I continued to watch episodes from the HBO mini-series, Band of Brothers. I am now on the third episode called Carentan.
There were interviews before the episode started. The men being interviewed were paratroopers from Easy Company. They talked about how scared they were and how they got used to the feeling of fear. They all felt like they were going to die as soon as they got to Carenten (the town they take over in this episode).
The episode started on June 8, 1944, in Normandy, France. It showed a few paratroopers still wandering around looking for Easy Company. They found another man who was looking for Easy Company as well. After a while of searching, they were back together with Easy Company once again, unlike many other paratroopers who never found their way.
Easy Company was then commanded to head out to take on their next objective which was to take the town of Carenten, France. When they got to the town, they were immediately attacked by soldiers hiding out in buildings throughout the town. They engaged in street to street fighting with an extremely determined enemy, Germans. The fighting was hard and there were many wounded and also many casualties. Many explosions/little bombs were used and many men lost limbs. A lot of the men were separated from each other which was very scary because they could run into their enemy anywhere they turned. Easy Company ended up pushing the Germans out and had to hold the position.
One of the paratroopers from Easy Company, Pvt. Albert Blythe, suffered from hysterical blindness due to the pressure and stress. He quickly recovered because of a few words of encouragement from Lt. Winters.
They then faced a counter-attack from German forces, including artillery and tanks. Thanks to their own tanks, they beat the Germans once again. After 36 days in battle, Easy Company was finally relieved and returned to their base in England. They lost a total of 65 men. Albert Blithe never recovered from his wounds received in Normandy and died in 1948.
This was a really intense episode. It was hard to watch at some points especially when a guy was run over by a tank. This episode definitely had a lot more action then the other episodes. I'll go into a lot more detail in blog discussion tomorrow, get excited. :)
Quotes from the episode:
"Dehydration is a soldier's worst enemy."
"It's nothing but a game, we're just moving the ball forward one yard at a time."
"War is hell."
Comments
Good summary once again! Great blog discussion as well!