More than once while watching Band of Brothers together my roommate and I have turned to each other wide-eyed and grinning and asked “Wait, did that really just happen?”
About a month ago and for reasons that still elude me I was on a serious World War II kick. Like “re-playing Call of Duty 2’s campaign and then watching The Longest Day on a Saturday night” serious. It was in the midst of this that I proposed watching HBO’s miniseries to my roommate. What little I knew of the show mostly came from GIF-sets on Imgur and that it was executive produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. We both entered into it with pretty set expectations. A touching, heroic, and un-complicated look at the Greatest Generation.
This view held for the first episode, which covers Easy Company’s experience in boot camp. But from that point on the characters are on the front lines of every major American action in the European front from D-Day to the end of the war. And if there’s one way to describe the war and the people that the show depicts “complicated” would be a good start.
Which makes sense given the show is drawn directly from the experiences of actual veterans of Easy Company. There are a lot of real people depicted on-screen. Each episode begins with a collection of these men talking in the present day about the moment or aspect of infantry life that the episode will focus on. There is no self-aggrandizement, nor are there rote lectures on duty or dry tactical assessments. Their recollections are always focused on the human element, whether that’s how they dealt with the inevitable fear of being in combat or just how much it sucked to be in the woods of Bastogne in the winter of 1944.
The Greatest Generation is revered as such not just because they won World War II and paved the way for the American century but also because most of the men involved weren’t career soldiers. As Noah Gervais-Caldwell explains in his critique of every Call of Duty, the use of conscription in World War II meant the army represented a wide cross-section of people. After the war ended, they went back home to try and build normal lives.
Today the men who fought in the war are routinely mythologized. We’re used to them being portrayed as pretty much the best people on the face of the planet at the time, affording them almost saintly qualities in our depictions of them. Band of Brothers, on the other hand, takes great pains to muddy the waters.
At one point in Episode 3, a soldier cowering in his foxhole in the dead of night asks his Lieutenant for consolation. Instead of adopting the fatherly tone we’ve been conditioned to expect from this character in this moment in a World War 2 story, the Lieutenant tells the soldier they’re both already dead. All they can do is accept that. Also, by this point this same Lieutenant may have murdered a dozen German POWs in cold blood.
When the Americans parachute into Holland as part of Operation Market Garden they’re greeted by jubilant townsfolk in the first village they enter. Amidst the celebrations, women who’ve slept with the Nazi occupiers are dragged out and their heads are shaved as the villagers chant “Whores!” incessantly.
In the second-to-last episode one of the Company’s captains talks to his friend and superior about having to write letters to the families of the men in a plane who died when they took a direct hit without ever even opening their chutes. The commander tells him they all died as heroes. The captain scoffs.
“You really still believe that?”
Again and again we’re made to interrogate the character of the men comprising Easy Company. The nature of war is such that “the right thing” can become impossible to discern. In retrospect it’s easy to view World War II as a cut and dry, good vs. evil conflict. But the show takes pains to strip away context and leave you with just the members of Easy Company. Momentous occasions like the deaths of FDR and Hitler are given just one line each, relayed as news by a minor character. We’re confined to the viewpoint of infantry grunts and for them there’s nothing inherently noble about what they’re doing. They’re only human.
Nowhere is this hammered home better than in the episodes that focus on just one character’s arc. The Battle of the Bulge in “Bastogne” as viewed through the eyes of a combat medic becomes an extended and harrowing meditation on loss and the human cost of war. Every time combat occurs in that episode it is not an opportunity for action scenes displaying the heroics of gruff soldiers. Instead it always results in scared young boys crying for help as they stare in disbelief at the mangled mess their bodies have become.
Episode 5, “Crossroads”, guest directed by Tom Hanks, follows Lieutenant Winters. He leads a charge against an entrenched SS position that results in a major victory, earning himself a promotion and leave in Paris. This tale of leadership under fire is turned on its head. Winters spots a French kid whose smile reminds him of the look on the face of the young German he gunned down in the opening move of his award-winning attack. This flashback doesn’t just serve to highlight Winters’ trauma. It reveals the psychological conflict he’s wracked by, the knowledge that in order to protect his men he’s had to take the lives of others.
Band of Brothers is fundamentally interested in the human toll of World War II. Its political message doesn’t fit neatly into a dichotomy of liberal or conservative. It displays the brutality of a conflict that Americans tend to view through rosy-colored glasses and it strips a great deal of the larger context away in order to focus on its core message. That war, even if it’s necessary, is one of the ugliest things humans can engage in. That even in victory there is always loss.
