Band Of Brothers: Did Speirs Really Run Through Foy?
In Band of Brothers, Lieutenant Ronald Speirs (Matthew Settle) is a man whose reputation precedes him - though the other soldiers of Easy Company are never quite sure which stories are true and which are not. After Speirs is called upon to lead Easy in an assault on German troops in the Belgian town of Foy in episode 7, "The Breaking Point," Carwood Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg) witnesses a new legend being born as Speirs sprints across the town through the midst of enemy soldiers - not once, but twice - in order to communicate with a US company attacking from the other flank. So, did this actually happen in real life?
Speirs' sprint through Foy is lifted straight from Stephen A. Ambrose's non-fiction book Band of Brothers, upon which the HBO miniseries was based. Beginning in 1990, Ambrose compiled stories from the surviving veterans of Easy Company about their experiences in the war and put together a cohesive version of events based on these different accounts. While some of the stories about Speirs might be exaggerated or glamorized, the depiction of his fearless run across Foy is true.
The firsthand witness for this incredible sight was Lipton, then a staff sergeant. "He just kept on running right through the German line, came out the other side, conferred with the I Company CO and ran back," Lipton recalled during a 1991 visit to the former battle site with Ambrose, Dick Winters and Don Malarkey. "Damn, that was impressive." As Band of Brothers suggests, Speirs likely owed his survival to the fact that none of the German soldiers expected a US soldier to do anything as suicidal as run right through the middle of them, and in the chaos many may not even have noticed him.
Of all the 101st Airborne paratroopers depicted in Band of Brothers, Speirs is the most enigmatic and difficult to pin down, and this is something that reflects the real Ronald Speirs. In a tribute to him written for Marcus Brotherton's book A Company of Heroes, Speirs' stepson Marv Bethea recalled that his stepfather spoke very little about his time in the war, and that "for some time, we honored and understood the possibility that many of his experiences during WWII were buried forever in his subconscious." After the Band of Brothers book and miniseries came out, however, Speirs began to share with his family some stories about what he had experienced on the front line.
The air of mystery surrounding Speirs caused a few headaches during the fact-checking process for Ambrose's book. The stories about Speirs include him shooting one of his own men for being drunk, and handing out cigarettes to 20 German prisoners of war before shooting them all dead. Simon and Schuster's legal team was concerned that these stories, if published, could open them up to a libel lawsuit. To allay those fears, Major Dick Winters personally got in contact with Speirs to explain that the tales were going to be included in the book and ask if he had any objections. Speirs was unconcerned, and freely admitted they were true (or at least, some version of them was). As he said to his stepson when Bethea expressed concern that the stories might reflect badly on him: "I'm eighty-one years old, what can they do to me now?"
Some of the stories about Ronald Speirs were indeed exaggerated. The German prisoners, for example, were shot not out of sadism but simply because on D-Day the US troops were ordered not to take any prisoners; there wasn't yet any established infrastructure within which to hold them, and letting them go would have meant letting them carry strategic information back to the German army. According to a letter that Winters wrote to Ambrose, the story about Speirs shooting his subordinate was also "glamorized." He shot the sergeant not for being drunk, but for twice disobeying an order to halt his men's advance into a town that was about to be hit with artillery shelling. When the sergeant tried again to push his men forward, "Speirs shot him," Winters wrote. "[And] in doing so he probably saved the lives of the rest of the squad."