Time Team Day 21 - Digging the Band of Brothers

Good morning!  Today I am going to be doing one of the newer episodes of the Time Team and this is a Time Team special.  I know I should be saving this for November and World War II, but I want to keep all my Time Teams together as part of the Thirty-One Days of the Time Team.  Anyway, today’s Time Team is called Digging for the Band of Brothers and it has a run time of 1:36:56.  As it is a special, it is also narrated by Tony Robinson and he is joined by one of the regular Time Team archeologists Matt Williams.

The Time Team is investigating the US 101st Airborne Division in Britain.  They have been invited by Operation Nightingale to Albourne, Wiltshire.  They will be working alongside service men and women from the US and the UK to learn more about the iconic Band of Brothers.  It is the 80th Anniversary of D-Day and the Time Team is going to help investigate Easy Company.  Easy Company was stationed in Albourne before the D-Day Invasion.  What will the Time Team find to further the Band of Brother’s story.

Albourne, Wiltshire would become home to the paratroopers as they prepared for D-Day.  Easy Company and other regiments would take up residence in a variety of building as they prepared and trained for the D-Day invasion.  The Easy Company men would have arrived here after their training at Tocca.  Their exploits would have been recorded in a scrapbook, which is shown in this documentary.  David Webster writes about when they arrived in the middle of the night at Albourne.

Operation Nightingale are looking for Nissan huts, these were where the ordinary soldiers stayed.  Officers stayed in private homes or pubs.  Although they were in Albourne for a year, they made a big impact on the village and would have left traces behind.  It was very cool to see photographs that had never been seen before.  One of the photos shows Forrest Guth on a bike and it was rumored that he buried the bike before D-Day.  In addition to the photograph, there were maps made of what the camp looked like when the soldiers were present.

John Gater is surveying the fields with magnetometry to assist in learning more about the camp.  Many of the initial finds are in a local history museum.  One of the finds that prompted the Time Team joining up with the dig was a dog tag from one of the men.  This was an episode that had a different pace to it because it furthers the story of the Band of Brothers.  Mark Lawrence, one of the actors from the series visits the dig and he brings a copy of the script for the heritage center.  He teases a trade.  He talks about his experience in the film.  There was a discussion on the impact of the TV series on the area.  A section of stables was moved to the museum at Toccoa, Georgia.  What else does the Time Team discover about the Band of Brothers?  What other finds are made on this dig?  Tune into the rest of the episode to find out.

It was cool that David Kenyon Webster’s words were used to help narrate the episode.  The photos were very good.  This went into many of the unknown stories of Easy Company. I rather like Tony narrating how Sobel got replaced.  It was cool to also see the actors from the TV series get in on the dig.  I also enjoyed seeing the tree where Easy Company soldiers carved their names.  I wonder what the descendants thought about the dig.  I found the bike story very funny.  I hope there will be another special about the Band of Brothers from Time Team.

It was cool to see Matt step up and narrate the episode.  I would have appreciated it if Gus also participated in this episode and then we would have the Matt-Tony-Gus team narrating Time Team.  This was a very well-done episode, the archeology and other facts about the Band of Brothers were interspersed in the episode.  I would definitely show this episode to a history class: both a US history and an American history class.