How come so many of them ended up as Sergeants? I mean...

How come so many of them ended up as Sergeants? I mean, isn't there a limit to how many sergeants you can have in one company?

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>How come so many of them ended up as Sergeants?
Because all the other ones died and they got field promotions because they were good/lucky enough to survive.

klingon promotions

Lowest ranking man in SF was a Sgt. Or used to be anyway. Presumably the same now.

Is there a problem, Captain Sobel?

Was the 101st airborn special forces in WWII? There were privates all over the place.

Nah, they are an infantry division of the U.S. Army trained for air assault operations, not special forces. They followed the same rank structure as any other army unit.

No, they were not.

because it focused on just a few people out of many

The show mostly focuses on guys that lasted a long time, hence they eventually became Sgts when the others. The loads of privates that got hit along the way got replaced by more privates.

fighting in the ETO...3 battles...2100+ KIA, times 3+ wounded...lots of room for promotions.

highho on my silver bitch

Assume Sergeants each lead a 10 man squad, Easy Company's 100 strong at the end of the war, bam, 10 Sergeants.

If you're following just guys who lived through the whole war (to talk about it and hype their role), you get a selection bias of privates who stuck around and got promoted by default.

there is a limit, but people dying makes it easy to get a slot. You have to think that one dead e5 means 1 slot, a dead e6 opens up 2, an e7 3, and if your first sergeant goes down there's 4 new NCO slots

nah man 10 would be a lot even for a staff sergeant. A sergeant gets a team not a squad and it's typically 2-4 men

IIRC a company-sized unit in WW2 had around 15 sergeants - three of them SNCOs (First sergeant etc.) and 12 regular sergeants

Pretty sure a sergeant leads a squad of around 9 men and a corporal leads a fire team of 2-4 men.

Kind of. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squad#United_States

>In 1942, the Army had a massive restructuring of its Tables of Organization & Equipment (TO&Es) and increased the rank of the squad leader and assistant squad leader to staff sergeant and sergeant, respectively. (Platoon leaders now became technical sergeants, as grade 2, and first sergeants became equal in pay grade to master sergeants as grade 1.) The BAR man (automatic rifleman) and the senior rifleman of the Charlie element became corporals (grade 5) and de facto team leaders, even though not officially designated as such. (In 1943 NCO platoon leaders were re-designated as platoon sergeants and officer platoon commanders became platoon leaders.)

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No one told me life was gonna be this way...

Why did they stick a Holocaust episode in when E Company went nowhere near the camps?

...

Sobel was a war hero and the way they portrayed him in BoB was despicable.

He was a good training officer but he was an objectively shitty CO and he was universally hated. Theres a reason no one showed up to his funeral.

Also that camp wasn't historically a death camp

This. One of the cardinal rules of leadership is to not ask your men to do anything more than you're prepared to do yourself. He trained Easy Company to a very high standard but was unable to deliver on the degree of leadership he should have offered in return. On top of that he was petty and vindictive, frequently took credit for his subordinates' success and blamed his failures on them and was clearly ambitious beyond his means.

This was by no means the worst prank played on Sobel. There were more life threatening ones. For instance, at the live firing ranges, Sobel experienced some “accidental” near misses. However, the worst was played on a field exercise where some men were designated simulated casualties so that the medics could practice their bandages, improvised splints and casts. Sobel was one of those chosen. Stephen Ambrose describes what happened next:

“The medics put him under a real anaesthetic, pulled down his pants, made a real incision simulating an appendectomy. They sewed up the incision and bound it up with bandages and surgical tape, then disappeared.”
Sobel was quite rightly furious, but no-one could seem to identify the guilty parties so an investigation didn’t get off the ground. I find this “trick” a terrible thing to do to someone. It might seem like a funny story, but you must remember that this actually happened and a man was violated in this way. It is things like this that reinforce my sympathy for Sobel.

>I mean, isn't there a limit to how many sergeants you can have in one company?
Clearly you've never met the US Army.

Maybe they wanted to show a part of the war that everyone knows about and thematically at least sensible to put in, as the last few episodes are about the aftermath of the war. Why else do they show you the Dutch women getting shaved, Germans having to clean up both the camps and the damage caused by the Allies and Jews having been starved and killed?

>try to train men to be the best possible soldiers
>they get so butthurt they physically mutilate you and then smear your name decades later after your death

Sobel deserved better.

Let's see, 3 platoons, 3 squads each plus a first sergeant, so ten sounds about right. Lipton, Bull, Malarkey, Garniere, a few others I'm forgetting. There were like 15 main characters, at least 4 were officers (Spears, Winter, Officespace and Blondey) and then several others like Popeye and Roe and others weren't officers or NCO so it seemed about right, especially since NCOs had better survivability and would therefore feature prominently in the Ambrose book.

>laughing with your bros
>suddenly spiers offers you some smoke

WAT DO?

Faggot couldn't even read a map.

*take the smoke*

*teleport behind him*

heh...

...

>funeral

Didn't he shoot himself in the head, but lived?

>believing stories told about him by men who despised him

I do kind of feel bad for him but the air borne were trained for years for what most people in the 40s would probably view as suicide. Remember that the only airborne only operation prior to D Day was Crete, when a bunch of under equipped and already defeated Anzacs and British slaughtered German paratroops as they fell. With that amount of intense pressure on them, a shitty field commander would definitely get treated like shit, regardless of how well he trained them. Theres a big difference between making guys run up a hill and commanding them behind enemy lines.

...

>How come so many of them ended up as Sergeants?

Because they survived.

A WW II rifle platoon in the 101st had at least 7 NCO's. Multiply that by 3 rifle platoons per company and you've got a minimum of 21 NCO's, not to mention the weapons platoons and headquarters. Some of those NCO positions were held by SGT's, despite the fact that they were slotted for SSG's, or SFG's, and that's because promotions didn't keep up with the casualty rates.

What about the weapons platoon? What about support elements?

The idea that there is always the precise number of sergeants as needed is ridiculous. In times of peace, there are an excess. In times of war, there can be a shortage or excess depending on the unit. Promotion to sergeant is not contingent on the need of a new squad leader.

Did I contradict what you just said? OP said seemed like there were too many sergeants in BoB, we both provided reasons there would be a bunch.

How come he wasn't tried for warcrimes?

warcrimes is for losers only bud

Because 1000s of prisoners were probably executed by the Allies, they were behind enemy lines so if it even happened it could have been an unofficial order and during the show the legends about him grew to the point where getting the truth would have been hard

woah it's almost like he's a bad leader

Two reasons:
1. Because he was that talented of a soldier and leader, in a situation where talent is in demand
2. Because Tertius knew there was some value to the men thinking he was the meanest, toughest son of a bitch in the whole Roman legion.

Would he actually have accepted a correct answer or was it always designed as a trick question?

/k/ here.
just stopping in to tell you all this is false.

Winners can do what they want.

But they did....

but user, you're already dead

Airborne>Marines>Army>Shit>Lower than shit>Armored>Navy>Airforce

Blows my mind how many actors that are relatively big today were in that show as side characters.

Fucking James McAvoy AND Michael Fassbender , Tom Hardy, Jimmy Fallon, Simon Pegg

Winters' book says that they turned a blind eye because talented officers were so rare.

No dust on their jump wings.

>Greenberg

It blows your mind that actors in one thing went on to act in other things?

The Airborne were given verbal instructions "not to take prisoners", citation needed. Basically they didn't have time to be guarding guys.

Everybody knew what that would mean, I'm guessing Spears was actually known to have gone through with it

tfw for the longest time, I thought this guy was Toby Kebbell

>implying american soldiers can commit war crimes

I'm pretty sure by the end of the war (when they were occupying Germany) there was a surplus of sergeants. Off the top of my head I can think of:

>Malarkey
>Christensen
>Talbert
>Grant
>Martin
>'Shifty'
>Randleman
>Luz
>Perconte
>'Doc' Roe
>'Popeye' Wynn

and plenty more corporals

You can also add to the list:

>Alley
>'Skinny' Sisk
>McClung

>In 1970, Sobel shot himself in the head with a small-caliber pistol.[10] The bullet entered his left temple, passed behind his eyes, and exited out the other side of his head. This severed his optic nerves and left him blind.[10] He was later moved to a VA assisted living facility in Waukegan, Illinois. He resided there for his last seventeen years until his death due to malnutrition on 30 September 1987.[11][10] No services were held for him after his death.[10]

His life's a joke, he was broke, his love life was D.O.A.

WATCH FOR SILHOUETTES ON THE HORIZON!
KEEP LOW!
MIND YOUR TARGETS! MUZZLE FLASHES!

And never forget, they were also stockpiling guys for what they thought at the time was going to be the invasion of Japan.

You mean Russia

If only...

They just had to go and kill Patton to help in silencing that shit.

is there a dumber board the /k/?

>until his death due to malnutrition
Jesus fucking christ

He had a fucking hard life

Had he used a true american foddyfaif instead of a shitty .22 he would had killed himself twice and also a couple of krauts.

Whatever one you frequent clearly

Standard for an infantry company of over 140 men and at least 2 platoons. Most of those guys were E-5s prior to leaving tocoa, and then got their stripes back overseas. I dont remember too many SFCs except Christensen in the group but a lot of SSGs (bull, guarnere, toye, ). Typically a SSG will act as a Playoon Sergeant while promotable. There were also tech ranks in WWII, lateral equivalent of E5 or E6 but not an NCO. Anyways, you could have an E5 or E6 as a squad leader of 10 men, then another E5 or corporal as a team leader of 5.

>show about white US army cuckolds who sold out the white race to jews and cultural enrichment in the future

>17 reichsmarks have been added to your account gunther

Not special forces but more rigorously trained than the standard infantry division.

What is it with this series and omitting or changing details? Christensen is barely shown even though he junped right after winters on d day and it says blithe died in the 1940s of his wound but served another 20 years on active duty?

Because it is American made, they are cultureless mongrels who had a very small role in WW2. If you expect anything half-decent you're a fool.

good goy does it for free

This.

Veterans of Jewish wars deserve no respect or admiration.

>air assault

I thought air assault was those guys who rappel down helicopters
Airborne are those crazy motherfuckers who jump out of perfectly good planes.

Because it's a hearsay? Unless someone stand up and say yeah speirs totally loaded a bunch of lead to the prisoners, there can't be a trial.
Also reminder that this is a story told by some old men about shit that happens half a century ago. They probably only remember the events that are most memorable to them or worse, remember things the wrong way.

>There exists an alternate timeline where Patton and MacArthur pushed commie shit in from both ends

They poke at this in the series, by the end of the show they talk about him karate chopping the heads of an entire regiment off while drinking their blood and fucking the neckhole. When he's asked about it he said it didn't matter if it really happened or not as long as everyone believed it did.

>Also that camp wasn't historically a death camp

I don't recall it was ever stated that it was. They specifically pointed out it was a labor camp in the episode.

>They specifically pointed out it was a labor camp in the episode.
Most of them were labor camps, but as the fronts were collapsing and they were running out of materiel supplying labor camps stops being a priority. Ze germans had abandoned the camps before the allies got there. The eastern front was even worse since ruskies didn't give a shit themselves. It wasn't too long ago they were boiling shoe leather for food themselves in Stalingrad.

Its not that weird when you consider that between this and SPR they pretty much used up every young male actor in the industry. I mean jimmy fucking fallon even shows up.

That's what I like about ensemble war pieces. They call for a large amount of young actors, and if they're well made the cast will be talented, so you'll be seeing a bunch of people who will later go on to be stars.

>How come so many of them ended up as Sergeants? I mean, isn't there a limit to how many sergeants you can have in one company?
Commander discretion

>"SARGE THIS IS SARGE FROM SARGE COMPANY, WE'VE GOT A REAL SARGE ON OUR HANDS"
>"GODDAMNIT SARGE I'VE HAD IT WITH YOUR SARGE......GET YOUR SARGE TOGETHER FOR AN ALL-OUT SARGE!"

Plus people were probably tripping over themselves to work on a spielberg project.
Black Hawk down is another one with a ton of actors, half of them with hilariously bad american accents.
Who the fuck casts Ewen Bremner as an american?

>Executive Producer: Steven Spielberg

They didn't have Wikipedia back when this show was made.

Things where one character did something some else did in real life was more for narrative/using recognisable characters already established. I never understood why they say Blithe died when he did.

There was a book though. The thing the whole series was based on. Pretty sure it was in there, even though it was years since I read it.

>Sobel was a war hero

except that he never went to war.

>Why did they stick a Holocaust episode in when E Company went nowhere near the camps?

>the 101st Airborne Division arrived at Kaufering Lager IV subcamp on the day after[10] it was discovered by the 134th Ordnance Maintenance Battalion of the 12th Armored Division on 27 April 1945

They did, they just weren't the first ones on the scene.

>on topic discussions
>little to no trolling
>mature
>reasonable arguments
>on-topic shitposting

The lowest IQ boards are Sup Forums, Sup Forums, Sup Forums and Sup Forums.

>being enlisted
>becoming an E-5 or above

I think by the end of selection and the Q courses you're always a sergeant.

t. In special operations MOS