Band of Brothers is a ten part TV miniseries based on the book of the same name by biographer and historian Stephen Ambrose. Both mediums cover the story of E (Easy) Company of the 2^nd Battalion, 506^th Parachute Infantry Regiment part of the 101^st Airborne Division during the Second World War.

The story picks up Easy Company in Toccoa, Georgia undergoing their basic training before shipping to the UK and becoming one of the first regiments to see action as part of Operation Overlord (France) on the evening before the D-Day landings. The story then follows Easy Company through the rest of the operations they were involved in during the Second World War including Operation Market Garden (Holland), The Battle of the Bulge (Belgium) and finally into Germany to clear up as the war in Europe came to an end.

If you thought Saving Private Ryan(SPR) was a great film then you will love the Band of Brothers series. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks pair up again bringing all their knowledge from SPR to bear on a better set of stories. With the freedom of ten episodes they are able to go into more depth with the characters and the details of the Second World War itself.

A real effort was made to produce a work that was factually accurate as well as creating the same on screen realism that was such a feature of SPR. Captain Dale Dye, a retired Marine, was a consultant on Band of Brothers and ran a 10 day boot camp for all of the actors before filming started. This was of course crucial in enabling the actors to believably recreate military manoeuvres on screen, but also provided them with a togetherness that many other productions would lack. Not quite the same bonds as the real war veterans, but a good insight into how the actors may have formed a 'Band of Brothers' had they been thrown into World War Two together.

In order to produce a coherent series across ten episodes taking in the entire war for Easy Company did require a few alterations to the literal historical events. Here's what Tom Hanks had to say on making history fit the screen:

"We've made history fit onto our screens. We had to condense down a vast number of characters, fold other people's experiences into 10 or 15 people, have people saying and doing things others said or did. We had people take off their helmets to identify them, when they would never have done so in combat. But I still think it is three or four times more accurate than most films like this."

For me the real seal of approval for the realism seen in Band of Brothers is that it got the go ahead from the real life veterans of Easy Company. Stephen Ambrose had interviewed many of them for the book and before each episode of the series snippets of the interviews are shown. The veterans were shown previews of each episode before they were aired to give them the final quality check.

If you have seen Band of Brothers but have not read the book or vice versa then I can strongly recommend view or reading the medium that you've missed. Having read the book after seeing the series opened my eyes to a heap of additional facts and events that are not covered by the series. I'm sure if you've read the book and not seen the series yet it will be hugely rewarding to see whats only in your imagination brought to life so vividly on screen.

Beyond Band of Brothers Stephen Ambrose has many other excellent books on the Second World War and of course if you haven't seen SPR then you should put that at the top of your must see movies list.

As far as a follow up series goes, it is obviously not possible to do more with Easy Company as it was in Band of Brothers because it follows them to the end of the war in Europe. However, Spielberg and Co are in production of a similar series set in the Pacific theatre of World War Two. It is scheduled for release in March 2010. If SPR and Band of Brothers are anything to go by then it will be another must see series, I can hardly wait!