Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest - Hardcover

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671769227 ISBN 13: 9780671769222

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1992

Synopsis

A look at the men of E Company describes how they parachuted into France early D-Day morning, parachuted into Holland in the Arnhem campaign, and captured Hitler's Bavarian outpost. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

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 Times-Picayune" A valuable and fascinating record...In these pages, the reader can vicariously walk with the men of E Company, suffer and laugh with them.

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0671769227
• ISBN 13: 9780671769222
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 335