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War Stories

There’s a spectacular illogic surrounding the wave of World War II mania that’s cresting across the American landscape. Something about it doesn’t make sense. Aren’t Americans supposed to be notoriously disinterested in history? Doesn’t Jay Leno still get laughs with his ongoing "Jaywalking” schtick, outing passersby on the street who demonstrate with appalling consistency that most of this nation couldn’t pass a third-grade history exam? So, how come turn-of-the-century America is now searching for its identity in countless tributes to its graying veterans, in books like Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation and films like Pearl Harbor? "I don’t know the answer to that,” says Tom Hanks, shrugging, proving that even the fashion’s most noteworthy progenitor has difficulty processing the notion that the American public (which long ago became his public) has become wildly passionate about something so unsexy, so unHollywood, as history. "I wonder sometimes, are people really caring about all this?”

Of course they’re caring, and Hanks knows it — he can always check the box-office receipts if he forgets — which is why, even during the filming of the touchstone Saving Private Ryan, he began laying plans for an even larger epic, one that would surpass the D-Day saga that’s come to define WWII films. "It’s a bit of a life-changing episode to go through the making of a movie like Saving Private Ryan,” Hanks says from the set of an L.A. production lot. "I had read Band of Brothers [the 1992 bestseller by Stephen Ambrose] in preparation for Saving Private Ryan and somewhere in there I said, ‘Oh, my god, it’s perfectly made [to deal with] the bigger story of World War II.’”

Thus was born the latest and in many ways most ambitious of Hollywood’s WWII films. With friend and Saving Private Ryan director Steven Spielberg signing on as co-executive producer, it took three years and a $120 million budget to make Hanks’ Band of Brothers inspiration into reality. The sweeping 10-part drama tells the true story of one of WWII’s most extraordinary and elite rifle companies — Easy Company, 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, U.S. Army — from its savage training in Georgia (crawling across fields littered with pig guts was a favorite drill) to its nighttime parachute drop behind Ger-man lines on D-Day. Frostbitten valor in the Battle of the Bulge and a final, glorious capture of Hitler’s "Eagle’s Nest” at Berchtesgaden were and are part of the program. The "Band of Brothers,” as Easy Company came to be called, took 150 percent casualties during the war, becoming one of the most celebrated groups of soldiers in American history.

Thought the Omaha Beach landing sequence from Saving Private Ryan was amazing? Band of Brothers makes that scene look like the chapter in the long war that it is. By the third episode of shooting, Band of Brothers special effects teams had blown more pyrotechnics than were used in the entire production of Saving Private Ryan. "The comparisons with Saving Private Ryan are inevitable; we’re aware of that,” Hanks says. "But this is something very different. Saving Private Ryan tells a fictitious story over the course of seven days in June. With Band of Brothers we have the luxury of scope and of time and we are presenting a very different encapsulation of what the war must have been like for someone who survived it from 1944 to 1945.”

Yet some of the similarities make it apparent that Hanks and Spielberg long ago mapped out Band of Brothers to dovetail with its predecessor. Careful watchers of the first film, for instance, will recall that Private James Ryan (played by Matt Damon) was, like the men of Easy Company, part of the 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. In effect, this makes Band of Brothers the real story of what the fictional Ryan presumably endured behind Nazi lines before hooking up with Tom Hanks’ Captain John Miller. Which makes the whole thing nice history, but an even better story — which is what audiences are really responding to in all the WWII films.

As Hanks noted at the Band of Brothers premičre at Utah Beach in Normandy on June 6, Easy Company was made up of ordinary guys with names like Babe, Moose, and Shifty — guys who were asked to do the impossible, and delivered. The Normandy premičre was a near impossible feat in itself. Forty-seven of the 51 surviving Easy Company veterans attended the screening — American Airlines partnered with HBO to provide round-trip transportation and accommodations to vets and family members from their hometowns to Paris — which took place in a 70,000-square-foot tent erected on the beach as a temporary theater.

The veterans saw highlights of nine of the 10 installments, then watched the series’ second episode, which chronicled their parachute drop into Normandy in advance of the invasion of Allied troops. Easy’s job that night was to locate and destroy German artillery emplacements, preventing them from harassing landing craft and soldiers on the beaches in the morning. Think of Easy’s mission as the behind-the-scenes action, literally, that was necessary before the landings depicted in Saving Private Ryan could take place.

Sobs and sniffling were audible throughout the screening — "Very hard to watch,” said one tearful veteran — but the early-morning horrors of D-Day depicted in the film weren’t even the worst the men of Easy faced. "I think most of the guys would give you the same answer, that Bastogne [part of the Battle of the Bulge, episodes six and seven] was the most difficult thing we endured,” said Easy veteran Darrell "Shifty” Powers, of Clincho, Virginia. "D-Day was easy. The planes were getting shot at so terribly that you wanted to jump out!” "The film was 98 percent accurate,” said Easy veteran Donald Bond of Yakima, Washington. "They really got the audio right. I’ve been in a lot of artillery actions and it sounds exactly like that.”

To a man, the veterans at the premičre agreed. The insistence on authenticity that became the hallmark of Saving Private Ryan has been, if anything, refined with Band of Brothers. "For the physical aspect of it — the armorers and the set designers and whatnot — you hire the best people who are dying to do the project,” Hanks says. "The other aspect of it is much more difficult. When you get into the emotions and motivations of the men and the dramatic narrative necessary for a motion picture, then you get into areas where you can lose your grip on the authenticity we were shooting for. ‘What actually happened here?’ That was a question we asked [the veterans] a lot of times.”

Making staged history appear authentic is one of the most difficult tasks in moviemaking. It’s exactly where Spielberg’s talent came into play. The unsaturated look and on-the-ground feel that astonished audiences in Private Ryan — and will again in Band of Brothers — are the result of a lifetime obsession.

Casual Spielberg fans can tell you that before Saving Private Ryan the director had used WWII as the backdrop for his Indiana Jones trilogy and released three major WWII films — Schindler’s List, Empire of the Sun, and the comedy bomb 1941 with John Belushi. But few know that Spielberg was obsessed with war movies as a child, that his father fought in Guam, Burma, and India in WWII, and that as a 14-year-old, the second movie he ever shot was an 8 mm WWII film called Escape to Nowhere. Another of his childhood WWII films starred all his middle school friends and his dad as a jeep driver. "[When my father] had reunions with his fighter squadron, it was so different from the movies Hollywood was showing me,” Spielberg told entertainment reporter Stephen Schaefer. "I didn’t know who to believe, and I chose to believe the war movies because my dad’s stories were too outrageously harsh. [Now] I realize my dad had been telling the truth all along and Hollywood has been fibbing.” "We didn’t want it to be too vivid,” Hanks says of Band of Brothers, which uses many of the Saving Private Ryan techniques. "I always said, the jeopardy of this piece is inherent to it. You don’t want to go for the melodrama if it means drifting into inaccuracy. The accuracy is infinitely more fascinating.”

In other words, don’t overdo it. This sort of restraint is a big reason why Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers will hold up two decades from now, while movies such as Pearl Harbor and U-571 will not. Hanks and Spielberg also agreed to follow Ambrose’s thoroughly researched book faithfully. This meant not glossing over the less noble actions of war, including those perpetrated by our own "heroic boys overseas.” "We show Americans gunning down prisoners,” Hanks says. "The fact is, these guys looted. We kick people out of their houses, we take stuff from them. We don’t editorialize to make a point, but we’re not interested in turning this thing into a whitewash version.”

The Band of Brothers cast is largely unknown — "I don’t think viewers care if there’s a star around or not,” Hanks says — with occasional appearances by familiar faces such as David Schwimmer and Jimmy Fallon. Schwimmer, in particular, is impressive as the arch tyrant of Easy Company, the sadistic commanding officer whose severity during training in Georgia made his men hate him unconditionally, but who nonetheless forged the company into a ferocious fighting unit. But forget about a sweet Hollywood finale — remember Richard Gere and Lou Gossett Jr. fighting and earning each other’s respect at the end of An Officer and a Gentleman? Schwimmer as Captain Herbert Sobel is despicable to the end. "He’s a good actor,” Hanks replies when asked about the unexpected casting of the Friends galumph in the role of unrelenting dictator. "You’re talking to a man who was in a sitcom [Bosom Buddies] on TV, as well.” Hanks smiles here. "As a producer, I try not to punish actors for things they’ve done in the past.”

Like Hanks, Spielberg began his career in television — he directed episodes of Columbo and Marcus Welby, M.D. — one of several parallels that now make it seem inevitable that the generation’s most celebrated actor and most celebrated director would even-tually team up to reintroduce America to its historic legacy. "World War II really was a crossroads that determined where any of us were going to live and how we were going to live,” Spielberg has said. "It is absolutely the single deciding event of the 20th century.” "It’s new stuff because we don’t teach it in school or concern ourselves with it,” Hanks says with the sudden puritanism of a frustrated high school teacher. "It seems like mythic stuff that happened long ago.” That commitment to the myth, along with his familiar self-effacing style, has made Hanks something of a hero to the WWII veterans, whose legacy he’s helped thrust into the spotlight so late in life. "It’s been just humdrum since I was discharged 57 years ago,” says Easy Company veteran Frank Soboleski of International Falls, Minnesota. "Same thing all the time: work, hunt, trap, snowmobile. There’s not a lot to do in Minnesota. And now, all this!” Soboleski says this from the window seat of a 777, as the wing dips and he looks down on the morning lights of Paris.

None of the vets showed up in France without a limp or ancient wound. Several arrived in wheelchairs, others with missing limbs. On behalf of their legacy, Hanks and Spielberg have worked hard and, like them, usually without trumpets blaring. When asked about his contributions and lobbying efforts on behalf of the National World War II Memorial, Hanks quietly demurs. "Other people have done a lot more,” he says.

Spielberg has also given mightily of the "blood money,” as he calls the profits from such movies as Schindler’s List. In 1994, he established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which has since recorded more than 50,000 unedited testimonies of Holocaust survivors to be used by teachers, students, and researchers for generations to come. As for the future, Hanks says he has no plans for another WWII production, but he hasn’t ruled one out, either. "There’s a ton of stuff coming,” Hanks says. "It’ll be interesting to see how much of this stuff the market will bear.”

What a saturated market could certainly bear from Hanks and Spielberg is a production that, instead of reaching across the Atlantic, tackles the Pacific. Variety reported last year that Spielberg’s production company, Dreamworks, had bought the rights to Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley’s best-selling account of events on Iwo Jima that led to the raising of the American flag memorialized in the historic photo. How fitting it would be to see Hanks hoisting the century’s most vaunted Stars and Stripes on film as a tribute to the war’s Pacific veterans. In reality, Hanks might be a little old for the part — the oldest man in that photograph was just 25 — but it seems unlikely anybody would complain if he was the one behind the camera.

Chuck Thompson is a writer and photographer, based in Portland, Oregon. His work has been published in many magazines, including Playboy, National Geographic Adventure, The Atlantic Monthly, Spy, and Reader’s Digest.. Army Buddies. American Way Magazine. September 1, 2001.

Hollywood’s look

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Director Steven Spielberg opens his opus where other films would finish — with a teeth-clenching, D-Day invasion of Omaha Beach that’s better and more authentic than any war action ever staged. The rest of the film is filled with tense, small unit actions serving as parables on everything from patriotism to anti-Semitism. Despite Spielberg’s usual forays into sentimentality, Hanks quietly shines in what will likely go down as the centerpiece role of his career.

The Thin Red Line (1998)

Thanks to a complex and unorthodox narrative, and a premičre that came on Saving Private Ryan’s heels, director Terrence Malick’s masterpiece has been unfairly overlooked. In fact, it serves as the perfect bookend to Spielberg’s epic. Like the war in Europe, Ryan was accessible, righteous, and heroic. Like the war in the Pacific, Red Line was confusing, barbaric, and gruesome — and equally important.

Enemy At The Gates (2001)

The duel between a Russian and German sniper in Stalingrad provides lots of heart-stopping action, but the finale is anticlimactic. Less cred-ible is the clumsy insertion of a love interest, a female Russian sniper who, in the best tradition of female Russian snipers, is also a deadly femme fatale out of uniform.

U-571 (2000)

War buffs will resent the inaccurate implication that it was the Americans, not the British, who broke Germany’s Enigma code. Thespians will resent the wooden manner in which McConaughey assumes his duties as a Navy officer. Still, the scenes inside the sub are compelling in that sweaty, claustrophobic submarine-movie way.

Pearl Harbor (2001)

Pearl Harbor (Director's Cut) (2001)

Movie clichés drop faster and harder than the actual bombs in this endless inquest into audience endurance levels. The attack on Pearl Harbor is convincing, until Affleck and Hartnett start whizzing around in their 1940s prop planes as if they were piloting Star Wars fighters.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001)

Cage plays an Italian army captain who comes to the Greek island of Cephallonia with Italy’s occupying forces in the early days of WWII. He soon falls in love with local beauty Cruz who is, alas, engaged to a local fisherman. Somewhere in there, a magical mandolin comes to the rescue.

Windtalkers (2002)

While WWII participants used a number of ever-changing intelligence codes, the U.S. trumped them all with the famed Navajo code talkers, who spoke a version of their own language that the Japanese never could figure out. The story involves a marine bodyguard (Cage) with orders to thwart a potential security risk by killing any Navajo in danger of being captured by the Japanese.

Hart's War (2002)

Set in a Nazi concentration camp, this courtroom drama involves a former law student (Farrell) defending an African-American prisoner (Howard) against a charge of murder levied by fellow American prisoners. The story explores the parallel between German prejudices toward Jews and the Americans’ racism toward their African-American comrades. Willis plays an imprisoned U.S. general.

Bataan (1943)

America’s defeat in the Philippines provided the background for a stirring tribute to the doomed defenders of Bataan.

Swing Shift (1984)

The role of women on the home front is studied in this well-mounted, atmospheric account of several housewives who become factory workers during World War II.

Patton (1970)

Director Franklin Schaffner's film presents a complex, multi-dimensional portrait of General George Patton, which simultaneous admires and criticizes the famous general. George C. Scott won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., in a highly popular tribute to the theatrical general. Scott again played the military man in the television movie The Last Days of Patton (1986).

Be seated. Now, I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

— George Patton, PATTON

Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)

Filmed on location in Japan and Hawaii, this drama about Pearl Harbor, which tried to give both countries’ viewpoints, is better than its sour reviews suggested.

Wake Island (1942)

Brian Donlevy, Robert Preston, Albert Dekker, and Walter Abel played four of the American soldiers who fought to hold Wake Island in the first days of the Pacific war.

Triumph Of The Will (1934)

This German film, directed by Leni Riefenstahl, reveals film's power as an instrument of propaganda.

The Great Dictator (1940)

In this film, which helped prepare the nation for war, Charlie Chaplin plays two characters, the dictator Hynkel, a caricature of Adolf Hitler, and his look-alike, a Jewish barber facing religious persecution.

The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946)

This William Wyler film explores the wrenching readjustment of soldiers as they return home.

Battleground (1949)

This film, which served as the model for Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, shows a squadron of American foot soldiers who are trapped during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944.

The Big Red One (1980)

Director Samuel Fuller's vivid examination of life as a foot soldier on the front lines of World War II.

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