Who dies in Band of Brothers episode 2? Every death in "Day of Days," from the D-Day jump to Brécourt Manor
"Day of Days" covers roughly 24 hours — the night jump into Normandy and the assault on the German guns at Brécourt Manor — and it wastes no time teaching Band of Brothers' hardest lesson: anyone can die. The body count is smaller than you might remember. Every death lands anyway.
Every death in the episode
- 1st Lt. Thomas Meehan III — Easy Company's commanding officer, killed when his C-47 takes anti-aircraft fire and goes down in flames. His death is what puts Dick Winters in command.
- 1st Sgt. William Evans and the rest of Meehan's stick — the plane carried 17 paratroopers and a crew of 5. Nobody survived. Twenty-two men, gone before a single boot hit Normandy.
- Winters' co-pilot — killed by a shell burst moments before the jump, panicking the pilot into flipping the green light early.
- Pvt. John Hall — the radioman Winters links up with on the ground, killed by an explosion in the trenches at Brécourt while running back for more TNT. The episode's gut punch, and the loss Winters visibly carries out of his first day of combat.
- A lost GI at Brécourt — an unnamed soldier who raises his head at the wrong moment and takes a round.
- The German gun crews — killed as Winters' men roll up the trench line, gun by gun.
- The German prisoners — the episode heavily implies that Lt. Ronald Speirs machine-guns a group of POWs after handing out cigarettes. It 's shown obliquely, and treated as rumor for the rest of the series.
The real Meehan crash
Meehan's aircraft — plane 66 — was hit by German flak over Normandy in the early hours of June 6, 1944. The pilots tried to put it down in a field near Beuzeville-au-Plain, but the plane clipped a hedgerow and burst into flames, killing everyone aboard.
Because no one witnessed the crash and lived to report it, Meehan was carried as missing in action for years; the wreckage wasn't properly identified until 1952. Before boarding, he had handed off one last letter to his wife, Anne. It ended: "I love you Sweetheart — forever."
The death Winters never forgot
Hall feels like a screenwriter's invention — the friendly stranger who bonds with the hero and then dies. He wasn't. John D. Hall was a real trooper from Able Company, killed in the Brécourt assault.
The show's version is played by a very young Andrew Scott, years before Sherlock's Moriarty and Fleabag's Hot Priest.
Not everyone hit at Brécourt stayed down, though: "Popeye" Wynn is shot in the backside and apologizes for goofing up, and Joe Toye survives two absurdly close calls with the same grenade sequence.