From Heaven to Hell
Easy Company at the Gettysburg Film Festival
John Orloff’s two episodes of the epic series Band of Brothers take us up to the heavens and down into Hell. John wrote episode two, “Day of Days”, which chronicles Easy Company’s jump into Normandy as part of Operation Overlord, and episode nine, “Why We Fight”, which shows Easy as it discovers the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp. John joined Band of Brothers actors Matthew Leitch (who played Floyd Talbert) and Mark Lawrence (who played William Dukeman), as well as Dale Dye (the USMC veteran and movie and television consultant who also played Robert Sink in the series), J.D. Huitt (host of The History Underground and The History Traveler series on YouTube), and Erik Dorr (the founder and curator of the Gettysburg Museum of History) for a conversation at the Gettysburg Film Festival.
The conversation ranged from the comic to the sacred. John Orloff started by describing how he felt his mission was to just “tell the story” of Easy Company. Although he resisted efforts to “juice it up”—noting, appropriately, that if you need to juice up a story about men who jump from airplanes into gunfire and then fight through some of the worst conflicts in the largest war humanity has ever known, then “you are not a f*cking writer”—he spared no effort on research. It was clear John had talked dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times with the Easy Company soldiers still alive when Band of Brothers was filming. John also shared that when he took on writing episode 9 and the concentration camp, he struggled with the enormity of that task and had writers block for several weeks.
Dale Dye relished talking about how he put the Band of Brothers actors, or as he affectionately calls them, “maggots”, through a high-intensity boot camp prior to filming. Alongside this good-natured ribbing, both Mark and Matthew grew emotional at times when discussing the soldiers they portrayed in the series. It was clear how deeply both men have been moved by their Band of Brothers experience: Mark has Dukeman’s service number tattooed on his shoulder, for example, and Matthew leads battlefield tours through his We Happy Few 506 company. Matthew also shared pieces of a letter Floyd Talbert—who experienced a difficult post-war transition and only re-connected with Easy Company towards the end of his life—wrote to Dick Winters (who commanded Easy during D-Day and for much of its harshest fighting) wherein he talked about how much Winters meant to him. For a man who struggled with connection, Talbert’s letter revealed the depth of love he felt for Winters and his fellow brothers of Easy.
Statue of Major Dick Winters near Utah Beach, Normandy. Source: DVIDS.
It was thus fitting that the conversation ended with Peter Youngblood Hills, who played Darrell “Shifty” Powers in Band of Brothers, surprising everyone by showing up in-person. It was a great moment—Peter stood in line to ask questions at the end of the conversation, but when his time was up, he stayed at the mic and asked Dale if he would lead the group in calling cadence. The panelists could not see clearly who this persistent audience member was and for a moment, confusion reigned. But then Peter started calling cadence and when he revealed his identify, the panelists jumped out of their seats to embrace him in a hug. It was a beautiful demonstration of how the bonds among the cast and crew mirrored those that exist in the infantry. I can imagine no better way to have closed a session where the topic was “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers”.1
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Great summary of what I imagine was an awesome experience.