E Company, 506th Infantry Regiment

[laughs] They really just did blow a lot of shit up.

Fantastic story, but they did release a new documentary, an hour-long documentary called Band of Brothers: Legacy that looks back at, you know, the making of and everything 25 years later with the actors and, you know, bits of the people from Easy Company that survived World War II from the original.

It's really worth a watch.

It's really worth a watch.

Not glossed over, but I think they didn't go into as much detail as perhaps... we would have liked

I can imagine there's an uncut version somewhere probably a much longer version because I thought I'd seen all of the talking head stuff because it was done for a documentary called We Stand Alone Together the Men of Easy Company that's on the DVD And I thought all of that had been in there, but there was stuff in there that I'd never seen before, so it was great.

Yeah, I mean, I think there'll never be enough Band of Brothers content for us because of the fact that we're massive fans.

But yeah, it was good, and it was really nice to see...

Even now, it's...

It's a really incredible documentary, and anyone who's a fan of Band of Brothers needs to sit down and watch this.

So one of the first observations we get comes from Ron Livingstone, who played Lewis Nixon, and he identifies one of the extraordinary historical circumstances that made Easy Company such an effective unit around which to construct the series.

So when you follow their journey, they intersect with a remarkable number of defining events in that final years of the war in Western Europe.

Learn more at caesar.com.

Our next dig comes from Salisbury, where a team of British ex-military personnel are hoping to find the remains of a barracks used by the 2nd Battalion of the US Army's 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, otherwise known as Easy Company.

the men of this elite American parachute unit also came to be known as the Band of Brothers.

They came to Britain in September 1943 and remained here for nine months, preparing alongside other Allied troops for the D-Day invasion.

On the surface, you can see nothing.

This is just a sports pitch.

What we wanted to do, to see if archaeology could tell us anything about what lies below this surface and link us to those men from Easy Company and take us back to those days of D-Day...

We know from military photographs that in 1943 and 44, this field housed a number of wooden barracks.

Joey on the right, that's atop Eagle's Nest, Hitler's tea house in the Bavarian Alps, as a matter of fact.

Just on top of Obersalzburg, which is Betches Garden, which is where Easy Company actually put an end to Hitler, put an end to the regime.

And the Berghof, Hitler's house, is at the bottom of that mountain.

That's just an incredible sight.

a time that we had going through, walking through the steps of not just the Nazis, not just the Jews, that the Nazis took on a death march for six days to Tegernsee Lake in Tegernsee, the town where they were going to push them in the lake and kill them.

before Easy Company and the Japanese arm of the U.S. Airborne, the Nisei, were able to save these people, to take out the Nazi regime and to liberate Dachau.

So we went to Dachau first, and then we went to Eagle's Nest.

And the reason why we went is because I needed to understand how fascism flourishes from the place that it was born, From the place that it got a second chance and from the place that it died.

and we'll come on to it, but I'm pretty sure that's down to that discipline and everything and the standards that was instilled by Sobel in training.

So episode one taught us how easy company became soldiers, whereas episode two asks the much more frightening questions, what happens when those soldiers finally go to war? I think, again,

this shows, I mean, we spoke in the last episode about how good that... hour-long episode is at cramming so much information in and i think this does the same you know it's so good the way that you know we are doing that we've seen them set up and now it's time to put that all that planning and training into action and it goes seamlessly you know we saw winters in the in the c47 and then now here we are as they're about you know they're about to land in europe so Let's just recap where we left Easy Company.

So episode one took us from the formation and training of the company, the arrival of Captain Sobel, who, as we said, his leadership style increasingly put him at odds with his men and officers.

And he's been removed from combat command and lieutenant at the time.

It's that humility as well that I think these men have, which really shines through throughout all of this.

And as we've said in the first episode, we know that there was many other units on D-Day and throughout the war that Yeah, it was.

And I know some people have leveled criticism that Easy Company are put on this pedestal.