But the actor-producer gets an A+ for his Band of Brothers, a nine-week miniseries based on Mr. Ambrose's book about U.S. paratroopers who jumped into the middle of the D-Day invasion.

        It's a five-star war story. It could be the greatest miniseries about The Greatest Generation, as Tom Brokaw has dubbed it.

        Band of Brothers, produced by Mr. Hanks and Stephen Spielberg,is the terrific boys-to-men story about Easy Company, the 506th Regiment of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division.

        After strenuous basic training in Georgia, they dropped into France on D-Day, fought the Battle of the Bulge and captured Adolf Hitler's “Eagle's Nest” fortress at Berchtesgaden.

ON THE AIR

Damien Lewis is one of the Brothers | ZOOM |     What: Band of Brothers     When:9 p.m. Sunday, today through Nov. 4     Where: HBO

BY THE NUMBERS

HBO's Band of Brothers required:     • 500 speaking roles.     • 2,000 U.S. and German army uniforms.     • A 12-acre village on the 1,100-acre backlot to portray 11 different European cities and villages.     • 700 authentic weapons, and 400 rubber prop weapons.     • 333,000 pounds of recycled paper to create snow for the Bastogne forest set.     • 750 people (cast and crew) each day on the set. Some days more than 1,000 were needed.     • 14,000 rounds of ammunition a day for filming major war scenes.

        “Before Saving Private Ryan even came out, I thought that Mr. Ambrose had stumbled upon the perfect avenue in which to communicate the breadth of the European war, from beginning to end,” Mr. Hanks says.

        As a baby boomer, the 45-year-old actor had grown up in a California home where his parents — and all of their friends and relatives — divided time into three categories: Before the War; During the War; After the War.

        “Every story had to have that kind of like gestalt understanding to it: "Well, that happened during the war.' "I was there before the war,' ” he says. “I had this concept of World War II as being this huge granite impasse in my parents' lives, and also my uncle's life, and my teacher's life, and my dentist's life . . .”
       

History lessons

        His fascination with Band of Brothers began while preparing for his role in Mr. Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. He read the book before shooting the film in 1998, and on the set met Mr. Ambrose, the former University of New Orleans history professor and historical consultant for Saving Private Ryan.

        Mr. Hanks took the project to HBO, where he produced the Emmy-winning From the Earth to the Moon NASA miniseries. It took three years and a record $120 million to produce the miniseries at the Hatfield Aerodrome outside London, where Saving Private Ryan was filmed.

        He co-wrote the first episode and directed another. He slaved over every detail of this tribute to his parents' generation, which participated in the pivotal event of the 20th century.

        “Between 1939 and 1945,” Mr. Hanks says, “you can honestly say the fate of the world hung in the balance. And that had it not turned out the way it (did), without question, the world would be a very, very, palpably different place than it is right now.”

        Band of Brothers dramatizes the citizen heroes of World War II. In the two-hour premiere, the men suffer through punishing basic training under Lt. Herbert Sodel (Friends' David Schwimmer, the only big name in the cast). The second hour dramatizes the confusion and carnage of the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944.

        By the time Easy Company under Lt. Dick Winters (Damian Lewis from Robinson Crusoe, A Touch of Frost) takes control of the French city of Carentan in next Sunday's episode, Band of Brothers had used more pyrotechnics than the entire production of Saving Private Ryan.
       

Not for the squeamish

        Band of Brothers isn't for the squeamish. It shows throats slit by machine-gun fire, and legs blown off by mortars, in graphic violence rare for television. (As HBO says in its commercials: Hey, it's not TV. It's HBO.)

        Mr. Ambrose gives high marks to Mr. Hanks for the realism.

        “You're going to see what a "gut shot' looks like. You're going to see what happened to (soldier) Bill Gardner when his whole leg was blown off. You've got to look at that if you want to try to understand war,” says the author of the best-sellers Citizen Soldiers and D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climatic Battle of WWII.

        HBO viewers will see the Battle of the Bulge mostly from foxholes. Easy Company was pinned down in a Belgium forest by German units, until Gen. George Patton broke through the enemy lines.

        “It's exactly what happened,” says Mr. Ambrose, the retired professor. “High explosives are going off all around you. Great trees are coming down on top of you . . . It is the most helpless feeling in the world.”

        Says Mr. Hanks: “Christmas eve (1944) was spent freezing in a foxhole in Bastogne, and their best friends died in the artillery barrage that happened that night. I don't know how these guys did that.'

        Mr. Hanks' mission was to portray war in simple “human terms,” so viewers would say: “What would I do under those same circumstances? And my gosh, I sort of recognize myself in these men, as opposed to these mythic heroes.”
       

New faces

        Viewers won't recognize most of the soldiers, other than Mr. Schwimmer, former New Kid on the Block Donnie Wahlberg (as C. Carwood Lipton), and a cameo in the fifth episode by Saturday Night Live regular Jimmy Fallon as a Jeep driver. Mr. Hanks' son, Colin (Roswell), plays a young West Point lieutenant in the eighth episode. Big-name actors, Mr. Hanks says, couldn't commit to the 10-month shooting schedule.

        The no-name cast makes Band of Brothers even more powerful. These men — grunts — were the true war heroes, not the generals whose names we remember.

        Band of Brothers will strike a chord with all adults. Enlist for the action at 9 p.m. today.
       Contact John Kiesewetter by phone: 768-8519; fax: 768-8330; e-mail: jkiesewetter@enquirer.com.
       

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