The Great Crusade

Band of Brothers and American Democratic Mythology

Band of Brothers, HBO, 2001

In contrast with the competing fascist myths of the 20th century that presented soldiers as being hardened men of steel who transcend their mortality through acts of heroism, or the somewhat similar socialist realism that viewed the proletarian soldier as being an undifferentiated mass steel-men—liberal democracy created its story for who their soldiers were.

Across the fields of France, the United States assembled a certain idea of the citizen-soldier who would go anywhere in the world for the sake of democracy and liberty. The story of a taxi driver from Brooklyn armed with nothing but an M1 Garand and backed by General Motors kicking the shit out of Hitler’s vaunted Übermensch is now foundational to who Americans see themselves as.

I should say here that I’m using mythology in a neutral sense, I don’t regard it as a positive or negative thing, merely just a shared set of idealized stories that form a foundational narrative about one’s political community.

I also don’t mean mythology to say that the story itself isn’t true—it’s more about how one chooses to tell a certain story. History is fundamentally too complex to ever really present anything like an actual accurate version of events, there are too many causes to ever actually narrow them down enough to present something like a definitive narrative.

For the sake of saying anything at all, we have to make choices about what causes and what effects we’re going to ascribe to historical events, and those discrete choices end up reflecting the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.

I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to call the Second World War America’s Good War, but the story could certainly be told differently. After all, we entered the war rather reluctantly only after being attacked by Japan and the subsequent declaration of war by Germany.

The makeup of the American military was also primarily conscript, many of whom were rather ambivalent participants in the conflict. Except for books like Catch-22, we’ve largely decided that the national image of the United States is not that we are a country that chooses to do the right thing when we have exhausted all other options, but of an active crusader for democracy.

As such, I don’t think it’s much of a mistake that the focus of the show ends up being an airborne unit. The self-selecting nature of going airborne has been directly correlated with higher morale since the introduction of parachutes to battlefields.

It is just a general rule that people willing to throw themselves from a plane are almost always going to make for a more cohesive fighting force than one that consists of conscripts.

In the same way that Homer’s Iliad once served the purpose of serving as a template for what the Ancient Greeks could emulate—the focus on a singular company of the 101st Airborne Division reflects a certain aspirational vision of who the American soldier that went to fight in Europe was.

Through this choice, Band of Brothers ends up being a distillation of the democratic idealism that was most forcefully expressed by Eisenhower in the letter he wrote on the eve of D-Day. It is a show that is first and foremost about a great and noble undertaking that free citizen soldiers are embarking upon.

You don’t spend much of the show focusing on the countless days of Dick Winter’s life that he probably spent staring blankly at trees while on guard duty, or the mind-numbing repetitive paperwork that came with his promotion into staff positions.

Those are considerations for a show like The Pacific or Generation Kill as this isn’t a show about soldiers as they really are.

Except for the episode "The Last Patrol," we essentially never see Easy Company as anything other than model soldiers. They’re men who are deeply devoted to their country, and almost to a man are rendered as being without any real character defects.

The only real exception to this would be Nix, but the show uses him more as a form of comic relief half the time, which takes away from his presentation as being driven into alcoholism from all of the killing and death around him.

It is, of course, true that a lot of this is helped by the fact that Easy Company did fight their way through some of the most well-known engagements of the Second World War.

It is rather hard to present a unit that fought from D-Day to Bastogne, then on to seizing Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest before going back home to live quiet lives with their families as being anything other than an idealized form of American heroism.

Outside of Speirs, there’s nobody in the show that’s ever really shown to be a soldier at heart either. There’s no Achilles in this story who is seeking some great glory on the battlefield for which their name will ring out in history. Nobody is seeking to have songs sung of their great deeds, and nobody hoping to die for King and Country.

The overriding ideology of the show can best be summarized by Winter’s internal monologue reflecting that I promised God and myself that I would find a quiet piece of land someplace and spend the rest of my life in peace.

It’s the diametric opposite narrative of war from that Fascism or Marxist-Leninism presents in their self-narratives of an endless violent struggle (or at least an endless class war until Communism is achieved).

The idea of the democratic soldier is someone who goes to war primarily out of a sense of service to their political community but longs to return home and peace the entire time. There’s no real narrative of violence that has any appeal in itself, or violence that ought to go beyond the absolute minimum necessary.

The combat itself also reflects the more liberal notions of who soldiers are by focusing on a very small-scale localized presentation of the various engagements that Easy Company found themselves in.

Take for instance Brécourt. It’s not that the assault on Brécourt never happened, it’s that the Brécourt was a minor action in the Second World War that takes on a larger symbolic role. Brécourt of course stands out in that 3 silver stars and 11 bronze stars were awarded for the action, but it also creates a very visceral sense of who the American citizen-soldier is.

It certainly isn’t the static and desperate fighting along the Gothic Line in Italy or the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest that killed thousands. It doesn’t depict a war that was dominated more by concerns of industrial planning, bombing statistics, and resource allocation to create an overwhelming material advantage.

There’s never any real screentime devoted to the fact that the outcome of most engagements had more to do with overwhelming American firepower than the courage to storm an artillery piece.

It’s a persistent feature of the show that little attention is usually paid to anything that happens outside of what is directly in front of Easy Company. It is of course a show about a specific group of people, but considering the combat that went on around Foy for instance involved multiple battalions of the 506th, you’d hardly have the impression that it was more than one or two platoons from the way the show presents the engagement.

It is an explicit choice in terms of how WWII is captured and presented. Through discrete and small-scale engagements, Easy Company is much more humanized and sympathetic than if you were just presented with the mass death that characterized industrial warfare.

They’re heroic on a democratic scale since the actions they undertake are not superhuman in any sense—but feats that any of us could carry out. Anyone reading this is more than capable of storming an assault gun with enough training, it’s not beyond any of our capabilities. It just requires the courage to get up and out of your fighting position to do it.

It’s a story that resonates with us for a reason—and is still taught in military schools as a model of small unit tactics—because it’s a story in which we see ourselves. We are a democratic people, and as such we want our soldiers and heroes to be human like us.

At our core, we want to see ourselves in the image of average men storming our way through German trenches to liberate occupied Europe.

The United States at its best is a nation that still sees itself as a country that is fighting a noble crusade for a free world, and it’s far from the worst myth anyone has ever told to themselves.