Band of Brothers is not an adolescent fantasy but a believably written re-enactment, so authentic that in it one encounters such features as a clinically sadistic company commander, people who can't say anything without the assistance of the f-word, officers who kill prisoners for the fun of it and also run away in battle, and looters (virtually everybody), together with cowards, anti-Semites, and drunks...

The final emotion left by this distinguished, serious work of cinema is a profound sadness—at the destruction of so many American soldiers necessary to bring about the destruction of the enemy and the attendant destruction of Europe. What Hitler didn't finish, the Allied air forces and the looters did. In wiping out the learning and culture of a century, the Germans committed cultural and political suicide, and, as Sir John Keegan has said, "The stain of guilt certainly remains to this day."