Spielberg & Hanks · 2001 · overland

The journey of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne, drawn from Stephen Ambrose's history and the acclaimed 2001 HBO miniseries by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. It follows the paratroopers from brutal training at Camp Toccoa, across the Atlantic to England, into the D-Day drop over Normandy, Operation Market Garden in Holland, the frozen siege of Bastogne, and on through Germany to Hitler's Eagle's Nest and the end of the war in Europe.

1. 1
   Camp Toccoa

   Georgia, 1942. Currahee. Easy Company is made under Captain Sobel - three miles up, three miles down - and Sobel falls out with the men he is training, Winters chief among them. The episode ends with the company shipped to England for D-Day; the crossing itself is never shown.

2. 2
   Camp Mackall

   Advanced field training in the Carolina pines through 1943 - the manoeuvres on which Sobel loses his own company in the woods, and the officers begin quietly concluding that he cannot be allowed to lead them into combat.

3. 3
   New York

   The regiment moves up to Camp Shanks and boards the SS Samaria at New York on 6 September 1943 - a converted Cunard liner built for a thousand passengers, carrying five thousand men of the 506th.

4. 4
   Liverpool

   Nine days of heavy seas and bad food later the Samaria docks at Liverpool on 15 September 1943, and the regiment entrains south the next morning for the Wiltshire villages that are home until D-Day.

5. 5
   Aldbourne

   The Wiltshire village where Easy is billeted before and between operations - pubs, replacements, and Bull Randleman ribbing the new men. On screen it is Hambleden in Buckinghamshire. From here they marshal for the drop into France.

6. 6
   Uppottery

   In the last days of May the company is trucked from Wiltshire to a sealed marshalling area at the Devon airfield, issued maps and invasion money - and on the evening of 5 June boards the C-47s with blackened faces.

7. 7
   Normandy

   Day of Days. The night jump scatters Easy across the Cotentin; Winters gathers a handful of men and takes the German guns at Brecourt Manor with them. Lieutenant Meehan's plane goes down and Winters has the company.

8. 8
   Carentan

   The town that links Utah and Omaha, taken in heavy fighting, and the making of Private Blithe - the episode follows his terror and his recovery. Easy holds the line at Bloody Gulch against the counter-attack.

9. 9
   Eindhoven

   Replacements, and Operation Market Garden. The Dutch pour into the streets to greet them; then the push to Nuenen runs into German armour and Easy is thrown back - the first time Winters has to order a retreat.

10. 10
    The Island

    Over the Nijmegen bridge by truck on 2 October, onto the strip of polder between the Rhine and the Waal - and eight weeks of static trench warfare more like 1917 than 1944, Winters' command post at Randwijk.

11. 11
    Mourmelon-le-Grand

    Pulled out of Holland on 25 November to a French barracks to rest and refit, still short of winter clothing and ammunition - and loaded into open trucks three weeks later, at a few hours' notice, for the Ardennes.

12. 12
    Bastogne

    The Ardennes in December, encircled and freezing, treating wounds under artillery in the woods round Foy - told first through the medic Eugene Roe, then through the assault on Foy itself. The coldest, hardest stretch of the war for the company.

13. 13
    Haguenau

    Alsace, and a dangerous night patrol across the river for prisoners - Webster back from hospital to a company that has been through Bastogne without him, and a second ordered patrol that Winters quietly tells them not to make.

14. 14
    Landsberg

    Into Germany. A patrol stumbles on a concentration camp near the town, the guards gone, and frees the starving prisoners - the episode where the war stops being about ground taken.

15. 15
    Berchtesgaden

    The Eagle's Nest above the town, and Goering's house below it - Easy takes Hitler's mountain retreat and the drink in his cellars. The shooting for these scenes was the Bernese Oberland, standing in for Bavaria.

16. 16
    Zell am See

    Points. Austria, the war over, Easy overseeing the surrender of 25,000 German troops and waiting on the points that will send them home. Winters reads out what became of each of them. On screen the town is Brienz in Switzerland.