The Deleted Scenes From Band of Brothers

Do you know that several scenes were actually filmed but didn’t make it to the cut from the series Band of Brothers?

Unseen Footage

In the scene where Dick Winters and his company are in a shallow ditch, he knows that his position was vulnerable, and decides to initiate a bayonet charge. He breaks his assault force into three separate attacking groups. However, what he doesn’t see in the episode is that he sets up two 1919 machine guns- one in between each of the attacking groups.

It was two of these machine guns who would stop the Germans from spotting the Easy Company 506th’s advance unto their position. Had they not been present, the first platoon might have been seen in the middle of the field, and the story could have wound up quite differently.

Didn’t Make the Final Cut

Another thing that we didn’t see in the series is that there were actually several strands of barbed wire strung across that field that ended up tripping Dick Winters and several members of the first platoon, where they would pick themselves up and keep running.

There was also speculation that Winter’s taped-up hand grenade was one of those stories that were never shot. However, there were distinct pieces of evidence proving that this was actually filmed, but ended up being removed from the final edit.

For instance, there was a sequence at the start of the episode where Winters ripped off a piece of tape with his teeth, wrapping it around the spoon of his hand grenade. One doesn’t often take a runtime of their episode showing scenes like that unless it has a purpose later on in the story that furthers the event of that story.

The Reason

The reason why this was probably taken out of the episode was probably Tom Hanks who directed it was trying to alter it with time throughout the episodes. He’s continually jumping back and forth between events. Because of that nonlinear story progression, they have to kind of mess with the editing, removing these particular series of events since it wouldn’t feel quite right with the story.

Had that episode been edited in a traditional linear story progression like the rest of the episodes, this grenade sequence would probably have made the final cut.