“Band of Brothers” by Stephen E. Ambrose – War’s Daredevils

The exploits of those who fight and die during wars tend to be forgotten as the years go by and all the knowledge people have of the events becomes increasingly generalized. 

As unfortunate as it may be, countless heroes are become forgotten every year, with some of them never having been known in the first place. 

Such is the fate of the many men who were part of the 506th Airborne Division in the United States Army. As Stephen E. Ambrose details it in his book, Band of Brothers, members of the 506th Airborne were always given the toughest and most dangerous assignments. The suffered countless casualties and ended up going through virtually all the deadly perils known to man, including hunger, freezing, bombs and bullets.

In Band of Brothers, Ambrose basically aims to reconstruct the picture as to who the men of the 506th were, and what they had to endure over the years in the name of their country. In order to collect his information, Ambrose had to do a healthy dose of research in peer-reviewed materials, but that’s not the most interesting part. 

That honor goes to the hours upon hours of live interviews Ambrose managed to conduct with the few surviving members of the 506th. In these instances, we are not only learning about their stories, but rather, we see them recounted to us from a first-person perspective by the ones who actually lived them.

War is hell, that much is known from all the literature we have about it. Surprisingly, even though much of the book is indeed about the horrors the 506th had to face during the war, there is a lot of focus on who the actual people were behind the masks of soldiers. 

Ambrose does a fantastic job at making each and every one of them feel like a whole and valuable human being, rather than an expendable pawn in a much larger mechanism. We are even taken on deep excavations inside the soldier’s mind, what happens before, during and after battle.

In addition to all of that, Ambrose never lets the historian inside of him sleep, providing concrete details and whatnot on the various assignments the men he interviewed were given. 

He goes beyond giving general descriptions of them, explaining the purpose of every mission, and the possible consequences to both its success and failure. In other words, he actually helps us to understand the strategy aspect of war in a simple and clear way.

All in all, those who are interesting in learning all there is to about the brave men of the 506th Airborne Division, the missions they undertook, the dangers they faced, and the men they were definitely ought to give Band of Brothers a try.

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Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) Stephen Ambrose was an American author born in 1936 and deceased in 2002. In addition, he was also a historian and even wrote the biographies of American presidents Eisenhower and Nixon. He wrote a number of bestsellers, including Nixon: The Education of a Politician.