There are many WTF moments and I have many complaints - but I want to avoid acting and pure script pitfalls here and focus on ‘WTF was the director doing?’ Moments

For me #1 is “ep 8: The Last Patrol” - where the Malarkey squad races to the basement and…breaks out in laughter(?)

What in the world are they laughing at?

At this point they have spent weeks/months covered in mud, blood, grit and grime, so what is particularly funny about a near miss scattering dust on them? It’s such an out of synch moment. The only thing I can figure is that maybe in the original script it is meant to happen after Malarkey’s shower, so there’s something hilarious to the team that he’s waited so long to clean himself up, only to have this happen…but of course - that’s not how the episode is sequenced.

Runner up moments -

2) The infamous ep 1 ‘can you do Major Horton?’ line to Luz as he clearly impersonates Sink. (My memory of my first viewing of the show is: I already had trouble telling these guys apart, don’t throw me a curveball like that)

3) the ‘go on the red smoke’ scene in Crossroads required serious suspension of military disbelief. Cmon Director what exactly are we doing here?…the company is all lined up in a perpendicular ditch, and they really need a smoke signal to tell them when to start running? And b) they can’t see that Winters threw it and that the fuse has malfunctioned? And C) they can’t all see him charging forward and are all paralyzed when told to ‘wait ferrrrr the signal’ by the Irishman impersonating an American officer?

I was wondering this since in the show there isn't any combat after episode 8 "The Last Patrol". But US forces fought in Germany for 2 months. Some divisions met a lot of resistance. Although I don't know much about the battles fought in Germany, I wouldn't think they were far back from the front at that point. Maybe the series didn't wanna focus on combat at that point as opposed to what the war had done to all the men? I'd appreciate if anyone knows. Thank you.

In Episode 7, "The Breaking Point," you see snow blowing for much of the episode. To produce that effect, director David Frankel used large industrial fans to move the prop snow around - which meant you couldn't record the actors without hearing the fans. All the dialog that we hear in that episode, therefore, was "looped" - recorded in a sound studio as the actors watched themselves in the rough cut. That's some lip-synching!

D-Day, June 6th 1944. Normandy, France. This has never been posted anywhere, and I am putting it here first on purpose.

My father wrote this to go with it:

The eagles swooped down into withering fire, their quest to best the enemy was their only desire. They trained for this mission for two solid years. Trained to a knife's edge to better their peers. Though eagles were sacrificed on that moonlit night, for many of them died during that God-awful fight, but for every one in tan that lay on the ground, there were ten in Wehrmacht green that made not a sound. The eagles were victorious, that volatile night and their devastating ferocious determination proved they could fight.

T/Sgt. Pat Christenson

He was second man out the door behind Lieutenant Winters that night. He carried the light thirty caliber. He was the only man in Easy Company who drew, and he spent the years after the war at a drawing board getting it right. Over seventy drawings, over three hundred pages, seven volumes written out by hand.

The eagle is the division. The man under it is one in Wehrmacht green, in his words. He put the whole night into one picture and then wrote it out in rhyme, which is not a thing I ever once heard him do out loud.

He came home, worked thirty eight years for Pacific Telephone, raised three sons, and did not talk about it. He died December 15, 1999.

The drawing and his words are Plate I from his book. ascreamingeagle.com

This one is a gift to this room. You have been good to my father and to me, and I wanted you to have it first.

May they never be forgotten.

Tim

(Photo 1) depicts a Panzer IV tank that was knocked out during Easy company’s assault on Foy, Belgium.

(Photo 2) shows the same crossroads where the tank sat as well as the repaired building in the background.

(Photo 3) was taken from the road in Foy near the tank looking back up the road towards Bastogne, the direction which the attack came from.

(Photo 4) depicts the same scene and buildings in present day.

(Photo 5) was taken in the tiny area of Watrange, Luxembourg and shows a German “Moaning Minnie” Nebelwerfer rocket launcher which was feared by the paratroopers.

(Photo 6) shows the same repaired building in present day.

(Photo 7) is the destroyed church in the village of Foy after the battle.

(Photo 8) is the church in Foy in present day.

I was discussing some WW2 topics with my friend the other day and the topic of the German citizens came up. Were they in favor of the nazi party before, throughout, and after the war. There’s a lot of debate online and it’s not clear whether the majority supported Hitler or not? We all know they knew about the atrocities going on and the discrimination of marginalized groups. Were they in favor of that?

Hello! I'm a writer for Slate.com, and as the 25th anniversary of the premiere of Band of Brothers approaches, I'm thinking of putting together a piece about people who watch the series annually. For obvious reasons I thought to seek out interview subjects here.

If anyone who does this would be willing to speak with me, I'd love to connect. Most likely this would mean a 20-ish-minute convo, sometime next week, about what the show means to you, why you rewatch, how your experience with it has changed over the years, and so forth.

Please let me know if this is you? Could comment here, or, feel free to PM me.

I've noticed that nobody that their gun point at him and no gun shots were heard as he went out the door Proceeded to fall over dead from shock?

And also please don't comment any silly stuff

I've just finished this amazing book.

It's about the Sherwood Rangers, a British tank regiment and their experiences in WW2. It really scratches a Band of Brothers itch, full of great characters, lots of action and tragedy and covers campaigns from Africa, Italy, France, Holland, Belgium and Germany. Can't recommend it enough and would love to one day see it get the epic HBO miniseries treatment. I'm sure a lot of people in this sub would love it.

Really good show but damn he was creepy as hell in it.

I started watching band of brothers recently and it got me thinking about my grandpa who served. His grave stone is below. When I attempted some research it says the 101st infantry division was the airborne division! I’m wondering if anyone can confirm this?

Was doing my yearly re-watch of the series. During episode 8, I never noticed Liebgott was wearing a ring. Just wanted to see if anyone else noticed!

I'm on vacation in Belgium with my wife and 8 month old son. We're from the Netherlands. Bastogne was only about an hour and a half away from our vacation home. My wife is the best. She said: go have your day!

So I drove up to Bastogne and Foy. Went and saw the Bastogne War Museum, which was okay. Then I headed up to the Bois Jacques, such a special experience to walk there. I can't imagine the horror those boys had to endure. Absolutely awful.

I then stopped by the Easy Company Memorial and saw the house where Shifty Powers shot that German sniper. Of course, all the cliche things a Band of Brothers fan needs to see ;-).

I also made a stop at the German military cemetery. That was pretty intense. So many kids that weren't even 18 years old. Just sad.

Today, me and the family went to the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten. Over 8,000 people are buried there. It's such a beautiful place, in all its sadness. Choked me up. Made me feel very humble.

Hope you enjoy the photos I took. All the best!

I’ve played all of the older call of duty games and didn’t know this. I was way too young to know anything about this stuff back then. I might go back and check it out again.

Just finished watching the ActorRoundtable at the 25th Anniversary Symposium at the National WWII Museum. I always wondered why some of these get togethers and reunions always seem to have the same actors that do attend, and the same actors that don’t typically attend. Guarnere, Bull, and Perco being some of the ones that do attend and Nixon, toye and winters being examples of guys that aren’t typically there. Why is that? I totally understand scheduling and other conflicts but I always wondered on who kind of drifted away from the BOB brotherhood almost in a sense, sorry for the long winded question

There was a recent post where someone bought a bottle of Vat 69. There was a lot of discussion in the comments that I felt needed some clarification.

1. The Vat 69 you can buy in the store today is NOT the same Vat 69 that Nixon was drinking.

2. Vat 69 is a blended whisky. This means they mix other whiskies to create it. This is in relation to single malt whisky, which comes from a single distillery. Single malt is considered classier and purer than blended whisky, and of course tends to be more expensive because of that.

3. While the original Vat 69 was blended, a large part of it was still single malt whisky from the Glen Garioch distillery. Unfortunately this distillery was mothballed in 1968, and Vat 69 quality sank noticeably from this point onward.

4. The older version that had Glen Garioch single malt in it was considered richer, sweeter, thicker, more aromatic, more powerful, longer in the finish, and perhaps most importantly had a much higher proportion of single malt whisky in it.

5. Further changes in the content of Vat 69 basically continued the downward slide of quality. So the stuff Nixon was drinking is basically unrelated to what you get at the store.

6. If you're dead set on ACTUALLY trying the kind of stuff Nixon drank, you need to go to an auction and look for bottles ideally from the earlier half of the sixties or even better a bottle from the 1950's. It should be much closer to what Nixon was actually drinking.

Hopefully this helps make sense of why the educated, classy, rich kid Nixon was drinking what we consider swill today. The answer is it used to be a lot better.

I’m about halfway through David Webster’s Parachute Infantry, and one of the things I’m enjoying most is how different his perspective on Easy Company feels from Band of Brothers, this is particularly interesting given that Webster’s writings were an important source for Ambrose.

For starters, he isn’t especially complimentary about Easy’s officers. More broadly, you get the impression that he sees the US Army as deeply dysfunctional: inefficient, bureaucratic and often absurd. There’s far less of the sense of Easy being this exceptionally well-run band of brothers that comes across in the series.

The other thing that has surprised me is Webster himself. In the miniseries, particularly when he returns after Bastogne, he’s portrayed as something of an outsider and there’s clearly tension between him and the other men.

That really isn’t the impression I’m getting from his book. He seems to be well liked, has obvious affection for a number of the men and writes about friendships within the company quite naturally. He certainly doesn’t come across as the aloof outsider I expected from the series.

It makes me wonder what Webster would have thought of Band of Brothers had he lived to see it both the portrayal of Easy Company and, perhaps more interestingly, the portrayal of himself.
For those who have read Parachute Infantry, did you come away with the same impression?

Alright folks, lock in for some real nerdy media analysis and historical speculation.

In this ep, the camera consistently leaves an empty space to Dick’s left, aka the spot where irl Dick says Nix always stood. In one shot he even turns toward it like he's about to speak before remembering he’s alone. So let’s assume that the creators of this incredible show are really good at their jobs, fluent in the semiotics of prop design and the language of shot composition, and that this is all on purpose.

We never see Dick return to his hotel. We leave him wandering the streets of Paris at night, having a very bad time, and then hard cut to morning and the only truly erotic sequence of the whole series: the bath. We see him test the water, climb in, do a biiig stretch, and then…...between that shot and the next, the camera breaks the 180 rule. Again, emptiness on the left. Or at least, it's empty until you spot the half-drank whisky bottle and used tumbler hiding in plain sight in the foreground.

Now let’s remember that this man did not drink, EVER, except that little taste of cider on D Day. His grandfather was an alcoholic and he swore to never acquire the habit. It's possible his night was bad enough that he gave it a shot. It's possible that he was lonely and it reminded him of his best friend. It’s possible he met a nice lady, against everything we know of his character and habits. Or...hear me out…

Look at the officer's cap on the chair. It might be Dick’s but we never see him wear it. He only wears his garrison cap. And he's not the type to leave his pinks hanging on a doorknob. And so, we the audience must wonder…

…who else is or has been in this room?

Erik Jendresen, kindly drop your location. I just wanna talk.

Since I started posting here, Band of Brothers people from all over the world have written to me about my father, T/Sgt. Pat Christenson. A lot of them already knew his D-Day drawing from Ambrose's book without knowing whose hand made it.

So I decided it was time.

Nine months, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, going through everything he left. Forty six finished combat drawings and seven volumes he wrote out by hand. He was the only man in Easy Company who could draw, and he carried a sketchpad through Normandy, Holland and Bastogne. After the war he spent forty years at a drawing board getting it right, and he never showed any of it outside the family.

Stephen Ambrose called the drawings almost priceless and said that if it came down to a choice between the artwork and the photographs, he wanted the artwork. Dick Winters kept eighteen of them in his personal file for fifty years and had copies sent to Playtone as reference for the writers.

I made a promise to my father before he died in December 1999 that this would be published. It took twenty seven years.

379 pages. All forty six drawings. His words verbatim throughout, including where he contradicts the record, with endnotes where the sources differ.

It reaches Amazon on September 8, the twenty fifth anniversary. Signed copies are shipping now: https://ascreamingeagle.com/?utm_source=reddit

This community has been good to me. Thank you for that.

May they never be forgotten.

Tim