Marcus Brotherton - We Who Are Alive and Remain: Untold Stories From The Band of Brothers

I bought We Who Are Alive and Remain a few months back after reading Dick Winters' Beyond Band of Brothers because I thought it would be interesting to learn the stories of the men of Easy Company who hadn't been featured in Winters' memoirs, Ambrose's Band of Brothers book, or the mini-series.

The stories themselves were very interesting, but the format of the book left something to be desired. Brotherton organizes the book according to themes (such as motivations for joining the army, or the journey across the Atlantic), and includes snippets from each man he interviewed providing their perspective. The problem is that this fragments the individual mens' stories, making the narratives that they provide sometimes hard to follow. Brotherton also acts on the assumption that his readers have either read Ambrose's book or have seen the mini-series, because he provides virtually no information to buttress the accounts of the veterans he interviewed, including when they reference the names or activities of men seen in Band of Brothers but not featured in Brotherton's book.

There were a number of things that I really liked about We Who Are Alive and Remain, however. One is the perspective of the replacement troops who came into Easy Company after Normandy. Band of Brothers doesn't really focus on them at all, so it was nice to see their stories, how they came to be in Easy Company, and what their experience as replacement troops was like. Perhaps the best part of the book for me was the last section, in which the children of three members of Easy Company who survived the war but have since died shared the stories of their fathers.

One of those soldiers was Herbert Sobel, who was featured in Ambrose's book, the mini-series, and Winters' memoirs as an incompetent jerk. Sobel's son shares his recollections about his father, which were entirely positive. More interestingly, to me, was that almost all of the veterans interviewed by Brotherton had good only good things to say about Sobel. By contrast, the vast majority of the men interviewed by Ambrose disliked him, including Winters, who admitted to a hatred of Sobel. Obviously there were serious problems with Sobel's command or he wouldn't have sparked the sergeants' near-mutiny featured in the mini-series, but there is clearly more to the story than Ambrose and HBO showed. It makes me wonder a little bit about how Ambrose chose which veterans to interview, that they would all share the same view.

Overall, We Who Are Alive and Remain was quite a good book, but it should only be read after having read or watched Band of Brothers, otherwise the reader will be left with a lot of questions.