Summary

BAND OF BROTHERS gives the history and tells the story of Easy Company, 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, U.S. Army. Drawn from interviews with survivors of Easy Company, as well as soldiers' journals and letters, BAND OF BROTHERS chronicles the experiences of these young men who knew extraordinary bravery and extraordinary fear.

Points

Easy Company enters the empty Bavarian town of Berchtesgaden, once home to all the chiefs of the Third Reich. They celebrate the German army's surrender in Hitler's mountaintop "Eagle's Nest," then proceed to scenic Austria.

There, they learn that the Division will be redeployed to the Pacific Theatre, minus any men who have earned enough "points" to go home. Few of them have. As they await official orders to leave Europe, Maj. WINTERS applies for a transfer to a unit that is moving out immediately but is denied the request.

Meanwhile, the violence continues in Austria, including an execution of a suspected labor camp commandant, and the critical wounding of Sgt. CHUCK GRANT (Nolan Hemmings) by a drunken trooper from another company. Capt. SPEIRS, dealing with all of this, decides to stay on as company commander despite having enough points to go home. But Winters will not make a career of the army: he accepts Capt. NIXON's offer of a job with his family's company. As Winters gives news of the Japanese surrender to the company on a baseball field in Austria, we learn what happened to each of the men after the war.

Why We Fight

Easy Company finally enters Germany, where they find no resistance, and begin kicking residents out of their homes for the night so they can sleep.

They find the "enemy" to be industrious and not much different from them, and the veterans enjoy a chance to relax and even "fraternize" with the locals. Maj. WINTERS is concerned about his friend Capt. NIXON, who returns from a disastrous combat jump with another unit, cynical about the war and drinking heavily.

After getting news that President Roosevelt has died, Easy heads out to another German town, from which Winters sends a small patrol into a forest. The patrol finds an abandoned concentration camp, with hundreds of emaciated and still imprisoned inmates, mostly Jewish -- a surprise to Winters and everyone else. They start to feed and release them, but then are ordered to herd them back into the camp so that their recovery can be monitored. As they supervise the cleanup of the camp and its many corpses by the disgusted local citizenry -- who disavow prior knowledge of its existence -- they get the news that Hitler has killed himself.

The Last Patrol

With the war perhaps winding down, Easy Company is trucked into an Alsacian town near the German border. Still on the front line, the men get to sleep in houses, just across a small river from German forces doing the same thing.

They are asked to send a patrol across the river to take some Germans prisoner, an assignment no one wants to be picked from. Except Lt. HANK JONES (Colin Hanks), fresh in from West Point and eager for combat experience. He's put in charge of 2nd platoon, alongside Sgt. DON MALARKEY (Scott Grimes), still broken up about losing so many friends at Bastogne.

When Malarkey is picked to lead the patrol, Jones asks to go in his place, and Capt. WINTERS okays it. Also getting the call is Pvt. DAVID WEBSTER (Eion Bailey), our narrator, returning to the company after having missed all of Bastogne for a relatively minor wound. He finds it's not so easy to gain the acceptance of his old buddies. In the end, the patrol is successful in retrieving two prisoners, but Easy loses a man killed. Weighing this, Winters disobeys an order to send a second patrol the next night.