Building a Winning Culture: Easy Company, Unit Cohesion & Grit
June 4, 2021 by Mike Kelvington
A group of individuals who came together to become one of the tightest fighting forces in World War II was the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, specifically Easy Company. These young men, glamorized in the Stephen E. Ambrose book and HBO Series, Band of Brothers, epitomized the culture of Airborne units. Stephen Ambrose chose to write about these men because he “astutely recognized the unit for what it was—a microcosm of the entire last year of the war in Europe; a story every soldier who served in the ETO would recognize and identify with, and on that future generations of Americans should know.”[1] Much has been written about this group of courageous individuals, who assembled at humid Camp Toccoa, Georgia, and became a family on the battlefields of Europe. They offered a perfect case study of what American Airborne units were like during WWII.
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Easy Co., 506th PIR, 101st Airborne in Zell Am See, Austria in June 1945. From
http://currahee.hispeed.com.
It is important to note who the men of Easy Company were, not because its individual were unique, but because their unit’s profile could have been any of the companies in the Airborne Divisions:
They were young, born since the Great War. They were white, because the U.S. Army in World War II was segregated. With three exceptions, they were unmarried. Most had been hunters and athletes in high school . . . They were idealists, eager to merge themselves into a group fighting for a cause, actively seeking an outfit with which they could identify, join, be a part of, relate to as a family.[2]
https://havokjournal.com/culture/military/building-a-winning-culture-easy-company-unit-cohesion-grit/
