"BAND OF BROTHERS" IS BACK ON HBO
I was going through available shows on Max and discovered HBO has “Band of Brothers” back available. So I downloaded the series, which haven’t watched since it first came out the week after 9/11. I watched Episode One tonight.
My memory of the series is right. The ten episodes are the ten best war movies ever made. Perfectly written, perfectly directed, perfectly acted, every technical detail exactly right. Episode One, which introduces all the characters and leaves us at the end in a dark C-47 headed across the English Channel to Normandy, is written by Tom Hanks and directed by Phil Alden Robinson (writer-director of “Field of Dreams”). To me as a screenwriter, it’s the best series premiere episode ever.
It may sound strange to suggest this as a show to watch at this time of year, but it seems to me it’s the perfect show to watch over the next 31 days. Given what we’re about to face, it’s good to celebrate who we are and who we came from, because the next four years are going to be as hard as those 11 months between D-Day and V-E day were for them. The “Band of Brothers,” the men of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101t Airborne Division, are good stand-ins for who we came from.
As a World War II historian, as a screenwriter, you can’t do better. So catch it.
This was my dad's story. It means a lot to me. As the master sergeant and jump master on one of the planes loaded with equipment and 101st paratroopers that were to lay out communications in advance of the invasion on D-Day, he and two other units were dropped off course into an orchard of sorts and after some skirmishes with the enemy, ended up surrounded by Germans. He spent the rest of the war in a German camp, as a wounded POW. Others not so lucky, went on to fight the rest of the war, which Band of Brothers tells brilliantly. It's ironic that being interred in a camp kept him alive, isn't it?
I should also say Spielberg and Hanks were usually as close to the technical stuff as they could get. As an armor modeler and former history author on military technical subjects, I could easily spot the FV432-based StuG III G and T-55-based Jagdpanther in one episode, and the T-34-based Tiger I in another, but they tried and the effect was very realistic. In the Peleliu airfield scene in "The Pacific" they had two running perfect mockups of Japanese Type 95 light tanks and an M4A2 USMC Sherman. Today, 20+ years later, there are far more and better mockups being used in movies, but these guys led the way. I do not know what happened to "Masters of the Air", except to think that one, no one involved in the production of the series had any knowledge at all of aeronautics, aerodynamics, aircraft construction or combat damage. Didn't ANYONE watch at least some actual combat footage show how B-17s really behaved, or how they fell out of formation when hit, or what combat damage really looks like in a solidly-built bomber? What we got in most cases was damage that looked like crows had pecked at cake icing. And the blown-up planes gently drifting down, in an atmosphere churned to an invisible froth by hundreds of propellers - or wings separating from planes and flying alongside them in formation..... Or the ground shots where the flying control surfaces were not aligned correctly - it was all so sloppy, and a waste of excellent art set design and uniforms, vehicles and other paraphernalia that was done very well. Here's a YT video that show the better way to demonstrate this, an RC He 111: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjncVG2Ws5U See how even this small plane comes apart and how the pieces flip and tumble and the wing rotates around the heavy engine.....