The Short Version
Today I’m walking you through the whole story of Band of Brothers, by Stephen E. Ambrose, in about five minutes. This is real history, so there are no spoilers in the usual sense, but if you want the book to surprise you, watch this after.
The short version: a company of volunteers trains for two years, jumps into Normandy on D-Day, fights through Holland, holds the line at Bastogne, and ends the war drinking Hitler’s champagne in the Alps.
Camp Toccoa
It starts in the summer of nineteen forty two, at Camp Toccoa, in Georgia. The men are volunteers for a brand new idea, paratroopers. They’re mostly young, many grew up poor in the Depression, and they want to be in an elite unit.
They run up and down a mountain called Currahee, again and again. Out of more than five thousand enlisted volunteers for the regiment, only about eighteen hundred make it through.
Captain Sobel
Their first commander is Herbert Sobel. He’s harsh, petty, and obsessed with punishing small mistakes. The men hate him, but he makes them incredibly fit.
The trouble is that he’s bad in the field. In England, his sergeants hand in their stripes rather than follow him into combat. The colonel moves Sobel to a training job, and Dick Winters, the officer they trust, comes back.
D-Day
On the night of June sixth, nineteen forty four, they jump into Normandy. The planes fly too low and too fast, equipment bags tear loose, and the men land scattered all over the countryside.
That morning, Winters and about a dozen men attack four German cannon firing on Utah Beach, near a farm called Brecourt Manor. They take out the guns. Ambrose says it made an important contribution to the landings.
Carentan And Normandy
In the days after, Easy Company fights for the town of Carentan and the hedgerows around it. They lose friends, they learn fear, and the training finally makes sense.
After a month, they go back to England, battered and much smaller. Replacements arrive, and the veterans aren’t sure what to make of them.
Holland
In September, they jump again, this time into Holland, for Operation Market Garden. The plan is to seize a chain of bridges and push into Germany. It fails.
Easy Company ends up spending seventy eight days on the line in Holland, on an island of flat, flooded farmland, in a long, grinding defense.
Bastogne
Then, in December, the Germans launch a surprise attack in the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge. Easy Company is rushed to Bastogne with no winter clothing and too little ammunition, and surrounded.
They spend weeks in frozen foxholes in the woods. Shells burst in the treetops. Men lose legs, friends die in direct hits, and almost everyone has trench foot.
The Breaking Point
Ambrose spends a whole chapter on breaking down. Some men crack under the strain. Easy’s company commander, Lieutenant Dike, freezes in the middle of the attack on the village of Foy.
Winters sends in Ronald Speirs, an officer from another company with a fearsome reputation. Speirs takes over on the run, and the company takes Foy.
Into Germany
In the spring, they cross into Germany. They see German soldiers up close, and then, near Landsberg, they find a concentration camp, part of the Dachau system.
Winters later wrote that seeing the prisoners made him understand, for the first time, why he was there.
The Eagle’s Nest
In May nineteen forty five, they reach Berchtesgaden, in the Bavarian Alps, where Hitler had his mountain retreat, the Eagle’s Nest. Nazi leaders’ houses are full of loot, art, and wine.
The war in Europe ends. The men drink Hitler’s champagne, collect souvenirs, and find themselves suddenly at peace.
Austria And Home
They spend the summer in Austria, waiting to go home or go to the Pacific. It’s strange and dangerous in its own way. A drunk American soldier shoots one of their best sergeants, Chuck Grant, in the head. He survives.
Then the atomic bomb ends the fear of a jump on Japan, the company is broken up, and the men go home.
After The War
The final chapter follows them into ordinary lives: farmers, teachers, businessmen, builders. Forty eight men of Easy Company died in the war.
The bond stayed. They kept writing to each other, met at reunions, and nearly fifty years later, they told their story to Ambrose.
Your Turn
Which part of the story hit you hardest? Tell me in the comments. My review and the book versus series comparison are linked below.
