Band of Brothers: They Helped Defeat Hitler (Episode 7: The Breaking Point)

NOTE: "Band of Brothers" is a highly realistic World War Two miniseries from HBO in 2001. Part of the "realism" is the profanity used; so, if you are sensitive to such language, the miniseries is definitely not for you. Also, there are numerous highly bloody scenes of killed or wounded soldiers, and scenes of people in a concentration camp, who have been the subject of horrendous treatment. So here too, if you are sensitive to these kinds of scenes, it is probably a good thing if you skip viewing the miniseries. As for this article and those I'll be doing about the miniseries, I have tried to keep things from being too blatant.

 

This very realistic HBO series is based on the book "Band of Brothers" by historian Stephen Ambrose. Remember, this is NOT a documentary nor an actual reenactment, but rather a series with characters representing the actual men, with their real names, of East Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. The series does present events and actions that the men of Easy Company related to Stephen Ambrose, the historian who wrote the book. In the book's "Acknowledgements and Sources," Ambrose writes that he "circulated the manuscript of this book to the men of Easy Company." He goes on to say there were criticisms, corrections and suggestions offered by the men, and that Richard Winters and Carwood Lipton were heavily involved in reviewing the book, the original publication of which was in 1992, while the first airing of the miniseries was in 2001.   

As I write about this series, I'll likely use a man's army rank on occasion, but for the most part, I'll use last names, just as the men do. The cast of this series is so large, I decided not to list it, as it would have been overwhelming, although I did decide to list just a few names of the cast who portrayed the men most seen, most heard and most heard about in the stories presented in this series. Believe me, the whole cast is likely 8 or 10 times as large as those I list here, and everyone did a great job.

 

 Partial Cast

 

Damian Lewis as Lieutenant, then Captain, then Major Richard Winters

Ron Livingston as Lieutenant, then Captain Lewis Nixon

Scott Grimes as Private, then Sergeant Donald Malarkey 

Shane Taylor as Medic Eugene "Doc" Roe

Donnie Wahlberg as Sergeant Carwood Lipton 

Michael Cudlitz as Sergeant Denver "Bull" Randleman

Frank John Hughes as Sergeant Bill "Wild Bill" Guarnere

Rick Gomez as Technician 4th Grade George Luz

Kirk Acevedo as Staff Sergeant Joe Toye

James Madio as Technician 4th Grade Frank Perconte

Eion Bailey as Private David Kenyon Webster

Dexter Fletcher as Sergeant John Martin

Ross McCall as Technician Fifth Grade Joseph Liebgott

Neal McDonough as Lieutenant Lynn "Buck" Compton

Nicholas Aaron as Private Robert "Popeye" Wynn 

David Schwimmer as Lieutenant, then Captain Herbert Sobel 

Here is the link to the previous article as Episode 6: Bastogne:

https://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2023/09/band-of-brothers-they-helped-defeat_12.html

 

 

This episode opens with the men of Easy Company advancing through the forest outside of the village of Foy (rhymes with 'toy' in English, but is pronounced as if "fwah" in French, and the company is stationed in the French speaking part of Belgium, with Belgium having three official languages: Dutch, French and German). This forested area is called "Bois Jacques" (Jack's Wood or Forest), and Sergeant Lipton's narration tells us that the company cleared the forest of any German troops, but that the men had not met much resistance. For much of the remainder of the episode, the company's men will be in defensive positions just outside Foy, until they are told to capture Foy itself. (Note: Foy and a few other villages are all part of the Bastogne area, and Bastogne is only about 2 miles away.)

 

Hoobler (played by Peter McCabe) shoots a German Waffen SS soldier riding a horse. When Hoobler gets to the man, he finds the man has a Luger on him. Hoobler has long wanted a Luger, and now he has it. Hoobler shows off the gun to his Easy Company buddies and he puts it into his pocket, but a little while later, the gun goes off, with the bullet tearing open an artery in Hoobler's leg. The men all have on any extra clothing they've got to get them through the cold weather, and Hoobler's clothing prevents the guys from seeing how bad his wound is. The men try taking care of him and getting him to an aid station, but Hoobler dies from loss of blood.

 

One of the continuing threads of this episode is about Lieutenant Norman Dike (played by Peter O'Meara), the then commander of Easy Company, who had replaced Lieutenant Frederick Heyliger when Heyliger was accidentally shot by a sentry (Heyliger had been the replacement for Captain Winters when Winters was moved up to 2nd Battalion Headquarters). The series has Dike played as an officer who has connections to a higher level officer in the 101st Airborne Division, and that he was given command of Easy Company to gain some combat experience for his resumé, before his next military career advancement. (Note: The men were not really connected to Dike, who seems to have generally kept a distance from the men.) Throughout much of the episode, we hear the men talk about Dike being absent for long unexplained periods of time, and the men call him "Foxhole Norman," as that's where he pretty much stays when he is around. For the most part, everyone just tolerates Dike, as they're all stuck in defensive positions in and around Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge; however, once the Germans are stopped, then comes the shift to offensive operations by the Americans to drive the Germans back from any ground they had taken. Now the men worry about any inexperience or incompetence in Dike and how it could get them killed. Captain Richard Winters and his friend Captain Lewis Nixon talk about Lieutenant Dike on a couple of occasions, and Nixon, who sort of adds some blunt, non emotional points to Winters at times, tells Winters, "We all know who you'd like to have running Easy (Company), but the problem is, it's not your job anymore, Dick." More on this shortly ...    

 

We see Sergeant Lipton and Lieutenant Compton often talking with the men, and the men have strong and comfortable ties to both Lipton and Compton.

 

The Germans unleash periodic artillery barrages on Easy Company, and the ferocious bombardments take a toll: Muck and Penkala are killed by a direct hit on their foxhole by a German artillery shell. Part of one of Joe Toye's legs is blown off and when Guarnere is trying to drag Toye to safety, another artillery round explodes nearby, and Buck Compton, who is coming to help them, is thrown back by the explosion, and Guarnere loses a leg. Compton gets to his feet, but his struggles with "shell shock" hit the "breaking point" (of the episode title) when he sees Toye and Guarnere lying there on the ground badly wounded, and he removes his helmet and drops it to the ground. Compton is pulled from the front line and sent for care elsewhere. Don Malarkey is under lots of stress, as Penkala and Muck were two of his best friends, but when offered a chance to work with Captain Winters for a couple of days to get a break, he turns the offer down and chooses to stay with the others. Lipton and George Luz are in a foxhole as one of the strong artillery barrages ends, and a dud German artillery shell lands in the dirt at the edge of their foxhole. Luz takes out a cigarette and lights it, but Lipton reaches over, takes it and starts puffing away. Luz says, "I thought you didn't smoke," and Lipton replies, "I don't."

 

In what is one of those lighter scenes, even though the subject is serious, Private Kenneth Webb (played by Jordan Frieda) hears from a couple of the guys about Lieutenant Speirs (played by Matthew Settle) having possibly shot one of his own men, and about Speirs giving 20 to 30 German prisoners cigarettes, just before he turned his Thompson sub-machine gun on them. So, who walks up to the foxhole just as the stories end? Speirs! The guys don't say anything, but their faces show, "I hope he didn't hear any of that!" Speirs asks what the men are doing and tells them how they should improve their foxhole. With the stories about him, the men are all uneasy around Speirs, and as he walks away, he turns and asks them if they want a cigarette. The men just look at him and nobody says anything, so Speirs specifically then asks Webb, who doesn't speak, but who just shakes his head no, his helmet moving from side to side. It's a pretty funny scene.

 

The time has come for the capture of Foy, and the day before, Sergeant Lipton meets with Winters and tells him how he is confident the men are ready, but that he doesn't have confidence in Lieutenant Dike to lead the company into battle. He tells Winters that Dike "is an empty uniform," and Winters listens, but because Dike has a friend in the upper levels of the 101st Airborne, he can't do anything about Dike, and Lipton knows that too. The next day, we see Winters giving final instructions to Dike, ending with, "Get it done!" The attack proceeds across a field in front of Foy, and there are storage huts and such scattered around, as the area is rural. All is going well until Dike orders the advance to halt. Many of the men are out in the open, and such a pause allows the Germans to zero in on the men with their artillery, and they do! Dike is confused, and he has no plan on how to advance. Winters is watching, as is Colonel Sink, and the casualties mount, including Frank Perconte, who is wounded in his backside, and Private Webb is killed. Winters starts to go out to the men to lead them himself, but Sink orders him back, so Winters calls on Lieutenant Speirs to go in and lead the attack. Speirs dashes into action, has the men focus on a building with a sniper, which they do, eliminating the sniper, and Speirs charges forward with the men following him, and with the Germans now abandoning vehicles to flee. Many Germans surrender and the men begin to celebrate the victory, but they are premature, as another German sniper shoots and kills some of the men before sharpshooter Shifty Powers (played by Peter Youngblood Hills) takes him out with one shot. The battle is over, but the ranks have been thinned.

 

That night, the men are entertained by the choir at a convent, as they finally get to be inside, instead of out in the cold. Lipton narrates again, telling us all the casualties the company suffered (the company had 145 men when they first arrived in Belgium, and as they spend the evening in Foy, they are down to 63.) In condensed form, Speirs figures that Lipton wants to ask him about the stories he has heard about him (Speirs), but Lipton tells him that because Speirs has never denied the stories, the stories continue, which brings Speirs to tell him that having such a fearsome reputation is not necessarily a bad thing. In a great moment, Lipton tells Speirs that the men aren't worried about the stories, they are just happy to have a good commander again. Speirs then tells Lipton that it's his understanding that since Winters moved up to the battalion headquarters, Easy Company has always had a good leader and a man who held the men together in tough circumstances. He tells Lipton, that man is Lipton, and he tells him that Winters has put in for a battlefield commission for Lipton, and it will be official in a couple of days. Lipton will be a lieutenant. 

 

The company does not get the time off they had thought they would get; rather, they are off to Hagenau in Alsace to help counter a secondary German offensive (compared to Hitler's Ardennes attack) called "Northwind" (German: Nordwind).                   

 

 

 Photo is of the HBO 2015 Blu-Ray Miniseries release ... 

WORD HISTORY:

Boot-The spelling "boot" has various meanings when used as a noun or as a verb, and these forms are not all related (I intend to do other meanings too). First, the noun for "a foot covering, the top of which goes above the ankle," with the singular certainly used, but I'd say a bit more common in the plural, "boots." The origin of the form with this meaning is shaky, although it "seems" to go back to Indo European "bhud/bhut," "seemingly" with the notion of "to beat or strike," which then gave Old Germanic "buttaz," which adjectivally meant "short, blunt," and the noun form meant "blunt end, rounded end" (the idea being, "something that is shortened or blunted as a result of striking it"). This gave Frankish, a Germanic dialect/language, "butt," meaning "blunt," with the Frankish verb form "buttan" meaning "to strike or hit." Forms of these words were absorbed by Old French as "bot," meaning "a hit, a strike/striking," and "bote," meaning "shoe that covers the foot and lower part of the leg," perhaps from its appearance of being blunted or shortened (not extending the length of the leg?). This was borrowed by English in the first part of the 1300s meaning, "shoe extending to the lower leg for horsemen," but the meaning then expanded to all such "high shoes." "Boot" is related, through Germanic, to "buttock" and "butt" (thick end piece), both from the Germanic roots of English, and it is also related to French "butte" (mound or small hill), which also is from Germanic Frankish. None of the other Germanic languages have forms of "boot" in the English sense, rather they have words that fit with the original Germanic meaning "blunt." "Boot" meaning "compartment for stowing things" (seemingly a shortening of "boot locker") and in British English meaning what Americans call "the trunk of a car,"^ is from the same sources of "boot, the high shoe." It came from a few hundred years ago and the use of a chest by a coachman to both store his boots, and to then provide a seat for himself on the closed chest. Later, such storage compartments were built into a coach, and later still, they were included in motor vehicle designs, and the term carried over to such in British English.

 

^ I'm never quite sure about the terms used in Canada, but my "guess" is, they may well use "trunk." Unlike the U.S., Canada has maintained an official connection to the British throne; and thus, the British monarch is also the king or queen of Canada.