Product Description

A description of life in the Easy Company, 101st Airborne Division, US Army, from the time of their rigorous training in Georgia in 1942 to D-Day and victory. Drawing on interviews, journals and letters, the author tells - often in their own words - the story of these American heroes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1388 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
As grippingly as any novelist, preeminent World War II historian Stephen Ambrose uses Band of Brothers to tell the horrifying, hallucinatory saga of Easy Company, whose 147 members he calls the nonpareil combat paratroopers on earth circa 1941-45. Ambrose takes us along on Easy Company's trip from gruelling basic training to Utah Beach on D-day, where a dozen of them turned German cannons into dynamited ruins resembling "half-peeled bananas", on to the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of part of the Dachau concentration camp, and a large party at Hitler's "Eagle's Nest", where they drank the his (surprisingly inferior) champagne. Of Ambrose's main sources, three soldiers became rich civilians; at least eight became teachers; one became Albert Speer's jailer; one prosecuted Robert Kennedy's assassin; another became a mountain recluse; the despised, sadistic CO who first trained Easy Company (and to whose strictness many soldiers attributed their survival of the war) wound up a suicidal loner whose own sons skipped his funeral. The Easy Company survivors describe the hell and confusion of any war: the senseless death of the nicest kid in the company when a souvenir Luger goes off in his pocket; the execution of a GI by his CO for disobeying an order not to get drunk. Despite the gratuitous horrors it relates, Band of Brothers illustrates what one of Ambrose's sources calls "the secret attractions of war ... the delight in comradeship, the delight in destruction ... war as spectacle". --Tim Appelo

Review
The remarkable success of the TV series produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks will ensure that many readers are keen to sample this vivid and powerful picture of men at war. In the book that formed the basis for the series, Stephen Ambrose takes us on a tour of duty with the men of Easy Company, a US rifle company being trained for the bloody landings of D-Day. From the tough training scenes in Georgia (in which the raw recruits are honed into a crack team of soldiers) to the final costly assault on Hitler's Eagle's Nest in Berchtesgarden, we are inextricably involved in the hopes and fears of the fighting men. Utilising first-person accounts, the verisimilitude of Band of Brothers virtually leaps off the page and makes most accounts of war seemed thin-blooded indeed. While always building the narrative towards its pulse-increasing finale, the author never forgets to characterize each member of Easy Company with maximum vividness: in each tautly orchestrated set piece, the tension is ratcheted up not so much by the bursts of action as by our knowledge of the individual personalities of the men of Easy Company. The reality is increased by the constant shoring up of the narrative with the hard facts of the encounters and a section of well-chosen photographs. Trading on the innovations of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, the TV series was more subtle and intelligent than many earlier ventures in the genre; a few pages into Stephen Ambrose's remarkable book shows us how much it owed to the source material. (Kirkus UK)

With his multivolume biographies of Eisenhower and Nixon now complete, Ambrose (History/Univ. of New Orleans) returns to military affairs (Pegasus Bridge, 1985, etc.) with this spirited account of one of the Army's crack WW II units. The 101st Airborne was "the most famous and admired of all the eighty-nine divisions the United States Army put in the Second World War," Ambrose notes. One unit in the "Screaming Eagles," Easy Company, was an elite group of paratroopers, self. confident survivors of a grueling physical regimen, adept in the use of weapons, and ready to fight for each other to the death. Ambrose traces how the group's esprit de corps was molded in boot camp under a martinet commander, then at Normandy's Utah Beach, in the disappointing Arnhem campaign in the Netherlands, in the Battle of the Bulge, and in the triumphant liberation of Hitler's Bavarian lair. Ambrose's writing style has all the elegance of a Sherman tank, but it really doesn't matter: the story of this company is riveting. The author captures many of the representative moments in a WW II soldier's career: the fear that, under some of the most intense shelling of the war, one may he approaching a breaking point; the suffering of freezing overnight in a foxhole while going hungry and without a bath in days; the elation of survival and success; disgust with commanders either inept or arbitrary; and a sense of brotherhood like that felt with nobody else in life. Hard-nosed, yet ultimately a celebration of grace under pressure in "the Good War." (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
A description of life in the Easy Company, 101st Airborne Division, US Army, from the time of their rigorous training in Georgia in 1942 to D-Day and victory. Drawing on interviews, journals and letters, the author tells - often in their own words - the story of these American heroes.