Surely a highlight of a long, frenetic, and eclectic career in an out of uniform was the work I did on HBO’s “Band of Brothers.” That epic miniseries is passing a milestone 25th Anniversary this year, causing me to review how we managed to capture lightning in a bottle and turn it into the long-lived and celebrated TV feature it has become.
Fortunately, I’ve already done that in process of writing an autobiography/memoir titled “Running Between Raindrops: Dale Dye’s March through the Mud to the Movies.” It’s due for wide release on 12 January, 2027. This piece, a peek behind the showbiz scenes, is an adaptation from that book.
In 2001, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks engineered a deal to produce a miniseries for HBO based on a book by historian Steven Ambrose titled “Band of Brothers.” I’d worked with both of those luminaries on past projects, so I got the call to serve as Military Advisor on what turned out to be one of the most long-lasting, revered, and celebrated epics in showbiz history. None of us realized it at the time but it was also the opening salvo of a marvelous World War II trilogy presented in miniseries form on worldwide TV.
Diving In
Given the multi-faceted nature of making a miniseries, Warriors XO Mike Stokey and I realized we would need to beef up our cadre to handle training and staging on a project that would take the better part of a year shooting on locations in England and elsewhere in Europe. We needed reliable men who understood and could practice our way of prepping actors to portray genuine heroes, some of them still living. The pressure was on, externally and internally, to get it right.
We held a series of briefings and meetings in LA, calling in what we considered to be proven performers from other missions. It was tough making cuts, but we wound up with the best and brightest to work as Cadre NCOs on a project slated to be eight months or more of shooting on a massive dual-unit, multi-location production.
The Ambrose book served as our bible, but that didn’t preclude weeks of detailed research in other sources as we geared up to move to Hatfield Aerodrome where we’d done most of the work on “Saving Private Ryan.” Massive sets were already under construction to support the series that would basically chronicle the World War II adventures of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division.
The Focus
This extraordinary unit of paratroopers was raised during the war at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, trained for parachute operations at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, and shipped to England where they staged with other Allied forces for the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. Easy Company made a night jump in the pre-dawn hours of D-Day and went on to fight with the Screaming Eagles in virtually every significant battle in the European Theater of Operations.
All of that, including the battles in the Normandy bocage, the campaigns in Belgium and Holland, Operation Market Garden, the siege at Bastogne, service as occupation troops at war’s end, and more was included in a series of scripts that our writers were constantly vetting and revising. Two full shooting units would work on the series with a hot-and-cold running assortment of directors, each requiring military advisors to provide continuity and stage the action for cameras.
Spielberg and Casting Director Meg Liberman did brilliant work in hiring a mixed bag of 30 mostly unknown American and British actors to portray the real characters mentioned in the Ambrose book. Only one of them, David Schwimmer of the hit TV series “Friends,” would have prompted a second glance from fans.
In addition to this cast, we needed 30 trained people to work as core elements of various German units we’d see throughout the story as well as 30 featured extras to flesh out Easy Company. Our plan was to fill these gaps by recruiting from various armories in the London area, looking for former soldiers or Territorial Army veterans who fit our profile as either Wehrmacht troops or cocky American paratroopers.
Everyone we considered would have to volunteer for a full eight-month run and survive the most rigorous training schedule we’d ever devised, so we embarked on this mission with our turd filters set on high. Billy Budd, a former Royal Marine with 14 years of service, was invaluable in screening his fellow Brits, eliminating what he called “the obvious wankers” and setting up interviews for me and XO Mike Stokey to select just the right candidates. It was an arduous search, but we found our guys and reported ready for training.
At this point, we pulled the trigger and flew our cadre NCOs into the UK where they could start work on the massive logistic support we’d need to accomplish all the scheduled events at our training base near Aldershot, the home of the British Army.
The Other Side
We obtained permission from the British Ministry of Defense to set up a base of operations for training at Longmoor Camp where we were given free run of the base and our own walled compound to ensure the isolation we required. Within that compound, we ran three barracks buildings for garrison operations and our own mess hall complete with cooks and kitchen staff. It was a virtually perfect training set-up, offering a classic opportunity to learn both garrison and field soldiering.
We got some very weird looks from our British Army hosts at Longmoor when we turned out in full Waffen SS uniform to receive the 30 men we needed to portray the enemy in subsequent shooting. Our Krauts as we called them, needed to look and act like tough, tenacious and professional soldiers, or the jeopardy constantly confronting Easy Company wouldn’t appear as deadly as it really was during the war. Since we couldn’t afford to train the entire cast of German Army extras we’d eventually field for the cameras, the idea was to train this core group who would then provide basic instruction for the extras when they were required.
By simply switching uniforms, equipment, and weapons, Our Krauts would be able to appear as hard-fighting Wehrmacht or Waffen SS infantry, panzer-grenadiers and even artillerymen. We had only a week to get this done as opposed to the two weeks we’d have with the American troops, so we went to work immediately on a training schedule that stretched from dawn to dusk. We taught the German tactics and techniques we’d gleaned from earlier research, running a rugged series of offensive and defensive missions. We spent long hours on ranges getting Our Krauts familiar and comfortable with infantry standard KAR-98K bolt-action rifles, MP-38/40 submachine guns and the Wehrmacht standard MG-34 and MG-42 machine guns.
We wanted, and eventually got the rugged, field-weary, individualized look of genuine German infantry that we saw in photos from the period.
As one of the early scripts focuses on Easy Company’s historic assault on an enemy battery shortly after they jumped in on D-Day, we even trained a full artillery crew using a genuine German 105mm howitzer we had delivered to Longmoor. At the end of the week, they were as good as we could get them, and ready to become leaders and teachers when we brought in large batches of untrained people during shooting.
When we graduated the unit and packed them off home to await orders, we were confident that the German forces in “Band of Brothers”would look genuine and just as deadly as their real counterparts were during the war years.
Our Side
We took the weekend off to explore the Aldershot pubs and then held a final cadre briefing to refine our training schedule while we waited for Easy Company to arrive at Longmoor. We knew that making 10 episodes of a story that would cover some aspect of virtually every major battle in the ETO during WWII as well as covering the training and employment of an Army airborne unit circa 1942 through 1945 would require more than just military guidance and direction. We had to build and train a unit that could operate independently and do all the right things on camera as a matter of automatic response. In the time available, we had to create a real Band of Brothers.
When Easy Company arrived at Longmoor, we were surprised to see Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks roll up behind their buses in a chase car. We gathered everyone in the messhall with no idea what was about to happen.
In a few pivotal moments I’ll never forget, both Steven and Tom made brief inspirational speeches in which they urged our guys to pay attention in training and get it right so that our efforts would be worthy of the real Easy Company. Those completely unexpected comments by two famous folks motivated all of us and set a very high performance standard. No one in that messhall—trainer or trainee wanted any part of letting those men down in any way.
We quickly organized into a training unit composed of two rifle platoons and a weapons platoon. The weapons guys focused on M1919A4 light machine guns and 60mm mortars, while the riflemen learned the M1 Garand, BAR, M1 carbine, and Thompson SMG. Every training day began with PT including long morning runs and trips over the obstacle course. We knew from long experience this sort of activity works to build self-confidence and unit cohesiveness. We did a lot of singing and chanting on these runs, and the troops began to get the feel of massed power a unit working together can generate. Done correctly, you can actually sense the power of a military unit running or marching in step and roaring out cadence calls.
In the Field
The first week of hectic fieldwork was designed to be brutal and it was. We started with squad tactics and then worked up to platoon patrols and attacks focusing on fire support from our crew-served weapons and maneuver by the rifle platoons. The idea as we progressed through training was to gradually back off on leadership by cadre members and turn it over to the men who would portray Easy Company’s real leaders such as Damian Lewis playing Dick Winters, Ron Livingston playing his pal Lewis Nixon, Neal McDonough playing Buck Compton, Rick Warden playing Harry Welsh, and Donnie Wahlberg playing Carwood Lipton. That crew of leaders got a lot of our attention, as three of the five men they would portray were still alive and in regular contact with the actors.
Toward the end of the first week when the unit was getting strong, salty, and confident in their field skills, we staged a long patrol designed to culminate in a night attack on a fortified position strongly held by cadre members playing German defenders. Walking beside Lewis, who was following a pre-set compass course, I took the unit on an arduous march through thick forests. When we cut the road marked on our map, I had Lewis conduct a reconnaissance of the objective and then come up with a hasty attack plan using all our assets. The troops pulled it off like the pros they were becoming, and I knew we were ready for training to fight in towns and villages as required in several of the scripts.
Urban Approaches
Fortunately, Longmoor had what the Brits called a FIBUA facility used to train troops headed for Northern Ireland to fight in built-up areas and we occupied this combat town for a two-day stay away from the comforts of the barracks. Unfortunately, a massive hailstorm and plunging temperatures hit and everyone was distracted by the sound of hailstones pinging off our steel helmets.
We spent a brutal, freezing night defending a series of buildings against constant harassment by aggressor forces, but the training paid huge dividends later when we staged Easy Company’s assault on German forces occupying the French town of Carentan.
Training and team-building continued during the two meals prepared by our civilian mess staff each day. When the troops marched into the messhall in complete silence, we had them stand behind their chairs as I said a brief prayer. Then I’d give the command “Ready…seats!” If I heard more than one ass hitting benches, they got back up and did it again until it was a precision movement. It might seem petty, but it’s an element of team building and teaching personal discipline.
Closing In
At the end of week two, we staged a Final Field Exercise that required the unit under its own leaders to conduct a reconnaissance, then plan and execute a company attack on a number of dispersed enemy positions, setting up immediately to defend against a counterattack. It was the largest and most complex FEX we’d ever tried, involving platoons seizing objectives while operating independently and then pulling back to consolidate into a company defensive perimeter. The entire attack was supported by our 60mm mortars firing dummy rounds and required them to constantly shift their fires as troops maneuvered. It was an amazing event to observe given the relatively short duration of their training, but the guys pulled it off in true airborne style.
I was hugely proud of them, and they were ready to move on to the next phase of skill training that they’d all been looking forward to: Airborne School. Throughout the first week, we’d carved out training time to give the troops what amounted to a paratrooper ground school, teaching Parachute Landing Falls from increasingly higher platforms. They were executing good PLFs from six-foot heights by the time we loaded them up for a trip to the British Army’s No. 1 Parachute School at Bryze-Norton Royal Air Force Base.
This was the facet of training they’d all strived to reach, the carrot I’d been dangling in front of their noses as they slogged through the frenetic first phase at Longmoor. They’d do everything their World War II counterparts did in parachute training short of an actual jump. We begged to include that, but the insurance weenies nearly had a collective heart attack, so we’d have to settle for a suspended jump from the school’s 60-foot tower as the culminating event.
The RAF parachute training staff gave us full run of their ground school facilities including suspended harness rigs, dummy chutes, aircraft fuselage mock-up, and the swing landing trainer. We went to work on this gear immediately using the swing-lander suspended over tumbling mats to teach right, left, front, and rear PLFs. Then we hung them all in suspended parachute harnesses to simulate descent under canopy and taught them to execute post-opening checks and steer their chutes. When they were banged up and bruised sufficiently, we put them in full parachute rig into the fuselage mock-up where they did pre-jump drills, learned to hook up their static lines and practiced exits from the doors.
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On the third day, they made their first jump from the tower suspended by a deceleration line that dropped them onto the ground at about the same speed a trooper would experience on a real jump. As the leader, I made the first jump followed immediately by the XO and my Cadre NCOs. There’s an embarrassing picture that still makes the rounds among Easy Company vets that shows me standing at the tower exit point, about to put my knees in the breeze and wearing a reserve chute pack boldly emblazoned with the word DUMMY.
They all made a series of three jumps from the tower, and I was surprised on the last day when David Schwimmer, who was on light duty and being treated for a painful knee injury incurred earlier in training, showed up limping but determined to make his jumps. These guys were motivated and ready for the reward they’d worked so hard to earn.
Moving Forward
In a formal ceremony held in the messhall back at Longmoor, I pinned silver jump wings on each of them. That was followed by a little speech in which I congratulated them, reminding every man that while training was over, the Easy Company mission was not. We were confident, capable and cohesive now, but the real challenge was to stay that way throughout the long months of shooting that lay ahead of us.
My method for ensuring that was going to be strict and consistently enforced. No one was to refer to himself or any other Easy Company trooper by anything but cast names. We would form up, gear up, and march onto the set every day singing. Easy Company would be responsible for its own uniforms, equipment, and weapons each and every day for the next eight months. They were now a real Band of Brothers, and I expected them to remain that way regardless of distractions and temptations.
To display the unit and show off the changes that had been affected during our time at Longmoor, I formed the unit after they climbed off the buses back at Hatfield where the production office was located. We marched Easy Company around the area singing and chanting in proud, loud precision. They were beautiful. They were magnificent. And they were fully aware of the admiring glances from the civilians who lined the streets and cheered. I was about to halt the unit and dismiss them, but they insisted on making another circuit, listening to their own voices roaring and echoing off the Hatfield hangars.
Training troops for Band of Brothers was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life in or out of uniform…and I guess it amounts to the same thing anyway.
Conclusion
There’s much more about “Band of Brothers” and lots of the other films I’ve contributed to or acted in over the years. And there’s some answers to the perennial question that viewers, readers and fans always ask.
If you’re interested in how I got from humble beginnings, through two decades of Marine Corps service to relatively high on the skyline in Hollywood, I hope you’ll take look at “Running Between Raindrops: Dale Dye’s March through the Mud to the Movies” when it is available on January 12, 2027. More information is available at DaleDye.com on how to pre-order it now.
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