According to Stephen E Ambrose, and therefore according to the men of Easy Company who knew him:

“Sobel…was fairly tall, slim in build, with a full head of black hair. His eyes were slits, his nose large and hooked. His face was long and his chin receded. He had been a clothing salesman and knew nothing of the out-of-doors. He was ungainly, uncoordinated, in no way athletic. His mannerisms were ‘funny’, he ‘talked different’. He exuded arrogance.

Running up Currahee, Sobel was at the head of the company, head bobbing, arms flapping…..with his big flat feet he ran like a duck in distress.

Sobel was a petty tyrant put into a position in which he had absolute power. There was a cruelty to the man. Sobel was the classic chickensh!t. He generated the maximum anxiety over matters of minimum significance.”

The producers of ‘Band of Brothers’ went to enormous trouble to accurately depict the men of Easy Company, including selecting actors who bore a strong physical resemblance to the men they were playing, and with so many of the veterans involved in the series it is difficult to believe that the producers would have been allowed to stray too far from the truth.

It is easy to dismiss the unsympathetic way Sobel is portrayed as a clumsy pantomime bad-guy (as is often done) but in this case it was probably as accurate as it is possible to be.

I agree.

I’m not a big fan of David Schwimmer, but he rang true to me – having read the book before seeing the series.

Good point, the Amiens raid has been suggested on here before as one good example. “untold” stories are still there, “Defiance” for example.

i vote for Operation Carthage: the bombing of the Gestapo HQ in Copenhagen.

Just as well 😀

The very one….or ones!

An interesting story.

Well, lets have the story then…..

I would have to say as a person who has worked on alot of different types of vehicles over the years that rags can definatly be left in engines. Ive done it.
But ive also worked in aircraft maintanance for a few years and done my share of engine changes . Stuffing a rag into an oil line is the last thing anyone would do. As soon as the rags in there it would become obviose that
whoever gets the job of reconnecting them wont see them and disaster will follow. The result is also not very likely to result in any evidence of the tampering either.
I dont think there would be many aircraft engineers who would be too comfortable stuffing rags into oil lines at any time expecialy wile under the preasure of far from ideal working conditions thay may have been under.

I have worked in aircraft maintenance for 20 years and I have seen very odd items in very odd places. None of them due to sabotage. A 2 foot piece of 4×4, used to support the spoilers during maintenance, left in the trailing edge falsework of a 737, only to be spotted by an observant passenger. Luckily nothing happened.

A pair of wirecutters halfway embedded in the sealent of a main fuel tank, having passed production inspection at Boeing. That’s VERY serious!

More tools and equipment than you can shake a stick at, mostly in “safe” places, but nevertheless items that shouldn’t be there at all. To protect the uneasy fliers, I will not make a full list here 😮

Personally I have yet to find oil rags in engine parts, but I’m sure others have. I have found enough loose rags everywhere else to be pretty certain about it. Very bad engineering, but nevertheless something that happens now and again.

During the war, parts were cannibalised from any other aircraft that had them. Including wrecks and instructional equipment. People might not have stuffed rags into functional aircraft parts, but U/S, or discarded, parts might have been reinstalled on aircraft without the proper inspection.

I’m not saying sabotage did not take place, I just don’t think it was on a scale that would give German engineering a bad name. The engines in question were most likely rubbish, due to bad materials, bad workmanship and bad management.

I think lack of the proper materials outstripped the “sabotage” element. The Germans were known for severe and swift retaliation for any sabotage. Not thinking twice about decimating the workers, if sabotage was even expected. Purely from a surviving point of view, my guess is that few of the forced workers sabotaged the engines.

Naturally it’s possible that some did get sabotaged, but I doubt it would have been enough to give the engine a bad name.

Lets have some more of those…A few DB engines would be nice.