoa, commanding successive companies as they went through training, Sobel would be remembered in a much more positive light.
Soble felt he was losing control of his command, and he needed to send a message to reestablish his authority. This worked well in peacetime, and even stateside, but had no place in wartime.
At the time, Winters wasn’t particularly concerned about his career in the millitary; in fact, Ambrose described our troops in WWII as citizen solders, non career professional millitary who served their country in its time of need and moved on. I suppose he could have avoided the promotion, but his commanding officer told him he was needed at headquarters, so he went. He wanted to stay with Easy Company, but it wasn’t about what Winters wanted; it was about where Winters could do his duty by best serving the war effort.
#1 I’ve read several interviews with survivors (not Easy Company as I recall) who were trained by Sobel and to a man hated him as a person but credited the training as saving their lives.
#2 My opinion is that he resented Winters’ popularity with the men and tried to use the BS court martial as payback.
#4 As SuperNelson said, he went because he was a good officer and that was where it was thought he could do the most good. In many of the memoirs I’ve read, leaving the men to go to a higher command was never easy for a good officer.
Question 3 was deleted when I was rearranging questions to match the order of the miniseries.
The officers who train the soldiers at the beginning–the General, Office Space Guy, Sobel, and Winters–all travel with the soldiers once they complete training. I thought that training and field command were generally separate entities, ie, the officers that trained the troops stateside would train subsequent classes of troops, which would be assigned to field commanders upon completion of their training. Was I misinformed about this, is it something that changed after WWII, or was this an exception for this particular group of officers and soldiers?
Everyone’s answered Questions 1 and 2 pretty well, but they’ve left something out on #4.
Winters didn’t get promoted to Major until the very end- he got reassigned to a new billet as the batallion commander for the batallion that Easy Co. was part of.
This wasn’t a “desk job”- if you’ve seen “We were Soldiers” or read the book, Col. Moore was a batallion commander in the Ia Drang fighting. Hardly a desk job, although there was probably more paperwork and less trigger-pulling than platoon or company command.
Plus, if Winters was as good of an officer as they imply, he was better employed at battalion command or higher- They knew he was excellent at a company level- why not try him at a higher level? He’d be able to use his excellence on a larger scale. Plus, as a Captain, they could still boot him back down to company command if he didn’t cut it.
