Sobel is a complete disaster he can’t even read a map so I don’t even know why he is a captain he should be private.
Sobel was not a good company commander because he didn’t have his own men’s respect. His inability to read maps stems mostly from his own soldiers who would often see to it that maps were accidentally “mislaid”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Sobel
Interesting look at Sobel. Although I loved BOB and he made for good drama I was actually kinda sad to see that he was a real person. I think it would have been better to change his name out of a small respect. Especially as it says:
“Though Sobel was not qualified to be a combat leader, many veterans of Easy Company have stated that they believe they would not have survived the war without Sobel’s hard training regimen at Camp Toccoa.”
Because everything you see on TV is correct, right? Besides, there are very few occasions when a company commander will need to be ****-hot at map reading and even fewer occasions when any of the other posts that might be held by a captain need map reading skills.
There is a hell of a lot more to leadership than map reading.
He was probably a competent logistics officer and also competent as leader of the jump school, else he wouldn’t have ben promoted to lieutenant-colonel later in his career. The Wikipedia article also mentions that he was wounded in action during the Normandy invasion.
I think the problem was that there was no base of trust between Sobel and the NCOs of his original unit, so he was pressing on the NCOs and they were returning in kind (you can see how the NCOs can make or break an officer). This can spoil an work relations. He was probably not a talented leader for men in combat.
I also agree that for the movie they should have used a pseudonym.
Jan
Well don’t forget The tv series came from the book, and the book had his real name in it so people would know who he is anyway. Also it’s interesting that Sobel’s sister got in touch with Ambrose, who cleverly directed her to Dick Winters, after the book came out because she was not happy with the way he was portrayed in the book.
I think that sobel didnt gain any respect from his men because he didnt show any. Also loyalty and respect go hand in hand, You cannot have one without the other. Sobel did not show his men any respect so it was not repaid and therefor was shown no loyalty or trust. As for using his real name, soldiers dont forget, he mad his own bed he should lie in it.
I’m not sure, but I think this company was Sobel’s first command. To me he seemed to be still very insecure and tried to hide it behind a facade of toughness. From what I understand, he would insist that he would fullfill the same standards he demanded of his men, but actually set his standards too high, above his own limitations. From what I understand, Sobel was no coward. He apparently had weaknesses in things like tactics and land navigation (in his civilian profession he was a book keeper), but was apparently later a capable logistics officer and he probably mellowed once experience set in, he recognised his own limitations and he lost his insecurity.
Jan
it’s my understanding that sobel regarded the NCO’s of easy as being the reason he lost command of the company,and held a grudge again them for the rest of his life… …he never attended any reunions even though the association invited him every year…as a bookeeper he should have been pipelined into a S4 type job anyway…he probably got his combat commands by virtue of his military school experience but is a good example of how leaders are usually born,not made.with dick winters as an example of someone with no real military experience (buisiness degree) that was a good leader from the get go…
As a 1st lieutenant, Sobel commanded Company E for all of their basic training, and was credited with having the finest company in the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. He was promoted to the rank of captain in recognition of his perceived ability as a trainer. According to the book Band of Brothers, Sobel was disliked by the soldiers of Company E, and though he was mentally strong, Sobel often had difficulties with physical activities, including combat training. He also had a tendency to rely heavily on senior subordinates to assist him with minor tasks most officers were capable of doing themselves. For example, Sobel had substantial trouble reading a map (as depicted in the Band of Brothers miniseries episode “Currahee”) and his grasp of tactics was apparently poor.
After a period of training in the United Kingdom, Captain Sobel was removed from command of Company E after several of the company’s non-commissioned officers refused to fight under him, believing him to be an incompetent commander who would get many men killed. Herbert Sobel was transferred to command the Chilton Foliat jump school. Thomas Meehan replaced Sobel, and was one of several officers (including Richard Winters) to succeed him in that post before the war was over.
After the invasion of Normandy, Sobel was again moved to a combat assignment, where he was wounded by enemy machine gun fire.
Shortly before Easy Company took part in Operation Market Garden, Sobel was assigned to the 506th once again, this time as the regimental S-4 (supply officer).
Though Sobel was considered an incompetent combat leader, many veterans of Easy Company have stated that they believe they would not have survived the war without the tough training Sobel gave the men. Others credit Sobel’s hard training regimen for saving lives later on in combat. There is no evidence in the public record regarding Sobel’s performance at the jump school or as Regimental S-4. His duties in those positions would have relied on skill sets quite different from command of a rifle company.
After World War II
Sobel returned home for a short time, and became an accountant before being called back into service during the Korean War. It is unknown if he actually fought in Korea or remained in the U.S. He remained in the National Guard, eventually retiring at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
Sobel returned to his job as an accountant for an appliance company in Chicago. He married, although he was later divorced, and had two sons. After the television series portrayed Sobel as a petty tyrant, his son Michael, unhappy with the new public opinion of his father, attended a reunion of E/506 and talked about his memories of Herbert Sobel as a good father.
Herbert Sobel is known to have attempted suicide in the 1970s and to have lived the rest of his days in a veterans’ hospital, until he died in 1987.
If you’re going to cut and paste, please at least provide the link!
erm , its not a cut and paste , its in the band of brothers book , read it .
OK, so it’s copy typing instead. Comes to the same thing - when doing so, provide the source.
Excellent point. CPT Sobel was wounded on D-Day! and even his biggest critics admitted he was one of the finest training officers they’d seen, and helped make Easy what it was. There are certainly reasons as too why he was generally unpopular with his men, and his mistakes were many. But he deserves more respect as a veteran than to be simply cast a villain…
In the end, he did not disgrace himself in combat as “Band of Brothers” would lead us to believe…
I think one important factor needs to be noted here as far as CPT Sobel’s fitness for command. I apologise if this has been mentioned prior to this post, but Sobel was in the peacetime, pre-War US Army as an MP officer I believe. And there was often much tension between the prior service US Army officers (and NCOs for that matter) called up in the opening days of the war, as with the active duty “lifers,” and the new officers corp crop that were commissioned, or enlisted, in 1940-1942…
The “new breed” of civilian-to-service officer tended to see themselves as being more aggressive and flexible than the military careerist officers and tended to see them as anachronistic dead weight that couldn’t get a better job in the “real” competative civilian world and instead sought the security of a military pension. In turn, the the old guard “professional” military leadership tended to regard the draftees and wartime volunteers as dangerously unprofessional amateur upstarts. I think this is recurring, almost universal theme illustrated nicely in the film “The Caine Mutiny.”
In any case, Sobel (and I totally disagree with his methods and would never have emulated them as a company commander training an elite troop of paratroops) was simply espousing a negative form of leadership. The goal is too so get the men to so hate and FEAR their leader, they will do anything to not only avoid his wrath, but will achieve great feats in order to win his approval. It’s sort of the ‘disapproving father’ sort of Freudian psychobabble. Well, is was a bit childish and amateurish, and it didn’t work with a group of men that were on the whole had above average IQs, regardless of their educational backgrounds. In the end, Sobel was under-qualified to lead such men. But he did a damn fine job training them, and saved many of their lives. And he deserves something more than have been pissed on by a plagiarist historian for it. I think LT/CPT Nixon put it best: (something to the affect of) “Sobel is a genius, I had a headmaster like him once…There’s not one guy in E company that wouldn’t run Currahee just to piss in his morning coffee.” In the end, they did because he went too far…
i get the feeling that when easy company members talk about how much his training improved their performance they probably just trying to be respectful to a dead man i think Dick Winters said it best when he wrote
“he didn’t make us a better outfit, he just made things harder than they had to be”
With all due respect to Winters, and make no mistake, Sobel was what they use to call “chickenshit” (meaning he was not necessarily cowardly as much he was a petty, vindictive asshole officer/senior NCO more worried about his prestige and military glory than about the men and the mission). But I think Winters changes his story a tad depending on the interview. Yes, MAJ Winters was almost royally screwed by CPT Sobel in the whole trumped up courts marshal incident. Yes, Winters had a far different, and vastly more effective, leadership style of leading by example and often putting himself into harms way rather than just ordering his men into it, which garners far more respect and credibility.
But the truth is, we really don’t know how well or poorly or well Sobel would have led them in combat. In fact, he probably would have been killed like Easy’s other CO before he even hit the ground. As for their competence in the field, well, Sobel was from urban Chicago (I think?) and Winters was a Pennsylvania boy that had agrarian roots, meaning simply, along with his other admirable qualities --he was comfortable in the woodlands which made him not only a better officer, but a more effective soldier in general.
However, I think I’ve also read positive comments by Winters regarding CPT Sobel being adept at training, and that their rigorous standards gave the unit a sense of being more elite and willing to put up with deprivations. But then again, perhaps Easy gets too much cred, or the other companies of the 101st Airborne don’t get enough --as evidenced by their heroic stand at Bastogne in which they defended the city starting with having to scrounge for ammo and heavy weapons while every other unit was “bugging out.” Sobel also made things easier for Winters, by ultimately playing the part of the ‘bad cop’ to Dick’s good Army-officer-cop.
I just think the guy deserves an even break, even if he was sort of an insecure asshole, which he sort of gets both in the film and in Ambrose’s book. I know they didn’t have time, but a side vignette of CPT Sobel getting shot while attacking a German MG42 on D-Day may have done a bit more justice. He couldn’t have been all bad…
well obviously we can never know how good of an officer he would have been in the field but i cant see how he could do that much better at things like map reading france than he was in england. I also doubt that there backgrounds played too much of a part in their command abilities especially since as you pointed out sobel was from urban Chicago, which is pretty difficult to navigate, where winters was from an area in Pennsylvania which is relatively suburban surrounded by fields and farmland.
Sobel was a complete asshole he didn’t had any field expirience he didn’t show respect to noone but himself
Exactly.
Ambrose was a story teller, who has attracted deserved crticism for flaws in his work unrelated to Sobel.
As any budding author fresh out of ‘Novels 101’ knows, stories need conflict. Goodies and baddies.
Sobel was the baddie. In the story.
Who knows what he was like in reality?
Whose version do we have apart from Ambrose’s and the men who didn’t like Sobel?
Good trainers drive their men, beyond what the men thought was their limit. These men will usually stand up in adversity. They will also hate their trainers during, and often after, training.
Bad trainers don’t drive their men. These men usually won’t stand up in adversity, apart from the few men of great character in any group of 30 or so platoon size picked at random.
Sobel’s men stood up very well.
Otherwise Ambrose wouldn’t have had a subject for his book, because most of them would have been casualties fairly quickly.
Maybe Sobel deserves a lot more credit that he’s been given.
Maybe the proof of Sobel’s approach is in the fact that so many of his trainees survived to tell the story of what a bastard he was.