Why We Fight (S01E09)
Airdate: October 28th 2001
Written by: John Orloff
Directed by: David Frankel
Running Time: 55 minutes
While Band of Brothers has justifiably earned acclaim for its visceral, ground-level portrayal of the Second World War, its fundamental narrative structure invites a persistent critique: by concentrating almost exclusively on the microcosm of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, the series risks presenting their harrowing journey as an isolated saga, a single cog seemingly disconnected from the vast, grinding machinery of the global conflict. This approach, however effective for human drama, necessitates that the series periodically step back to contextualise the unit’s sacrifices within the broader strategic and moral imperatives of the war. The penultimate episode, Why We Fight, attempts precisely this crucial contextualisation. It delivers some of the most profoundly disturbing and emotionally resonant moments in the entire ten-part series, forcing both the characters and the audience to confront the war’s ultimate horror. Yet, in its very ambition to transcend the parochial struggles of Easy Company and articulate the raison d'être for the Allied effort, the episode stumbles into significant historical inaccuracies and tonal inconsistencies that undermine its otherwise powerful message, generating controversy that persists to this day.
The episode’s title, deliberately echoing Frank Capra’s seminal WWII propaganda documentary series commissioned by the US government, establishes an immediate, almost ironic, tension. In April 1945, as the episode opens, the grand philosophical question of "why we fight" is utterly remote from the minds of the weary men of Easy Company. With the Third Reich collapsing, their immediate concerns are starkly mundane: survival, scavenging for food, acquiring luxuries like cigarettes or alcohol, and, for some, exploiting their position as conquerors for casual sex. This is epitomised by Captain Lewis Nixon (Ron Livingston), the nominal protagonist and Major Winters' (Damian Lewis) closest friend. Nixon, now serving as 2nd Battalion Operations Officer, is consumed by his quest for Vat 69, his favoured whiskey, a pursuit symptomatic of a deepening alcoholism. Simultaneously, he receives the devastating news that his wife has divorced him, taking their home, child, and even his dog – personal tragedies that, while profound for Nixon, feel almost trivial against the backdrop of the continent’s collapse. This focus on the soldiers' immediate, often ignoble, preoccupations – drinking, stealing chickens, and the seduction of local woman - including Tom Hardy’s screen debut as Private Janovec in a brief but memorable sex scene, contrasting with Lutz’s (Rick Gomez) slap-inducing misadventure – creates a deceptively light, almost farcical opening. It lulls the viewer, mirroring the soldiers' own sense of anticlimax, before the brutal pivot.
That pivot arrives with shattering force in Bavaria. Sent ostensibly to counter the mythical "Alpine Redoubt" where fanatical Nazis might wage guerrilla war, Easy Company occupies Landsberg. A patrol venturing into the surrounding woods stumbles upon a satellite camp of the Kaufering complex – a scene of unimaginable horror. They find thousands of emaciated, skeletal prisoners, many already dead or dying, abandoned by the SS who lacked the ammunition to murder them all before fleeing. The sheer scale of the suffering, the living skeletons crawling in the mud, confronts the hardened veterans with a reality that transcends battlefield trauma. Captain Winters, visibly shaken, attempts to organise immediate aid – water, minimal food – but is swiftly informed by medical personnel that overfeeding will kill the survivors; their bodies, ravaged by starvation, can only tolerate minuscule rations. The US Army then orders the bewildered local German populace, who protest ignorance of the camp’s existence, to bury the mountains of corpses – a grim, necessary act of accountability forced upon the civilian population. It is Nixon, amidst this maelstrom of horror, who delivers the final, almost mundane, update: Hitler is dead by suicide, and Easy Company is to proceed to Berchtesgaden to secure the Führer’s Eagle’s Nest.
Why We Fight thus functions as a crucial symbolic bridge between Steven Spielberg’s two defining WWII films. Up to this point, Band of Brothers had effectively served as a sprawling, episodic extension of the visceral combat and brotherhood explored in Saving Private Ryan. Here, the episode pivots irrevocably towards the moral universe of Schindler’s List. Director David Frankel, whose own family members perished in the Holocaust, handles the camp discovery with unflinching restraint and profound empathy. He avoids gratuitous gore, focusing instead on the soldiers' stunned reactions, the overwhelming scale of the suffering, and the sheer logistical nightmare of the aftermath. The camera lingers on faces – both prisoner and liberator – forcing the audience to share in the shock, the nausea, and the dawning comprehension. This sequence is the episode’s undeniable core, its gut-punch. It reframes everything that has come before: Easy Company’s battles, their losses, their struggles through Normandy, Netherlands, and the Bulge, were not merely part of a conventional war for territory. They were integral components in a titanic struggle against an evil that sought the systematic eradication of entire peoples. The episode posits, unequivocally, that this knowledge – even if only fully grasped after the event by the soldiers themselves – imbues their sacrifices with a profound, world-saving significance. The war was a fight between Good and Evil, and their contribution, however small it seemed within their own unit, was vital.
The episode further attempts to illustrate the overwhelming scale of the Allied victory through a visually spectacular sequence: vast columns of US mechanised forces thundering down the Autobahn towards Bavaria, while in the opposite direction, seemingly endless streams of German POWs march on foot. It’s a powerful image of industrialised warfare meeting its inevitable end. However, this impact is significantly diluted by Private Webster’s (Eion Bailey) mocking the Germans for the lack motorised transport, quipping about their logistical failures. This flippant commentary, while perhaps reflecting a common soldier’s attitude, feels jarringly trivialising amidst the episode’s gravest subject matter, undermining the scene’s intended epic weight.
Other elements, however, falter more noticeably. The recurring motif of a small German string quartet playing Beethoven amidst the rubble of Landsberg, used as a framing device, feels excessively "artsy" and pretentious. It imposes an unwarranted layer of aestheticised melancholy onto the immediate, brutal reality of occupation and discovery, clashing tonally with the raw horror of the camp sequence. Similarly, a brief but potent scene depicting French soldiers summarily executing German POWs, witnessed with horror by passing US paratroopers, serves as a chilling foreshadowing of potential moral collapse in the face of such depravity. Yet, its historical credibility is shattered by a glaring anachronism: the French troops are depicted wearing the distinctive Adrian helmets of WWI, not the helmets actually used by French forces in 1945. This unnecessary error, while visually identifying them as French, instantly pulls the informed viewer out of the narrative.
The most significant and enduring criticism, however, centres on historical inaccuracy. The episode depicts Easy Company and the 101st Airborne as the liberators of the Kaufering concentration camp complex. In stark reality, Kaufering IV (Landsberg) was liberated on 27th April 1945 by Combat Command B of the US 12th Armored Division. Elements of the 101st Airborne did arrive the following day and assisted in managing the camp and its survivors, but they were not the liberators. This conflation, while perhaps driven by dramatic necessity to maintain the series' focus on Easy Company, is profoundly problematic. It appropriates the pivotal, traumatic moment of liberation from the unit that actually experienced it. In an era where Holocaust denial and historical revisionism are increasingly vocal, eight decades after the events, such narrative liberties carry dangerous weight. When a globally influential series like Band of Brothers alters such a fundamental detail – the identity of the liberators at a site of industrialised murder – it risks eroding public trust in historical narratives altogether. The episode’s powerful moral message about confronting evil is tragically weakened by its own failure to adhere strictly to the historical record it seeks to honour.
Why We Fight remains an essential, emotionally devastating chapter in Band of Brothers. Its unflinching portrayal of the Holocaust’s aftermath provides the series with its crucial moral anchor, transforming Easy Company’s story from a tale of military endurance into a testament to the necessity of defeating Nazism. Yet, the episode’s legacy is irrevocably tied to its flaws: the jarring tonal shifts, the unnecessary anachronisms, and, most damningly, the misattribution of the camp’s liberation. By sacrificing historical precision at the altar of narrative cohesion, Why We Fight achieves profound emotional impact but ultimately undermines its own vital argument about the absolute importance of bearing witness to the truth.
RATING: 8/10 (+++)
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