Tear Jerker / Band of Brothers

• Every tear jerker is put up to eleven because it really happened.
  • Except Blithe who is portrayed as initially being a coward who died of his wounds. Historically he survived and continued to serve a few more decades until he obtained the rank of Master Sergeant. That is one of the few historical flaws in the show.
  • His son also revealed that his actual death was still incredibly sad - happening very suddenly only a few days before Christmas. Still, the son revealed this in an interview with Marc Warren, where he thanked the actor for the portrayal of his father.
• Episode 9, "Why We Fight":
  • You know they'll show the Nazi concentration camps sooner or later, considering the setting. Doesn't make the view less of a Tear Jerker.
  • When wisecracking tough guy Liebgott (a Jew) is translating between the prisoners and Winters, and they all suddenly realize why these people were gathered here to die. Liebgott's corresponding mini-breakdown is just the final nail in that coffin.
  Liebgott: (when asked who was kept in the camp) I don't think criminals, sir. (translating for the prisoner) Doctors, musicians, tailors, clerks, farmers, intellectuals... I mean, normal people.
  Prisoner: Juden... Juden... Juden... (Jews...Jews...Jews...)
  • They barely need to say anything, you only have to look at their faces: the dawning horror, disgust, and sorrow as they come to understand the true nature of the horrendous Final Solution.
    • The slow zoom into Lieb's face as he realizes what the man is saying just makes everything worse.
  • "The women's camp is at the next railroad stop."
  • One of the prisoners walks up to Chuck and Shifty carrying a dying somebody who is either a family member/friend. Upon reaching the two soldiers, the man falls to his knees and although neither can understand Polish, it's pretty obvious that the man is asking them to save his loved one. Shifty, who looks close to tears himself, simply apologizes before bowing his head, clearly frustrated that he can't do anything to help.
  • In the same episode, a malnourished prisoner who can barely stand on his own power musters up the strength to salute Perconte, who returns the gesture.
  • Local civilians living nearby "had no idea" that there was a concentration camp next door to their town. Many broke down in tears upon witnessing the horrors within after being enlisted to help clean up the place.
    • In particular, Nixon had earlier gotten a Death Glare from the wife of a German soldier when she caught him looting their house. When Nixon spots her as part of the clean-up crew, she can't even look him in the eye now that she can't deny what the Nazi regime was really doing
  • Finally, just as Easy Company have finally gathered enough food and had begun distributing it to the recently-liberated prisoners, they are told that they need to put a brake on the deed, ironically in the interest of those ex-prisoners' own safety.^*Eating too much food after prolonged deprivation can cause severe digestive system distress, from stomach pains, to kidney problems, to death. Imagine having a fair abundance of food at your disposal, with dozens or hundreds of literally starving people standing yards away waiting for it and you, but being forced to carefully ration it out in portions not much more than what they were already dying from.
  • Seeing the resident Easy Company hardass Liebgott slowly break down, unable to continue translating for the concentration camp prisoners after having to tell them they can't have any more food. Liebgott is a proud Jew. Devastating.
    • Probably even more sad in real life. Liebgott wasn't a practicing Jew at this point in life but a Roman Catholic. There is a rumor that his parents, both direct immigrants from Austrian (with a few distant ancestors who were Jewish), made him convert to Catholicism due to the rabid antisemitism at the time. Notably, Liebgott intentionally broke off all contact with anyone from Easy Company after the war was over.
  • When Easy Company starts taking food from the bakery to give to the prisoners, the baker is vocally upset about this. Webster puts a gun to his head and after the baker says that he's not a Nazi, Webster coldly replies "What about a human being?" When another private tells Webster the baker doesn't know about the camp yet, Webster bitterly says "bullshit" before putting his gun away.
• Winters' voiceover at the end of the last episode, telling the audience how everyone's lives turned out.
  • Especially those who have died since then. It's sad and odd to think that men who survived the absolute best that the Nazis could muster would die from such mundane causes such as a traffic accident (More), cancer (Roe), or even just old age (Winters).
• The aptly-titled seventh episode, "The Breaking Point," sees characters the viewers have become emotionally invested in horrifically injured, killed, or suffer nervous breakdowns, made all the worse because it all really happened. Episode Nine, "Why We Fight," borders on Nightmare Fuel with the discovery of a (brutally accurate) concentration camp, as mentioned above.
  • Special attention to the real Malarkey starting to cry in the introduction to "The Breaking Point," the only time that happens in the interviews. Picture the quote below with obvious visual tics at every comma or verbal pause. Then obvious distress. The interview ended as he was starting to break down.
    Malarkey: You don't have a chance, when your friends go down, to really take care of 'em as you might, especially if you're in an attack, moving, whatever, and uh, uh, ... I withstood it well, but I had a lotta trouble in later life, uh, because, uh, those events would ... come back, and ... you never forget 'em.
  • Episode 7 is really just an hour-long Tear Jerker. Skip and Penkala are killed in their foxhole. One minute they're there, and the next they're gone.
    • To make things worse, it's Luz who has to see all of that happen. He's stunned enough that Lip has to pull him into a foxhole to safety, and even when he does, all Luz can do is howl that their friends are dead, even as Lip cradles him and tries to calm him down.
  • The end scene of 'The Breaking Point' as the dead are named and they fade away, one by one.
  • The quiet moment when Buck simply drops his helmet in the snow.
  • Toye's Heroic BSoD when he sees that one of his legs have been blown off. Him sobbing "I gotta get up. I gotta get to a foxhole. I gotta get up" repeatedly and trying to drag himself across the snow while in obvious pain just takes the cake.
  • Buck's Big "NO!" moment when a mortar hits Bill and Joe, who were two of his best friends in the company.
  • The moment with Guarnere and Toye actually omits a dark moment when Malarkey came upon them (though the book has it in detail). Malarkey notes that they're both calm despite the fact that their legs have been severed, and Toye even asks Malarkey for a cigarette.
  Stephen Ambrose: [Malarkey] paused during our interview at this point. I urged him to continue and he said "I don't want to talk about it." After a pause of several minutes, he resumed. "Toye looked at me and said 'Jesus, Malark, what's a guy gotta do to get killed around here?'"^note Toye had been wounded four times before this incident, and this would be his fifth (and final) wound
  • Hoobler's death in "The Breaking Point" serves to set the tone for the entire episode - he bleeds out from a self-inflicted wound from the German gun he'd been trying to get since episode 1, while his friends talked to him and tried to keep him from going into shock.
  • Malarkey sadly clutching Skip's broken rosary after the latter's death. To make matters worse, that rosary is the only thing he has left of his best friend.
• Liebgott translating the speech that ends with "You all deserve long and happy lives in peace."
• The real Richard Winters talking about what Mike Ranney wrote in a letter he sent him: "I treasure my remark to my grandson who asked, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?' Grandpa said, 'No...but I served in a company of heroes.'"
• The entirety of Episode 6, "Bastogne," for obvious reasons.
  • Babe desperately begging Julian, who is slowly bleeding out from a bullet straight to the trachea, to stay with him.
    • Later on, even though both Spina and Roe are reassuring him that none of it is his fault, Babe angrily says that he'd promised to bring Julian's belongings back to his mother, and since he failed at that, the Germans will strip him and dispose of his body in a ditch somewhere. Knowing that this is most likely true, the medics simply trade knowing looks before hugging Babe.
  • Eugene finding Renee's headscarf in the rubble of the church and the weary, resigned look he gets on his face before he runs out into battle once more.
• In the final episode, even though the fighting was over, men like Janovec still get killed due to mundane things such as car accidents.
  • On the other hand, the number of Earn Your Happy Ending stories (again, all truthful). After all of the horrible fates in the series, it can be hard not to tear up when you learn that Lewis Nixon got himself and Winters jobs after the war, got married, and beat his alcoholism; or that Buck Compton became a lawyer, then a judge; or that Peewee made himself a multimillionaire after the war.
• Winters finding Hall's body during the assault on Brécourt Manor. He was the very first friendly face Winters ran into after dropping alone into France, and he's the very first (and in this particular battle, only) man Winters loses. (But of course, he's far from the last.) He later reflects the kid wasn't even old enough to buy a beer.
• Blithe having a serious moment of explaining to Speirs that on D-Day, he didn't try to fight, he just hid. Speirs turns it around on him and tells him to accept that he's already dead, so that he can then be an effective soldier. However, given the fact that Blithe earlier heard stories of Speirs killing prisoners and his own sergeant for cowardice, the scene takes on a darker tone: Blithe has no reason to tell Speirs what happened on D-Day, and while it could just be a moment of needing to confess, the possibility is also there (and the scene is played both ways) that he's telling Speirs in the hope that he'll be killed, to atone for his ineffectiveness.
• Neal McDonough had a massive breakdown once he comprehended the extent of the project he was getting into and, while grateful for the whole experience of the series, admits he has never watched episodes like "The Breaking Point" because it's too painful for him.
• How about Pvt. Jackson's death in Episode 8, "The Last Patrol"? He tossed a grenade into a German outpost, but then in a Too Dumb to Live / Leeroy Jenkins moment, goes in before it blew, and ends up getting his face horribly mutilated by the explosion and shrapnel. Despite the best efforts of Doc and the others, Jackson can only whimper "I don't want to die" before his throat becomes clogged with his own blood, leading to him gagging and choking before the trauma finally does him in and he goes silent for good. Even the German POWs looked disheartened and ashamed of being partially responsible for Jackson's death.
• The ending of Episode 3 "Carentan." Malarkey goes to a British home to collect his laundry. Then the woman asks if he can bring the laundry of Lt. Meehan, who was killed during D-Day. He reluctantly agrees to do so. Then she asks if he can help with a few others: Evans, Moyer, Owen, all men killed or wounded.

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