War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its

size, and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Thank you. host, James Early. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Key Battles of American History.

In this episode, Sean and I will continue our series of in-depth discussions of the epic

award-winning 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. And today we are going to

break down episode four, replacements for you. We'll start and see if Sean has anything to say

before we actually get into the plot. Sean, do you have anything about the background of this episode

or the making of the episode or the historical background?

Anything you want to say?

Not really.

We'll have some notes as we go along and then we'll have some notes at the very end

about this particular episode.

But the one thing to note is we mentioned in an earlier episode, the town of Eindhoven is part of the massive, massive set that they built in England, where they had multiple street scenes that they decorated and did the set dressings to represent different towns.

So if you look, the town of Aindhoven is actually the same town as the ruins, later ruins of Bastogne.

So if you look closely, you'll see some of the similar buildings.

But this is a good episode of there's a lot of cool stuff in this episode.

Yeah.

And so just as background, we saw in the last couple of episodes, we saw Easy Company

...