Band Of Brothers

“The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you’re already dead.” [The Band of Brothers] In 1942, the U.S. army assembled a volunteer parachute regiment to jump behind enemy lines. Embedded in this unit was a company of men who landed to fight at the forefront of the war in Europe. That company was Easy Company. The brave men parachuted behind enemy lines in the early hours of D-Day in support of the landings at Utah beach and much more. Doing so, the company sustained one of the highest casualty rates of WWII. Although there were a few minute inaccuracies within Band of Brothers, the show is well produced and accurately depicts the training of the paratroopers, the horrors of how the Jews were treated during the Holocaust, and the battles
We see pilots flying too fast, too low, deviating from their designated flight paths, panicking in the face of fire, etc. The problem with these portrayals in the show is that they are based upon interviews with 101st Veterans only, not pilots or other crew members of the C-47’s that took part in the airborne drops at Normandy. “Once we get into combat, they only people you can trust is yourself and the fella next to you.” [Lambert] Flying an aircraft in 1944, especially at night and in combat, is not a mindless task, and it still took a lot of skill and effort to get the majority of Airborne Forces over Normandy in one piece, regardless if they hit the correct drop zones or not. The paratroopers knew they had to be “prepared to die for each other; more important, they were prepared to kill for each other” (“The Society”). Missed drop zones did happen and mistakes were made by the troop carrier pilots, but their portrayal as seen in Band of Brothers is not necessarily fair nor accurate in regards to how things really unfolded during the Normandy Operation.
Other inaccuracies appear throughout the show as well. For example, is shown where Blithe (paratrooper) is wounded in the neck during the Normandy campaign and then later dying of his wounds in a hospital four years later. “I’ve thought about this often. That man and I might’ve been good
army. “And he wandered into the woods, found a barn and slept for a couple of days.” [Shimmin] Apart from the early American confrontations with the German assault, there is also the absence of the actual weather conditions in which the real battle was fought, such as cold weather and snow; there is no trace of snow at all in the major tank battle scene. Hitler launched a massive offensive into the Ardennes woods of Belgium, which caught allied forces by surprise. “There are many kinds of victory. For the German Army to survive, for us to remain in uniform - that is our victory.” [Smith] The series does realistically capture some major aspects of the battle, representing how inexperienced American replacement troops positioned in the Ardennes were initially overpowered and how confused the situation