What rattles the critics is the fact that the BBC have paid a huge sum to acquire the UK broadcast rights to Band Of Brothers (the Mail quoted £15m, which the BBC says is 'wildly exaggerated'), in effect using British licence-payers' money to tell them that the Yanks won the war.

For that he cannot be criticised, nor can Steven Spielberg and his fellow executive producer Tom Hanks for their choice of source material. Naturally, this kind of people-based history makes good movies, and it so happens that Ambrose, an American writing for a home market, chose to write about American soldiers. In Band Of Brothers, he narrowed the focus to tell the story through the eyes of one particular group of men. He's written big, wide-reaching tomes on second world war history. Ambrose isn't some hack writer in the pay of the US government: he's a respected academic, the author of over 30 books including standard works on presidents Nixon and Eisenhower. What seems to have passed them by is the fact that the story is, for the most part, true.īand Of Brothers is based on a book by the prolific American historian Stephen E Ambrose, who compiled the story from extensive interviews with veterans of the 'Easy Company', the Airborne's 506th Regiment.

What's incensed the Mail is the lack of reference to the British war effort, and the implication that the Americans won the war in Europe. Along the way they witness the battle of Arnhem, the battle of the Bulge, and the liberation of the death camps. A group of soldiers from the US airborne division are dropped behind enemy lines in 1944, take part in the D-Day victories and then fight their way through Europe to capture Hitler's mountain eyrie at Berchtesgarden.

Whipped into a lather by the Daily Mail, a handful of war veterans condemned the series as 'an absolute disgrace and an insult to the millions of brave Britons who helped win the war' - without the benefit of having actually seen any of it, of course.īand Of Brothers treads familiar territory. I t's just six months since the principal photography finished on Steven Spielberg's 10-part second world war TV epic Band Of Brothers, and already controversy is brewing.

Stephen ambrose band of brothers book