Favorite episode of Band of Brothers

[pokerfan]

[AwakeAtLast]

1. That's almost like asking which child is your favorite

I chose "Why We Fight" because I thought the concentration camp scenes were so well done (I think that's the one anyway). They are all good, though. It was hard to choose.

[pokerfan]

5. I went with The Breaking Point

The one in the Bois Jacques.



Carwood Lipton: (narrating) The morning after the shelling that killed Muck and Penkala, I saw a soldier trying to dig a foxhole with his bare hands. He didn't even notice that he'd torn off all his fingernails.

It was the policy of the U.S. Army to keep its rifle companies on the line for long periods, continuously in the case of the companies in infantry divisions, making up losses by individual replacement. This meant that replacements went into combat not with the men they had trained and shipped overseas with, but with strangers. It also meant the veteran could look forward to a release from the dangers threatening him only through death or serious wound. This created a situation of endlessness and hopelessness, as Winters indicated.

Combat is a topsy-turvy world. Perfect strangers are going to great lengths to kill you; if they succeed, far from being punished for taking life, they will be rewarded, honored, celebrated. In combat, men stay underground in daylight and do their work in the dark. Good health is a curse; trench foot, pneumonia, severe uncontrollable diarrhea, a broken leg are priceless gifts.

There is a limit to how long a man can function effectively in this topsy-turvy world. For some, mental breakdown comes early; army psychiatrists found that in Normandy between 10 and 20 percent of the men in rifle companies suffered some form of mental disorder during the first week, and either fled or had to be taken out of the line (many, of course, returned to their units later). For others, visible breakdown never occurs, but nevertheless effectiveness breaks down. The experiences of men in combat produces emotions stronger than civilians can know, emotions of terror, panic, anger, sorrow, bewilderment, helplessness, uselessness, and each of these feelings drained energy and mental stability.

Ambrose, Stephen E. (September 2001). Band of Brothers (pg 207)

[AllenVanAllen]

6. That's the one I voted for as well

It has one of the most powerful stories and imagery is just haunting. It's still really hard to choose just one episode they were all so good.

[charlie and algernon]

2. I think episode 7 might be my favorite

Lipton's narration is great and I love the whole scene where they're in the church and the girl's choir is singing in the background while we see all the fallen soldiers.

but yes, I also agree with AwakeatLast, it's like asking me to choose which child I like best.

[Condem]

3. Day of Days.

Winters description at the culmination. I'll find me a farm in Pennsylvania to live out my days if I survive this (D-Day).

[RoyGBiv]

4. The Breaking Point

I'm astonished at how well acted the entire series is, but that one takes the cake, imo.

Who knew that Donnie Wahlberg could pull that off.

Many memorable scenes exist from that episode, but two stick in my mind and give me chills ever time I watch them. The first is when Winters orders Speirs in to relieve Dike, the second the scene at the church with the girls singing and the "roll call of the dead" being displayed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncC0lOJPYRw

Very powerful.

[KillCapitalism]

7. Why we fight

It's sad episode, but if it weren't for the allies, none of those people would have had a chance.

[pokerfan]

8. Amazingly

it only rated four paragraphs in the book:

On April 29 the company stopped for the night at Buchloe, in the foothills of the Alps, near Landsberg. Here they saw their first concentration camp. It was a work camp, not an extermination camp, one of the half-dozen or more that were a part of the Dachau complex. But although it was relatively small and designed to produce war goods, it was so horrible that it was impossible to fathom the enormity of the evil. Prisoners in their striped pajamas, three-quarters starved, by the thousands; corpses, little more than skeletons, by the hundreds.

Winters found stacks of huge wheels of cheese in the cellar of a building he was using for the battalion CP and ordered it distributed to the inmates. He radioed to regiment to describe the situation and ask for help.

The company stayed in Buchloe for two nights. Thus it was present in the morning when the people of Landsberg turned out, carrying rakes, brooms, shovels, and marched off to the camp. General Taylor, it turned out, had been so incensed by the sight that he had declared martial law and ordered everyone from fourteen to eighty years of age to be rounded up and sent to the camp, to bury the bodies and clean up the place. That evening the crew came back down the road from the camp. Some were still vomiting.

"The memory of starved, dazed men," Winters wrote, "who dropped their eyes and heads when we looked at them through the chain-link fence, in the same manner that a beaten, mistreated dog would cringe, leaves feelings that cannot be described and will never be forgotten. The impact of seeing those people behind that fence left me saying, only to myself, 'Now I know why I am here!'"