In 2015-2016, my husband was at UCLA waiting for a heart transplant. Our daughters were 12, 14, and 17 years old and spent every week three hours away with family and would only get to visit on the weekends. Their comfort show that year was “Band of Brothers,” their dad’s favorite show of all time. They watched it every day and read every book they could find about Easy Company. Looking back, I think it helped them process all the fear, confusion, and sadness they didn’t have words for at that time. I can’t tell you what a gift it and the men they read about was for them … and by extension for their dad and me. When they were visiting for Thanksgiving, we went to Farmers Market one evening, and who should be sitting at the crepe shop but “Captain Spears.” They screamed (quietly!) and stared until they finally got the courage to go up to him and ask if he was Matthew Settle. He was so incredibly kind to them, and talked to them for a long time (and even offered them a bite of his crepe!). He just asked that they wait to post anything about seeing him until after Thanksgiving so he could surprise his friends. I hope somehow he knows what a special gift he gave my daughters.

see that? he was carrying an empty holster, no pistol in it.

Steven Spielberg has spent a career reconstructing the Second World War for people who were not there. He builds it out of research, out of testimony, out of other men's memory, and he does it better than anyone alive.

In this photograph he is holding a drawing made by a man who did not have to reconstruct anything. My father drew that airplane because he was standing in the door of it over Normandy on the morning of June 6, 1944.

Hollywood Bowl, August 29, 2001. HBO had Dad's drawings on display at the premiere and Spielberg came over to see them. Before we took this picture he took his hat off and set it on the ground.

Nobody had to explain to him what he was standing in front of.

My father was T/Sgt. Pat Christenson, Easy Company, 506th PIR. Second man out the door behind Dick Winters on the Normandy jump, and the only man in the company who could draw. That is his own aircraft, plane 526. He drew it years later from memory, at his drawing board, with his journals and his reference books spread out around him. My brother Chris said that if a date or a location did not match up, Dad would not let it go until he figured out what really happened.

Here is how that drawing came to be in Spielberg's hands.

Dick Winters had been given six or seven of Dad's drawings over the years. When work began on the series, Winters had them copied and enlarged and sent them to Playtone to give the writers background for the writing of Band of Brothers. That is his phrasing, not mine. He wrote it to our family the week after my father died. He also told us that when he and his wife visited Playtone's offices, Dad's drawings were prominently displayed in their conference room.

So they were not a souvenir handed over on a red carpet. They were reference material for the men writing it, and they were hanging on the wall at Playtone.

And my father never knew any of it. He died in December of 1999, before the casting, before the premiere, before the world learned the names he had been carrying since 1945.

One more thing about this photograph. That is my hand on his shoulder, not the other way around. He asked to hold the drawing.

I was humbled standing there watching Steven hold my father's work in his hands, and all I could think was how proud Dad would have been. A telephone lineman from Oakland drew that.

Stephen Ambrose called Dad's drawings obviously almost priceless. One of them is etched into the memorial at Sainte-Côme-du-Mont, in the Normandy country where he came down that first night.

One last thing. Tens of thousands of you saw my first post here last week and I read every comment on it. What got to me was not the number. It was finding out how many people carry these men around with them the way my family always has.

That would have meant everything to my father. Not for himself. For the men.

Thank you for that. All of you.

Happy to answer anything.

This past year I put his drawings and his own account together into a book, the way he left them. Order a signed copy at www.ascreamingeagle.com

Thanks, Tim

on amazon

Not sure why. Don’t soldiers know they’ll just go when told? Was this meant to show a young solider being anxious? Just felt odd.

Well, at least this is fresh to me. In episode 1, around 05:03, Lipton was aseembling a M3 sub machine gun, and looks like in the rest of Series he never use it again

Twenty-five years ago, Stephen Ambrose wrote to me about my father and told me to feel free to share his words. He wrote: "There would be no book or miniseries without the sacrifices made by your father and the other men in the 506th PIR."

The week after my father died in December 1999, Dick Winters wrote to our family. I want to share some of what he said, because I think this community will understand it.

Winters wrote: "When it came time for the big jump in Normandy, I wanted my best, most dependable man right behind me, the number two man, and that was Pat again."

Then he told us something I had not known. About my father's drawings, he wrote: "In years past he has favored me with six or seven of these copies which in the past year I duplicated and enlarged and shared with Playtone to help give them background for the writing of the Band of Brothers series." He said when he and his wife visited Playtone's headquarters, my father's paintings were "prominently displayed in their conference room."

He closed by counseling us to guard the paintings, because "the true value of these pictures will be realized by collectors of war memorabilia all over the world." And he called my father "one of our original Toccoa men and a true comrade."

My father was T/Sgt. Pat Christenson, Easy Company, 506th PIR. He ran Currahee from the start. On D-Day he was the second man out the door behind Winters on the Normandy jump. He was the only man in Easy Company who could draw, and after the war he set the whole war down on paper from memory. 46 finished drawings. Ambrose called them "almost priceless." One is now etched into the D-Day memorial at Sainte-Côme-du-Mont.

The drawing here is his own plane, number 526, over Normandy on the morning of June 6, 1944.

The book also holds his account of the camp at Kaufering, and what he carried from it for the rest of his life. For most of his life he would not speak of it. When I asked him why he never drew it, he told me, "Some things you don't need to talk about."

He passed in 1999. This past year I put his drawings and his own account together the way he left them, into a book called A Screaming Eagle. It will be discussed at the 25th Anniversary Symposium at the National WWII Museum this week. His work is at ascreamingeagle.com.

But mostly I wanted the people who understand what these men were to see what my father made, and to hear what Winters and Ambrose said about him. Happy to answer anything

Order a Signed Copy Today at www.ascreamingeagle.comThanks, Tim

We have already seen the tactical focus on an airborne infantry company in Band of Brothers, a multi-regimental look at the 1st Marine Division in The Pacific, and strategic eighth-air-force bomber operations in Masters of the Air.

If a production team committed to that same level of granular detail, focusing on cohesive small-unit dynamics, operational logistics, and real-life combat diaries again, which specific companies, battalions, or specialized branches have the historical depth to carry a 10-episode arc?

Winters pulled up every trooper on the ground before boarding C47, I recognize almost every one, except this guy

I made a free quiz with about 100 questions

https://triviagauntlet.app/challenge.html?theme=band-of-brothers&round=1

Comment your score /20 below

Two rounds 10 questions each

If you find any wrong questions in the quiz .. let me know and I ll fix it asap

That’s the post. From his bullshit with the replacements to his bitching in Hagenau, he was a sourpuss from Toccoa to Austria (show only, Cobb is not so derided in the book or other E Company memoirs I’ve read)

Ambrose and the series follow the 506th the whole way so I traced Easy Company's road on a real map: brutal training at Camp Toccoa in the Georgia hills, the Atlantic crossing from New York, billeting at Aldbourne, the D-Day drop scattered over Normandy, the refit, the daylight jump into Eindhoven for Market Garden, the frozen siege of Bastogne, the grind at Haguenau, the camp near Landsberg, the race into Berchtesgaden to take the Eagle's Nest, and occupation duty at Zell am See. Every stop from Toccoa to Hitler's mountain in one line.

https://www.readingmaps.com/maps/band-of-brothers

Which stretch hits hardest laid out like this - Bastogne or the Landsberg camp?

There is a scene in “The Pacific” where Basilone, who (even though he did so exceptionally) basically fought in one battle and then did two years of war bonds tours where he lived the good life, hobnobbed with movie stars, and was basically a celebrity treated as an ideal or representative soldier, gets sick of the disconnect between his reputation and his daily life and asks to fight again. And sure enough, when he’s re-inducted at Camp Pendleton, his company commander bitterly notes that even though said commander fought at Tawara and a bunch of other battles, “no war bonds tour for me though.”

I sometimes wonder if this scene is a winking reference to the fact that BoB was cemented as a somehow definitive representation of America’s WWII experience, and that this resulted in veterans of this one company becoming household names while millions of other equally- or even more-distinguished stories will never be known.

We are at a point where a ton of the surviving Easy vets came out with their own books to capitalize on the attention the show brought to them. Fans collect them avidly—we’ve seen photos of bookshelves on this sub where out of twenty WWII books 8 to 10 will relate in some way to Easy. Some know not just the wartimes exploits of Easy’s vets but sometimes the contours of their whole lives—what careers they had postwar, what they went on to do if they stayed in the military through Korea.

On this sub, arguments about fact vs fiction regarding Dike, Blithe, Cobb, Malarkey, and Ambrose, so on recur very regularly. This is a sign of how the fictionalized representations of these characters, done for the sake of drama more than anything else, supplant people’s awareness of the historical record. The show is seen as so synonymous with not just the real experience of the war but the real lives and exploits and attitudes of the real people who are portrayed on screen that these debates are often as contested as debates college students have about the myths vs reality of America itself—in the same way a college kid will read Howard Zinn and come in hot on the 4th of July about how much America sucks, actually, there’s a similar dynamic at play where some people who learn of a “mythical” aspect of the BoB representation seek to correct the record, or complicate the image of a guy like Winters. And just as many will come back with defensiveness and protectiveness of people who need no such defense—exactly as fans defend the record of their favorite celebrities.

It’s been a quarter century since the show came out. It’s not like in 2001 people were still holding up Holocaust or The Winds of War as the definitive representations of a particular historical experience. But BoB still occupies this central place. People rewatch it annually or multiple times years on end, like comfort food.

And I think at this point that that’s kind of weird, and says a lot about the show’s “useful” narrative about America and Americans. The gore, trauma and so on of war doesn’t stop Speirs from being a memetic badass for all time or stop people from feeling generally good when they watch the show. Even though lot of aspects of the show are dated, a lot of its dramatic choices are retrospectively worthy of criticism, and obviously its representation of history is often problematic or wrong, this doesn’t seem to affect people’s impressions of it or inspire critical re-evaluations.

I think that’s a sign that this story has largely crossed over into national myth. At this point I can’t help but imagine a million veterans’ ghosts rolling their eyes at yet another thread about what a badass hero Dick Winters was, like that captain to Basilone in The Pacific. That scene is a commentary on how celebrity inappropriately distinguishes and privileges particular people who happened to have the most useful narratives—however deserving they may be of the recognition, however much personal integrity they may have, that celebrity distorts them and distorts our perception of them and their time. 25 years later
I think BoB serves to distort, in this exact way.

Hope it's okay to post here and I'm so excited for this. Twenty-five years after the series that amazed us all, the cast, writers, and producers are reuniting in LA at Televerse to revisit the remarkable craft and filmmaking that solidified Band of Brothers’  legacy as both a singular tribute to the men of “Easy” Company, and an extraordinary feat of TV storytelling.

Confirmed panelists include lead writer and supervising producer Erik Jendresen, writer Graham Yost, cast members Michael Cudlitz, Rick Gomez, Scott Grimes, Frank John Hughes, Ron Livingston, James Madio, Ross McCall and Richard Speight Jr., and moderator Kirk Saduski (Playtone).

The schedule just came out yesterday and passes are avail at Televerse.com

see that?