10 Episodes · Premiered September 9, 2001 · Ended November 4, 2001
Easy Company, 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, U.S. Army, is an elite rifle company. Parachuting into France early on D-Day morning, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, and capturing Hitler's Eagle's Nest at Berchtesgaden, they were also a unit that suffered 150 percent casualties, and whose lives became legend.
Replacements join Easy Company. The company parachutes into the Netherlands as part of Operation Market Garden.
Winters writes a report on the challenge of an unexpected resistance to a German attack.
In the dead of winter, in the forest outside of Bastogne, Belgium, the men of Easy Company struggle to hold the line alone while fending off frostbite and hunger, having arrived with no winter clothes and little supplies and ammunition. Medic Eugene Roe is overwhelmed, on edge and close to combat exhaustion when he finds friendship with a Belgian nurse. Easy Co. spends a miserable Christmas in the trenches, and receives the news that the German army's demand for surrender was met with Gen. McAuliffe's defiant answer: "Nuts!"
Having thwarted the Germans at Bastogne, the exhausted Easy Co. must now take the nearby town of Foy from the enemy. Several are killed and wounded in fierce shelling, compounded by the incompetence of their commander, Lt. Dike, about whom Winters can do nothing. Easy takes Foy, but at an enormous cost.
Easy Co. arrives in the Alsacian town of Haguenau near the German border, and are ordered to send a patrol across the river to take enemy prisoners. Lt. Jones, fresh from West Point and eager for combat experience, volunteers to lead. While successful, the mission costs another paratrooper's life, prompting Winters to ignore the order to send a second patrol the next night.
Easy Co. finally enters Germany, to surprisingly little resistance, and has a chance to relax for the first time in a long time. A patrol in a nearby forest discovers an abandoned Nazi concentration camp, still filled with emaciated prisoners. The local citizenry, unbelievably disavowing knowledge of its existence, is made to clean it up, as the news arrives that Hitler is dead.
Once home to the top officers of the Third Reich, Easy Co. enters the Bavarian town of Berchtesgaden, and captures "Eagle's Nest," Hitler's mountaintop fortress. Facing imminent deployment to the Pacific Theater, the men compare their "points" to see who has earned enough to go home. However, the Japanese surrender ends the war. A closing vignette tells what happened to the men of Easy Company after they returned home.
