u/PatChristensonSon

T/Sgt. Burton Pat Christenson. Toccoa man, Easy Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne. Second man out the door behind Dick Winters on the Normandy jump, the night of June 5th into the 6th. He carried the .30 caliber machine gun and the company guidon. Two combat jumps, four battle stars.

December 1944 the division was cut off at Bastogne. No winter clothing, low on ammunition, the coldest winter Europe had seen in years. Men lost feet in those holes.

He came home in December 1945 and did the thing nobody writes movies about. Went to work for the phone company, climbed poles for thirty eight years, raised three sons in a house in California. If you had met him at a barbecue you would have met a quiet telephone man.

But every Christmas he sat down at a drawing board and made a card for the men of Easy Company, and mailed it. Not once. Nearly every year for the rest of his life. Dick Winters called those cards famous and kept copies in his own file. Winters wrote that Pat sent them faithfully so the men would remember Bastogne.

This is one of them. He took the poem every American child knows and rewrote it around that December. The third stanza is the one that gets me. The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow, and what it showed was the dead.

That is the part people miss about that generation. The war was three years. The remembering was fifty. He never took an art lesson. He never spoke about the camp at Kaufering to the day he died. When I asked him about the war as a boy what I usually got was that some things you don't need to talk about. He worked it out alone, after dinner, at a drawing board, while his sons slept upstairs.

Forty six finished combat drawings, all of it from memory, decades after the fact.

Father Maloney was real, the chaplain who came out to the men in the snow. The spelling in the poem is his and it stays that way.

He died in 1999, twenty months before the series aired. He never saw any of it.

Ask me anything about him.

The man on the right is my father, Pat Christenson, and beside him is Woodrow Robbins. They served together in 1st Squad, Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne. Dad was the light machine gunner and Robbins was his assistant gunner. Dad carried the .30 caliber machine gun and Robbins carried the tripod. Most people who know Dad today know him because of Band of Brothers, where Michael Fassbender portrayed him, but what many people don't know is that Dad was an artist. He carried a sketchpad through the war and was known among the men of Easy Company as the resident artist. When there was time between the fighting, Dad drew in barns, billets and foxholes, sometimes on whatever paper he could find. Some of those original field sketches survived and I still have them today. Dad fought from Normandy through Holland, Bastogne and into Germany, and after he came home he continued drawing the war and writing about what happened. He spent decades checking his memories against his journals, books and the accounts of the other men because getting it right mattered to him. If something didn't match, he kept working until he was satisfied that he had it right. Dad once wrote that writers and artists had never been able to capture the true realities of combat, the confusion, hunger, fear and sleeplessness, and that the true picture of war was impossible to convey even by those who had done the bleeding and the fighting. I'm Timothy Christenson, Pat's son. Dad died in 1999 and I still have his wartime letters, journals, photographs, field sketches and finished drawings. I have been sharing them because this is the record Dad spent much of his life preserving, and I want people to know the men of Easy Company as he knew them.

My father is the man at the back, against the wall, no helmet.

T/Sgt. Burton "Pat" Christenson, Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne. Original Toccoa man, second out the door behind Lt. Richard Winters on the Normandy jump. Easy Company jumped into Holland on 17 September 1944 as part of Market Garden and spent seventy two days on the Island.

He kept this print in his own photograph book for the rest of his life.

Happy to answer questions about the unit or the campaign. Band of Brothers.......

T/Sgt. Pat Christenson, Easy Company, 506th PIR. He kept these in his journal with that caption on them.

The RAF bombed the Obersalzberg on 25 April. The 506th came up in early May, almost unopposed by then. This is what was left.

The war in Europe ended on 8 May while Easy Company was there. Here is what he wrote about that day, word for word:

"Nor did we have the enthusiasm to celebrate the wars end on May 8th 1945. We were almost unopposed during our drive through Germany. The end was inevitable."

No cheering. They were just finished.

A week or so later came orders for Austria, and this is the part I love. Earl Hale, 1st Platoon sergeant, had taken his pick of confiscated vehicles and chosen a fire truck from the Berchtesgaden fire department. My father went along as his assistant. In his own words:

"The vehicle was a large panelled truck, loaded with booze that we had procured in Berchtesgaden from the defeated Wehrmacht... The vehicle had a large bell and siren that could be activated from inside the cab...... If the Fuhrer could see us now..... Siren and bell going full blast through each village... tolling out the sound of victory over the Third Reich....."

Then the road climbed and they came over the top of the pass:

"Below us, an enormous valley appeared, surrounded by rugged snow capped mountains. The sight was something to behold, awesome.....absolutely beautiful. Reminding me so much of the movie Shangri-La."

Three years, three months and thirteen days after he enlisted, that was the end of it.

His seven volumes and all forty six of his drawings are published now, twenty six years after he died. A Screaming Eagle: His Drawings, His Words, at ascreamingeagle.com

>

This is my father's drawing. T/Sgt. Pat Christenson, Easy Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne. He was an original Toccoa man and went out the door second in the stick behind Dick Winters on the Normandy jump.

The aircraft is Easy Company's headquarters plane, identification No. 66, piloted by Harold A. Cappelluto. It carried Lt. Thomas Meehan, who commanded the company, 1st Sergeant William Evans, and the entire headquarters section. It also carried Bangalore torpedoes and other demolitions.

Here is my father's own caption, verbatim:

"Company E Headquarters plane was carrying a lot of explosives and when hit by antiaircraft fire a chain reaction may have taken place causing the plane to disintegrate killing everyone in the airplane. The airplane was piloted by Harold A Cappelluto, its identification No. 66, 44 years later the dog tags of 1st Sergeant William Evans and P.F.C. William T Mc Gonigal were found in Normandy France by a farmer."

That distinction is why he drew it the way he did. It did not go down. It came apart. The load initiated and the airframe disintegrated. Everyone aboard was killed before a single man from the company reached the ground.

The C-47 was a converted airliner with no guns and no armor, flying at low altitude, at night, across active flak, in formations tight enough that the wingtips were a few hundred feet apart. Over eight hundred of them went into Normandy that night. Every man in the back knew what they were riding in.

He was the only man in Easy Company who could draw. He came home, went back to the telephone company for thirty eight years, and spent the next forty years at a drawing board reconstructing the war from memory. Forty six finished drawings, checked against his own journals until the details reconciled.

On that same jump he came down about seventy feet from a German 20mm gun position that was firing on the aircraft stream with its back to him. He drew that one too.

Stephen Ambrose called the drawings almost priceless. Dick Winters had several copied and sent to Playtone as reference for the writers of Band of Brothers.

He died in December 1999. His drawings and his own account are published now, in a book called A Screaming Eagle: His Drawings, His Words. It is at ascreamingeagle.com

Happy to answer anything about the aircraft or the jump.

My father was T/Sgt. Pat Christenson, Easy Company, 506th PIR. Michael Fassbender played him.

He left seven volumes of typed manuscript and forty six combat drawings, made over forty years at a drawing board after work. He was relentless about accuracy. If a date or a road did not reconcile he would not let it go until he found out what actually happened.

There is nothing in any of it about the camp.

On April 29, 1945, west of Munich near Landsberg am Lech, Easy Company came on one of the Kaufering camps. Kaufering was not one camp but eleven subcamps of Dachau. The one they reached, Kaufering IV, had been designated a sick camp. Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in that system.

My father drew the whole war. The jump. The burning aircraft. Stick 66 coming apart in the air with the entire headquarters section aboard. Bastogne. He never drew the camp. Not once. He did not turn the prisoners into material.

And he never talked about it.

His nephew Gary is 91 and still living. He and my father were as close as father and son, and Gary asked him about the war for years and got open answers every time. Gary told me my father never once mentioned the camp to him. Not in all those years.

When I asked him about it myself, all I got was: "Some things you don't need to talk about."

That was the entire conversation.

So there is a chapter in his book about Kaufering, and he did not write it. I did. It exists on the other side of a boundary he set and never lifted. It cannot make him say what he chose not to say. All it can do is name the place, use the record and the witnesses who did speak, and say plainly that silence is one of the shapes memory takes after something like that.

That chapter was the hardest thing I have ever written, and the whole time I was aware I was writing about the one thing he would not have written about himself.

A Screaming Eagle: His Drawings, His Words. Amazon has it September 8. I sign and mail the direct ones myself.

ascreamingeagle.com

This is my father, T/Sgt. Burton "Pat" Christenson of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne.

His wartime service would later be immortalized in Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers and the HBO miniseries, where he was portrayed by Michael Fassbender.

But when this photograph was taken, none of that existed.

The war was finally over.

He had spent more than three years overseas.

He had jumped into Normandy behind Dick Winters.

Fought through Holland.

Survived Bastogne.

Entered Germany.

Helped liberate one of the Kaufering concentration camps.

And stood on Hitler's Eagle's Nest.

Then he came home.

He took off the uniform and quietly returned to the same job he had left in 1942, climbing telephone poles and splicing cables for the telephone company.

He married my mother, raised three sons, and almost never spoke about himself.

But after dinner, something remarkable happened.

Night after night, for nearly forty years, he sat alone at a drawing board surrounded by wartime journals, military maps, photographs, and reference books, painstakingly reconstructing the war exactly as he remembered it.

If a date didn't match...

If a road wasn't quite right...

If one detail couldn't be reconciled...

He simply kept researching until he found the answer.

He wasn't trying to become famous.

He was trying to leave an honest record before the men who remembered those days were gone.

By the time he finished, he had created forty-six combat drawings that Stephen Ambrose described as "almost priceless." Dick Winters thought so highly of them that he had copies enlarged and sent to the Band of Brothers production team as historical reference while the series was being developed.

Growing up, I just knew him as Dad.

Looking back now, I realize the greatest lesson he ever taught me wasn't about war.

It was about humility.

He never believed that what he had done made him extraordinary.

He believed that remembering it accurately was simply his responsibility.

Sometimes I wonder how many extraordinary people we've all walked past without ever knowing what they carried with them.

A few days ago I shared the story of how Michael Fassbender's first major role was portraying my father, T/Sgt. Burton "Pat" Christenson of Easy Company, and asked what a dramatization owes the real people whose names it uses.

I never expected that discussion to resonate with so many people.

Many of you asked what happened when our family finally saw Band of Brothers become a reality.

These photographs answer that question.

In June 2001, our family received an invitation from HBO to attend the world premiere of Band of Brothers in Normandy on the anniversary of D-Day. Before we even arrived, it was obvious this would be unlike any premiere I had ever imagined. The invitation itself had been designed like a June 6, 1944 newspaper, honoring the day the story truly began.

When we reached Utah Beach, HBO had built an enormous temporary pavilion beside the museum. Veterans, military units, filmmakers, actors, and families from around the world gathered together to honor the men whose lives inspired the series.

Then I found my seat.

It simply read:

RESERVED
CHRISTENSON
FAMILY

I still have that card today.

It may be the most meaningful souvenir I have ever brought home.

My father had passed away before the series was completed. He never knew that an actor would portray him, and he never had the opportunity to see what Band of Brothers would become.

Inside the pavilion, my brother Chris and I finally met Michael Fassbender, the actor who portrayed my father. He was thoughtful, respectful, and generous with our family. It was a moment I will never forget.

But what has stayed with me even more than meeting the cast was seeing the real Easy Company veterans together again.

Watching them walk through Normandy surrounded by thousands of people made me realize something I had never fully appreciated before.

Their memories had become part of our shared history.

Looking back through these photographs twenty-five years later reminded me that premieres eventually become history too.

The invitation.

The veterans.

The photographs.

The reserved seat.

They're no longer simply keepsakes.

They're part of the story.

So I'd like to ask one more question.

When a film or television series becomes part of history, who becomes responsible for preserving the stories behind it—the filmmakers, the families, the audience...or all of us?

I'd genuinely love to hear your thoughts.

My father, T/Sgt. Pat Christenson, was in Easy Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne. He's the paratrooper on the far right in the photograph. A few hours later, on June 6, 1944, he became the second man out of the C-47 behind Dick Winters over Normandy.

He didn't talk much about the war after he came home.

But he drew it.

The drawing beside the photograph is what he later put on paper from memory—the aircraft, the jump, the chaos in the sky, and the fire coming up from the ground. He captured not just what the C-47s looked like, but what it felt like to stand in the doorway and step into the darkness.

In some sectors that night, the C-47s flew low and slow through heavy anti-aircraft fire. Some paratroopers were hit before they even got out of the aircraft, and many who reached the ground landed miles from where they were supposed to be. What looks organized in history books was anything but.

My father was the only man in Easy Company who could draw, and for the next forty years he quietly recreated the war from his journals, memory, and research. He completed 46 finished combat drawings, preserving moments that photographs could never capture.

I spent the last year bringing those drawings together with his own written account of Normandy, Bastogne, and the rest of the war so his story—and the story of the men he served with—wouldn't be lost.

If anyone has questions about the C-47s, the Normandy jump, or my father's artwork, I'd be happy to answer them

My father was the only man in Easy Company who could draw, and for the next forty years he quietly recreated the war from his journals, memory, and research. He completed 46 finished combat drawings, preserving moments that photographs could never capture.

After he passed away, I spent years gathering his drawings, letters, and memoir into a book called A Screaming Eagle: His Drawings, His Words, so his story—and the story of the men he served with—wouldn't be lost.

If anyone has questions about the C-47s, the Normandy jump, my father's artwork, or the book itself, I'd be happy to answer them.

That is my father on the right. Sgt. Burton "Pat" Christenson, Easy Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne. The company Band of Brothers was written about. He was an original Toccoa man and he went out the door over Normandy second in the stick, right behind Dick Winters.

I am on the left, Army National Guard. Two sergeants, same last name.

Here is what I actually want to say, and it is not about Normandy.

He came home and never talked about it. Not the way people think veterans talk about it. He talked about Toccoa and the men and the funny things all day long. But there were parts he would not go near. Easy Company came across a camp near Landsberg in 1945, and he would not discuss that one for the rest of his life. When I asked him once why he never drew it, he told me, "Some things you don't need to talk about."

That was the whole answer. That was all I ever got.

What he did instead was draw. He was the only man in Easy Company who could, and for forty years after the war he sat at a drawing board in the evenings after work with his journals spread around him and put it on paper. Forty-six finished drawings. He was ruthless about accuracy. If a date or a location did not reconcile he would not let it go until he worked out what actually happened.

He worked thirty-eight years at the telephone company, splicing cable and climbing poles. Raised three sons. Never once made anything of it.

I did not really understand any of it until after he was gone and I started going through what he left. Then it was obvious. He had been talking the whole time. He just was not using words.

I am posting this here rather than a history sub because most of you already know how this works. A lot of you watched that series in basic. What it does not show is the fifty years afterward, and that is the part I lived next to.

If your guy is still around, get him talking about the small stuff. The stuff he does not mind telling. That is where the rest of it lives.