Band of Brothers (miniseries)

Band of Brothers is a 2001 American war drama miniseries based on historian Stephen E. Ambrose's 1992 non-fiction book of the same name. It was created by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, who also served as executive producers, and who had collaborated on the 1998 World War II film Saving Private Ryan. Episodes first aired on HBO from September 9, to November 4, 2001. Critically acclaimed, the series won the Emmy and Golden Globe awards for best miniseries.
The series dramatizes the history of "Easy" Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. It begins during Easy Company's paratrooper training and follows its participation in the Western Front of World War II. The events are based on Ambrose's research and recorded interviews with Easy Company veterans. The series took some literary license, adapting history for dramatic effect and series structure. The characters portrayed are based on members of Easy Company. Each episode begins with excerpts from interviews with some of the survivors, who are identified by name only at the end of the finale.
The title of the book and series comes from the St. Crispin's Day speech in William Shakespeare's play Henry V, delivered by King Henry before the Battle of Agincourt. Ambrose quotes a passage from the speech on his book's first page; this passage is recited by Carwood Lipton in the series finale.
Over the course of ten episodes, Band of Brothers depicts a dramatized account of Easy Company's exploits during World War II.
Episodes include their training at Camp Toccoa, the American airborne landings in Normandy, Operation Market Garden, the Siege of Bastogne, the invasion of Germany, the liberation of the Kaufering concentration camp, the taking of the Kehlsteinhaus (Eagle's Nest) in Berchtesgaden, the occupation of Germany, and finally the war's end.
Richard Winters is the central character, shown working to accomplish the company's missions and keep his men together and safe. While the series features a large ensemble cast, each episode generally focuses on a single character, following his action.
As the series is based on historical events, the fates of the characters reflect those of the persons on which they are based. Many either die or sustain serious wounds which lead to their being sent home. Other soldiers recover after treatment in field hospitals and rejoin their units on the front line. Their experiences, and the moral, mental, and physical hurdles they must overcome, are central to the story's narrative.
It follows the story from their initial training starting in 1942 to the end of World War II. They parachuted behind enemy lines in the early hours of D-Day in support of the landings at Utah beach, participated in the liberation of Carentan and again parachuted into action during Operation Market Garden. They also liberated a concentration camp and were the first to enter Hitler's mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden.
The series features a large ensemble cast.
The series was developed chiefly by Tom Hanks and Erik Jendresen, who spent months detailing the plot outline and individual episodes. Steven Spielberg served as "the final eye" and used Saving Private Ryan, the film on which he and Hanks had collaborated, to inform the series, although Jendresen served as showrunner. Accounts of Easy Company veterans, such as Donald Malarkey, were incorporated into production to add historic detail.
Band of Brothers was at the time the most expensive TV miniseries to have been made by any network. Its budget was about $125 million, or an average of $12.5 million per episode.
An additional $15 million was allocated for a promotional campaign, which included screenings for World War II veterans. One was held at Utah Beach, Normandy, where U.S. troops had landed on June 6, 1944. On June 7, 2001, 47 Easy Company veterans were flown to Paris and then traveled by chartered train to the site, where the series premiered. Chrysler was a sponsor, as its Jeeps were used in the series. Chrysler spent $5 million to $15 million on its advertising campaign, using footage from Band of Brothers. Each of the spots was reviewed and approved by the co-executive producers Hanks and Spielberg.
The BBC paid £7 million ($10.1 million) as co-production partner, the most it had ever paid for a bought-in program, and screened it on BBC Two. Originally, it was to have aired on BBC One but was moved to allow an "uninterrupted ten-week run", with the BBC denying that this was because the series was not sufficiently mainstream. Negotiations were monitored by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who spoke personally to Spielberg.
The series was shot over eight to ten months on Ellenbrook Fields, at Hatfield Aerodrome in Hertfordshire, England. This location had been used to shoot the film Saving Private Ryan. Various sets were built, including replicas on the large open field of 12 European towns, among them Bastogne, Belgium; Eindhoven, Netherlands; and Carentan, France. North Weald Airfield in Essex was used for shots depicting the take-offs for the D-Day Normandy landings.
The village of Hambleden, in Buckinghamshire, England, was used extensively in the early episodes to depict the company's training in England, as well as in later scenes. The scenes set in Germany and Austria were shot in Switzerland, in and near the village of Brienz in the Bernese Oberland, and at the nearby Hotel Giessbach.
To preserve historical accuracy, the writers conducted additional research. One source was the memoir of Easy Company soldier David Kenyon Webster, Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich (1994). This was published by LSU Press, following renewed interest in World War II and more than 30 years after his death in a boating accident. In Band of Brothers Ambrose quoted liberally from Webster's unpublished diary entries, with permission from his estate.
The production team consulted Dale Dye, a retired United States Marine Corps captain and consultant on Saving Private Ryan, as well as with most of the surviving Easy Company veterans, including Richard Winters, Bill Guarnere, Frank Perconte, Ed Heffron, and Amos Taylor. Dye (who portrays Colonel Robert Sink) instructed the actors in a 10-day boot camp at the Longmoor Military Camp in Hampshire, culminating with parachute training at RAF Brize Norton.
The production aimed for accuracy in the detail of weapons and costumes. Simon Atherton, the weapons master, corresponded with veterans to match weapons to scenes, and assistant costume designer Joe Hobbs used photos and veteran accounts.
Most actors had contact with the individuals they were to portray before filming, often by telephone. Several veterans came to the production site. Hanks acknowledged that alterations were needed to create the series: "We've made history fit onto our screens. We had to condense down a vast number of characters, fold other people's experiences into 10 or 15 people, have people saying and doing things others said or did. We had people take off their helmets to identify them, when they would never have done so in combat. But I still think it is three or four times more accurate than most films like this." As a final accuracy check, the veterans saw previews of the series and approved the episodes before they were aired.
Shortly after the premiere of the series, Tom Hanks asked Major Winters what he thought of Band of Brothers. The major responded, "I wish that it would have been more authentic. I was hoping for an 80 percent solution." Hanks responded, "Look, Major, this is Hollywood. At the end of the day we will be hailed as geniuses if we get this 12 percent right. We are going to shoot for 17 percent."
The liberation of one of the Kaufering subcamps of Dachau was depicted in episode 9 ("Why We Fight"); however, the 101st Airborne Division arrived at Kaufering Lager IV subcamp on the day after it was discovered by the 134th Ordnance Maintenance Battalion of the 12th Armored Division, on April 27, 1945. German historian and Holocaust researcher Anton Posset worked with Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks as a consultant, providing photographs of the liberators and documentation of the survivors' reports he had collected over the years. The camp was reconstructed in England for the miniseries.
It is uncertain which Allied unit was first to reach the Kehlsteinhaus. Several claim the honor, compounded by confusion with the town of Berchtesgaden, which was taken on May 4 by forward elements of the 7th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division. Reputedly members of the 7th went as far as the elevator to the Kehlsteinhaus, with at least one individual claiming he and a partner continued on to the top. However, the 101st Airborne maintains it was first both to Berchtesgaden and the Kehlsteinhaus. Elements of the French 2nd Armored Division, Laurent Touyeras, Georges Buis and Paul Répiton-Préneuf, were present on the night of May 4 to 5, and took several photographs before leaving on May 10 at the request of US command, and this is supported by testimonies of the Spanish soldiers who went along with them.
Major Dick Winters, who commanded the 2nd Battalion of the U.S. 506th PIR in May 1945, stated that they entered Berchtesgaden shortly after noon on May 5. He challenged competing claims stating, "If the 7th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Division was first in Berchtesgaden, just where did they go? Berchtesgaden is a relatively small community. I walked into the Berchtesgaden Hof with Lieutenant Welsh and saw nobody other than some servants. Goering's Officers' Club and wine cellar certainly would have caught the attention of a French soldier from LeClerc's 2nd Armored Division, or a rifleman from the U.S. 3rd Division. I find it hard to imagine, if the 3rd Division was there first, why they left those beautiful Mercedes staff cars untouched for our men."
Band of Brothers has a 94% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 8.1/10 and based on 34 reviews. The website's critics consensus reads: "Band of Brothers offers a visceral, intense look at the horrors of war – and the sacrifices of the millions of ordinary people who served." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, gives the miniseries a score of 87 out of 100 based on 28 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".
CNN's Paul Clinton said that the miniseries "is a remarkable testament to that generation of citizen soldiers, who responded when called upon to save the world for democracy and then quietly returned to build the nation that we now all enjoy, and all too often take for granted". Caryn James of The New York Times called it "an extraordinary 10-part series that masters its greatest challenge: it balances the ideal of heroism with the violence and terror of battle, reflecting what is both civilized and savage about war." James also remarked on the generation gap between most viewers and characters, suggesting this was a significant hurdle. Robert Bianco of USA Today wrote that the series was "significantly flawed and yet absolutely extraordinary—just like the men it portrays," rating the series four out of four stars. He noted however that it was hard to identify with individual characters during crowded battle scenes.
Philip French of The Guardian commented that he had "seen nothing in the cinema this past year that impressed me as much as BBC2's 10-part Band of Brothers, produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, and Ken Loach's The Navigators on Channel 4", and that it was "one of the best films ever made about men in war and superior in most ways to Saving Private Ryan." Matt Seaton, also in The Guardian, wrote that the film's production was "on such a scale that in an ad hoc, inadvertent way it gives one a powerful sense of what really was accomplished during the D-Day invasion - the extraordinary logistical effort of moving men and matériel in vast quantities."
Tom Shales of The Washington Post wrote that though the series is "at times visually astonishing," it suffers from "disorganization, muddled thinking and a sense of redundancy." Shales observed that the characters are hard to identify: "Few of the characters stand out strikingly against the backdrop of the war. In fact, this show is all backdrop and no frontdrop. When you watch two hours and still aren't quite sure who the main characters are, something is wrong."
Band of Brothers has become a benchmark for World War II series. The German series Generation War, for example, was characterized by critics as Band of Brüder (the German word for "Brothers").
Band of Brothers' September 9, 2001 premiere drew almost 10 million viewers. Two days later, the September 11 attacks occurred, and HBO immediately ceased its marketing campaign. The third episode drew 7.2 million viewers and the last episode received almost 5.1 million viewers, the smallest audience.
The series was nominated for 20 Primetime Emmy Awards and won seven, including Outstanding Miniseries and Outstanding Directing for a Miniseries, Movie, or Dramatic Special. It also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television, American Film Institute Award for TV Movie or Miniseries of the Year, Producers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Producer of Long-Form Television, and the TCA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Movies, Miniseries, and Specials.
The show was selected for a Peabody Award for "relying on both history and memory to create a new tribute to those who fought to preserve liberty." In September 2019, The Guardian ranked the show 68th on its list of the 100 best TV shows of the 21st century, stating that it "expanded the horizons – and budgets – of prestige TV".
The miniseries was released on VHS and DVD box sets on November 5, 2002. The DVD set has five discs containing all ten episodes, and a bonus disc including We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company and an official video diary by Ron Livingston (Lewis Nixon) showing the actors' boot camp at Longmoor. A collector's edition of the box set was also released, containing the same discs in a tin case instead of cardboard. As of 2010, Band of Brothers was one of the best-selling TV DVD sets, having sold about $250 million worth.
The series was released as an exclusive HD DVD TV series in Japan in 2007. With the demise of the format, they went out of production. A Blu-ray Disc version of Band of Brothers was released on November 11, 2008, and has become a Blu-ray Disc top seller.
In 2011, HBO aired a documentary entitled He Has Seen War with Tom Hanks as executive producer and Mark Herzog as director about the postwar stories of and lasting effects of the war, including post-traumatic stress disorder, on not only Easy Company members but also members of the 1st Marine Division who were subjects of The Pacific after the division fought at Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester, Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. William "Wild Bill" Guarnere and Donald Malarkey both appear alongside their families, as does the family of Lynn "Buck" Compton and also the families of Corporal Eugene Sledge and Private Robert Leckie, two of the members of the 1st Marine Division who are central characters in The Pacific.
In 2012, the Richard D. Winters Leadership Monument near Sainte-Marie-du-Mont in Normandy recognizing all American junior officers, together with their divisions and corps, who led the way on D-Day, was unveiled on the 68th anniversary of the invasion. For the occasion, the World War II Foundation, which raised the funds for the monument, produced a biographical documentary entitled Dick Winters: Hang Tough. Damian Lewis, who played Winters, narrates the film in the American accent he used while playing him. Documentary filmmaker and World War II Foundation founder and president Tim Gray is the creator of the overall film, which includes actual photos, photos from the miniseries and interviews with the real-life Winters and other Easy Company members including a number who were portrayed in the show such as Guarnere, Malarkey, Edward "Babe" Heffron, Frank Perconte and Edward Tipper.
Special attention was paid to the Brécourt Manor Assault including the owners of Brécourt Manor to this day — the Vallavieille family, including Utah Beach Museum founder Michel de Vallavieille, who was wounded after being mistaken for a German soldier — and the creation of the 13-foot (4.0 m) bronze statue of Winters by sculptor Steven Spears.
In 2021, on the occasion of the miniseries' 20th anniversary, HBO produced an official podcast hosted by British-American author, broadcaster and filmmaker Roger Bennett of the Men in Blazers soccer show and podcast. After a prologue episode featuring Tom Hanks as executive producer, it progresses through each episode giving a brief summary before interviewing actors and crew members about their roles, their careers leading up to the miniseries, their experiences with the show and the specific episode.
A number of books give further insight into Easy Company: