Currahee, the first episode in the miniseries Band of Brothers, gives you an inside view of the training the men of easy company went through at camp Taccoa, Georgia, all the way to England where they prepare for their jump and finish their training. Currahee is the name of the mountain that the men have to run up in training. 3 miles up. 3 miles down. men who stopped and couldnt run anymore were sent away tobe in the regular infantry.
their first C.O. , Captain Sobel, only has big parts in the film during this episode. In the book, Stephen E. Ambrose calls him a Chickensh*t
Chickensh*t refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be:petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly diguised as necessary discipline; a constant 'paying off of old scores' ; and insistance on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickensh*t is so called - instead of horse- or bull- or elephant sh*t it is small -minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously."
One day during training at Taccoa, Sobel decides that the men need a break and tells them they wont be running that day. He then has the fed a huge speghetti lunch.This may seem nice as your watching but soon Sobel gives then a nice surprise. After they ate half their meal and are stuffed with pasta, he comes in and tells them they will be running. As they are running Currahee, 3 miles up 3 miles down, men are throwing up all over. Sobel is telling them that there is an ambulence waiting to take them away if they want. They could be done with the airborne, the training Currahee, and him. All they had to do wasget in the ambulence. In the movie you will see him saying this to Seargent Randleman. Randleman doesnt get in the ambulance and later Richard Winters, who is soon to be the easy company C.O., says that Randleman was one of his finest soldiers.
Some of the training took place in Uppotery, England, because of its likeness to France in that the landscape is similar.
The incident where Sobel makes a fool of himself by cutting the fence to a farmers cow pasture, took place in Uppottery. Sobel is leading the men on a tactical training mission. Since he doesnt know how to read a map correctly, he gets the company lost, and they come to a barbed wire fence that" wasn't supposed to be there." He sends the men to take cover behind a group of trees, while he attempt to figure out what to do. While the men are behind the trees, George Luz, an E-company man who can imitate peoples voices, tells sobel to cut the wire fence and go through, while pretendin to be Major Horton, who is Sobel's C.O. Sobel does. He comes do the road with the men screaming " Hi Ho silver!" and running the men down the road where winters and 1st platoon are waiting. Sobel and second platoon represents the Germans, and Winters the Allies. Soble gets his men " killed " again. Good thing it was training and not a real combat mission.
The episode ends with the men in C-47's flying across the Englich Channel to drop on France and Winters is looking out the door.