71 pages • 2-hour read
Band of Brothers
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Themes
The Nature of Leadership
Throughout the narrative, Ambrose focuses on what distinguishes a good leader from a bad leader. Because the Army is organized in a hierarchical fashion, what makes a good leader varies according to the level of responsibility.
For example, Eisenhower is a very distant, powerful figure who appears in Ambrose’s accounts of war strategies and large-scale planning and thus has very little contact with the men, who nevertheless respect him. When he does deign to engage with the men personally, they are aware that these gestures take him away from his very important duties as Supreme Commander and are flattered by those brief moments of attention he gives them as a unit (243).Even in instances in which his miscalculations place the men in harm’s way, the men blame those who are closer to them in the leadership chain. Winters blames Taylor for the use of Easy Company for the operation at Noville, while Ambrose makes it clear that this plan was simply a part of Eisenhower’s overall plans for the war (213-214).
On the other hand, those in positions just above the enlisted men—Sobel,Speirs, Winters, Compton, and Dike, for example—are expected to manage the men under them through respect, superior knowledge,strong interpersonal skills, or the ability to inspire fear.
Sobel’s lack of physical fitness in a company of men known for record-breaking levels of strength and endurance cause the men to disrespect him. The kind of knowledge he has and upon which he bases his authority is one grounded in what the men call “chickenshit” (24). This leading based on regulation rather than common sense and effectivenessdistances him from the men and cause them to question his judgment. They fear him for his pettiness, not his superior knowledge. Easy Company does benefit from his rigorous training, but his lack of interpersonal skills serves as a negative means of uniting the company.
In contrast to Sobel, Wintersstrikes a balance between engaging with his men but demanding respect and unquestioning obedience when it is called for. He leads by example, meeting the same standards of fitness as his men even during training, showing that he values the lives of his men by taking risks only after calculating the costs and benefits to his troops, and embodying Welsh’s ideal that “Officers go first” (38) by being the first out in front of German artillery at Carentan. Speirs, whose fearsome reputation implies that the war has unhinged him to the point of brutality, represents an alternate vision of good leadership: one based on fear. The men fear him but follow his lead because of his proficiency in battle, and his mastery of the skills of a good soldier in the field is enough to balance out his brutality in other settings.
The poor leaders in Band of Brothers are failures for several reasons. Compton, who serves as a platoon leader (relatively low on the hierarchy of leadership), fails to be a good leader because he does not establish enough distance to see the men as soldiers who need to be directed to do a job as opposed to friends who are in danger of being killed. Norman Dike, whose refusal to follow orders and lead his men during the action at Foy causes Winters to relieve him of duty, is a foil to Winters and Speirs,and shows what happens when officers refuse to go first. Taylor is insulated from insubordination in the ranks below him because of his position, but he is in some ways a failure as a leader because he essentially misunderstands his men as people who are motivated by the desire to kill Germans. This belief perhaps explains in part his failure to advocate for relief for his men after their deployment on “the island.”
Ultimately, the effectiveness of the leaders in Band of Brothers is a function of the level of leadership, the context in which the leader is required to act, and the specific personality traits of the leader.
The Morality of War
One of the central challenges both the leadership and men in the ranks face is what Ambrose calls the “topsy-turvy world” of combat (202). Values that are foundational to American identity—individuality, respect for property, and respect for life—are untenable in the field.
One the most obvious inversions of values during war is the attitude toward property. In peace time, seizing something just because you need or want it would be unimaginable, but during their time in Europe, Easy Company unabashedly loots to supplement their poor diet, to support family back home after the war, for fun, and as a prerogative of being conquerors in a pacified country. The epitome of the inversion of civilian values with respect to property is in Berchtesgaden at the Eagle’s Nest. “Drinking Hitler’s Champagne,” part of the title in Chapter Seventeen, drives home the point that such looting is seen as the moral thing to do because it punishes the Third Reich and the German people for the costs of war.
Another important value that is inverted is American individualism. While rugged individualism is a hallmark of popular ideas about American identity during the historical period of Band of Brothers, the Army as an institution is designed in part to stamp out individuality when it interferes with the effectiveness of the soldiers. Ambrose notes that training, the men’s induction into Army culture, is specifically designed to teach the men“instant, unquestioning obedience” (20). Failure to instantly and unquestioningly obey can sometimes lead to disaster, as almost happens when the men refuse to leave their ditches on the roadside in Carentan.
On the other hand, there is a tension between individuality and obedience to authorityin the context of war. It is clearly the responsibility of the soldier to obey, but Winters, the most exemplary of American soldiers, uses subterfuge in Chapter Fifteen to avoid obeying Sink’s order to send men on a patrol mission into German territory on the north bank of the Moder because it is a suicide mission. His judgment is a pragmatic one but also one in which his value for the life of his men trumps his responsibility to obey.
Respect for life is one of the civilian values that is most complicated by war on both the American and German sides. In his discussion of combat fatigue and shell-shock (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), Ambrose notes that the fear of death is one of the greatest challenges to the effectiveness of the soldier the longer the deployment of that soldier lasts (210). In signing up to fight, a soldier in Easy Company had clearly taken on the moral responsibility to defend his country. Fulfilling that responsibility requires soldiers to place themselves in mortal danger, kill others, and deal with the confusion of being praised for it (210). To be effective, however, soldiers are forced to place less value on human life—theirs and everyone else’s. They become callous when confronted with death and completely unmoved when faced with the death of enemies seeking to kill them.Long after the end of the war, they pay the cost of having to have lived by a different set of morals, as evidenced by the demise of both Talbert and Sobel.
The Holocaust, only briefly represented in the book, is the ultimate expression of the lack of value for human life. The episode at Landsberg, in Chapter Sixteen,includes descriptions of the starved bodies of prisoners in the concentration camp and the disrespected remains of victims, whose skeletons are strewn around the camp. Winters’ angry insistence that the German residents of the nearby town, who must have been aware of the camp, come bury the bodies provides the ultimate rationalization for the loss of life in war: the restoration of the value of human life in civilian German society.
As brave as the men are, Band of Brothers reveals one of the ironies of war, namely, that to protect civilian morality, war and warriors must violate that morality.
The Story versus the Reality of Heroism
One of the reasons why Ambrose’s book has been widely read is that it recounts the heroic exploits of one of the most well-known companies in the 101st, itself a storied division in the Army during and after World War II. The fame of those soldiers has spread even further since HBO adapted the book into a series that first aired in 2001, shortly before the 9/11 attacks on the United States.Ambrose’s narrative documents that the soldiers of Easy Company were heroes by any standard. Nevertheless, his version of the events surrounding the campaigns of Easy Company makes it clear that popular, civilian representations of Easy Company are sometimes in contrast to the lived experiences of soldiers in combat.
After the Battle of the Bulge, the 101st was widely celebrated for its role in the siege of Bastogne. Ambrose quotes Rapport and Northwood’s Rendezvous with Destiny (2001) to support the idea that although the actions of the 101st were heroic, the fact that their actions made for a good story accounts for their recognition as heroes by the civilian world (190). In the popular press, they were celebrated for their heroism in the face of long odds, and in the context of a war that was not going well for the Allies, the military and civilians seized on this one bright spot of hope. The 10th Armored Division, whose contributions were pivotal to the defense of Bastogne, isn’t recognized as heroic by the public because their story isn’t widely told. The drivers who got the 101st there are also key contributors to the Battle of the Bulge, but they also didn’t receive the notice that the 101st did.
Another gap between the story versus the reality of what it means to be heroic is what it took for Easy Company to be successful. While the defense of Bastogne was dramatic, the fortitude of the men surviving in foxholes without socks in Bastogne is a kind of everyday heroism that made them successful. Another example of the less dramatic side of heroism is Winters’ approach to taking out the artillery at Brécourt Manor. He was cautious and methodical rather than flashy and confrontational, and thus saved the lives of his men.
Such everyday heroism is even at times not fully recognized by the Army, as illustrated by the lack of medals the men had at the end of the war. Webster notes with some bitterness that paratroopers were ineligible for the medals that would have given them more points, while Ambrosewrites that most of the men in the company had “no more [decorations] thana personnel clerk who had never left base camp” (286) because of their roles.
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