War On Film – Masters of the Air

After the huge success of Saving Private Ryan in 1998, the film’s director Steven Spielberg and star Tom Hanks collaborated on an ambitious television project. They bought the rights to a book by historian Stephen E Ambrose that followed a single group of men, ‘Easy’ Company, in the 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne, from training in the US, through D-Day, Operation Market Garden, the battle for Bastogne, and the liberation of a concentration camp, to the capture of Hitler’s Berghof in the Bavarian mountains. Ambrose’s book was itself based on the unpublished memoirs of Captain Dick Winters, the commanding officer of ‘Easy’ Company. The show was named after the book: Band of