Krysta Desper
Mr. Connors
U.S. History I CPS 10 C
17 January 2013
Band of Brothers
In the summer of 1942, young men in Army training at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, are given an opportunity to be part of a unique unit of paratroopers. This unit offers $50 dollars a month extra for hazardous duty pay, which draws a lot of the volunteers. These men begin a very rigorous training regimen under Captain Sobel, whom most of the men come to hate. Their training includes basic infantry skills - use and maintenance of various weapons, map reading, and communications. They also practice jumping with parachutes, beginning with towers of varying heights, then to the actual jump from an airplane. The hardest part of their training is a run they must make, up to the top of Mount Currahee, which is an Indian name that means We Stand Alone Together.
After several long months of this training, the men of Easy Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, are shipped to Uppottery, England, where they continue their training. They are being prepared for the greatest military maneuver ever undertaken; the D-Day invasion of Normandy. The 506 is to parachute behind the German lines and work their way back towards the beach, to meet the Allies there, and hopefully cut off German supply lines to the front in the process. On June 6, 1944, the invasion comes, after having been postponed for bad weather. The drops do not go well, due to anti-aircraft fire and low visibility, but as the men hit the ground, they begin to regroup, and eventually, the beaches are secured, and the company is under the leadership of Lt. Dick Winters. Now it is time to beat the Germans back to Berlin.
Easy Company does not get much rest after D-Day. They are sent into Holland, as part of Operation Market-Garden. In an effort to get to Berlin, they are then sent to Bastogne, and are tasked to hold the front line in the dead of winter, with no food, no winter clothing, and little ammo. This becomes known as the Battle of the Bulge. After many casualties, they are finally relived, and then continue the push towards Germany. They finally fight their way in to Germany, where they come upon a concentration camp, one of many that are found as the Allies push into what was German territory. The company gets tasked to take Hitler's Eagle's Nest and the town of Berchtesgaden, the last stronghold of the SS, and as the German Army surrenders, many of the men begin preparing to ship out to the war in the Pacific. Finally, Japan, too, surrenders, and the war is over.
Easy Company had one of the highest casualty rates of all the Allied units. There were many battlefield commissions, including making Dick Winters a Major, and battallion leader. Their unit was disbanded after the war, in honor of their accomplishments. For the ones that made it back, we get a brief glimpse of thier lives back at home, how they took their experiences and lived their lives after being a part of one of the greatest forces in all of military history. This is an intimate look at how these men came together and made it through the worst the Germans had, how they became a band of brothers.
Full disclosure: I watched the miniseries before I read the book. And maybe that’s a good thing, since I wasn’t picking at the miniseries, comparing it to the book. As far as I could tell, the miniseries was a pretty faithful adaptation. But I digress. I come to discuss the book, not the miniseries.
What makes Band of Brothers such a remarkable book is that the stories are true. Men really fought with this sort of bravery. They really endured these harsh, unbearable conditions. These men from all over the United States were largely ordinary, blue-collar men, but they fought with extraordinary courage. Stephen Ambrose, the author, follows a few of these men with particular care, and his telling of their personal war stories adds a human element to the historical accounts.
Stephen Ambrose spent years gathering all of the information for this book. He got to know many of the men he wrote about, and heard these stories from their own lips. Despite receiving conflicting accounts regarding certain events (which he discloses), he writes about them as faithfully as he can.
Ambrose also writes directly; his language isn’t too flowery, which is appropriate, considering the horror of war. He matter-of-factly describes the grim realities of war and, in doing so, echoes the matter-of-factness that many veterans show when they describe their experiences in the trenches. They don’t see that they’ve done anything particularly heroic. They simply fought hard because it was the right thing to do.
Despite the aforementioned, I found Band of Brothers to be a deeply frustrating book to read. On the one hand, the story of Easy Company is more than compelling. The company featured prominently in D-Day, Operation Market Garden, The Battle of the Bulge and the famous siege at Bastogne, the liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps and the occupation of Goering’s Palace and Hitler’s Eagles Nest. Further, the fact that the Company was a volunteer unit formed before the war offered Band of Brothers a group of characters that readers could get to know and follow throughout Easy Company’s experiences.
However, these strengths are more than off-set by two major, and in my mind related, weaknesses in this book.
First, Ambrose completely over-eggs the dramatic story telling aspect of the book. I’m certainly not against using a dramatic narrative to improve the accessibility of history, in fact there’s clearly a lot of value in this, but at times Band of Brothers read like a teenage boy’s G.I. Joe Fan Fiction. I wish I was exaggerating in this regard, but take for example the following, not atypical paragraph:
“Get ‘em?” Winters yelled. Lorraine hit one with his tommy-gun, Winters aimed his M-1, squeezed and shot his man through the back of his head. Guarnere missed the third Jerry, but Winters put a bullet in his back. Guarnere followed that up by pumping the wounded man full of lead from his tommy-gun. The German kept yelling, “Help! Help!” Winters told Malarkey to put one through his head.” (Ambrose pg 98)
I’m sure I’m not the only non-American who was grimacing while reading the passages like this. What made this even more frustrating was that the substance of Easy Company’s war experiences were more than dramatic enough without the chauvinistic, melodramatic flourishes. The “Fan Boy” dramatic passages of the book were both embarrassing and unnecessary.
The second glaring weakness of Band of Brothers was the complete lack of perspective and objectivity that Ambrose shows throughout the book. Ambrose doesn’t just describe Easy Company’s exploits with added schlock, he views them through rose colored glasses tinted with the Stars and Stripes. As described in Band of Brothers, Easy Company were the All-American, pure of heart, defenders of democracy and the Free World. He’s so close to his subject that he is completely unable to position the Company’s actions within any kind of broader context or offer any meaningful insight into the experience of war.
It is clear from even a superficial reading that Band of Brothers is heavily dependent on the accounts of members of Easy Company. Even more disturbingly, Ambrose offers little or no critical perspective on these accounts. Jarringly, at one point, after quoting extensively from a Staff Sergeant’s account of a heroic battle field experience, Ambrose goes so far as to add the following post script:
“If that sounds idealised, it can’t be helped; that is the way Lipton and many others in Easy, and many others in the Airborne and through the American Army – and come to that, in the German and Red Armies too – fought the war.” (Ambrose)
Forgive me if I become skeptical when historians are defending “idealized” accounts of the experience of war. Ambrose genuinely sounds more like a cheer-leader than a historian at times in this book.
Even worse, Ambrose has been caught out a number of times copying extracts from veteran’s accounts almost verbatim. As Patricia Nelson Limerick, a professor of history at the University of Colorado has observed:
“You can’t get a more striking example of lack of critical distance from your sources than simply typing it into your own word processing program,”
After reading philosophically substantial war historians like Antony Beevor and Vassily Grossman, Band of Brothers feels more akin to reading a comic book account of war – a one-dimensional, triumphalist sketch of something far more complex and nuanced. I suppose Band of Brothers works as a piece of pop non-fiction written for an American audience – it certainly sold enough copies. But for those wanting a bit more substance and perspective and a bit less myth-making and self-congratulation, there are far better options.
Yet this book is a rare achievement. Kudos to Stephen Ambrose for trying to capture the remarkable story of Easy Company for generations of Americans to read, enjoy, and remember. Honestly, he could have done a lot worse. I recommend this to anyone who enjoys war stories, especially ones about World War II.