Private First Class Albert Blithe was never supposed to die in a hospital bed in 1948, and yet that is exactly what millions of viewers saw when they watched the acclaimed miniseries Band of Brothers. In the television adaptation produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, Blithe takes a mortal wound to the neck near the French town of Carentan, and the episode tells the audience that he succumbed to his injury six years after the war ended. The only problem is that none of that happened. The real Albert Blithe survived the war, healed from his wounds, served again in Korea, and lived until 1967.
Born on June 25, 1923, in Philadelphia, Blithe grew up on the rough side of the city. His father drove a delivery truck for UPS and his mother worked in the Garment District. As a young man, Blithe ran with a tough crowd, a fact his son Gordon later acknowledged without sugarcoating it. According to Gordon, his father was a thug in his youth, and there was no other way to say it.
After a brief spell working at a Westinghouse Electric plant, Blithe decided he needed to escape Philadelphia and the bad influences around him. Looking for a fresh start, he volunteered for the paratroopers on August 18, 1942. He was assigned to Easy Company of the 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, at Camp Toccoa in Georgia, where he trained under the strict command of Captain Herbert Sobel. Blithe became a rifleman in Easy Company’s first platoon and earned his jump wings at Fort Benning.
On June 6, 1944, he jumped into Normandy as part of the airborne component of the D-Day invasion. Landing far from his drop zone, he found himself disoriented in the darkness and exhausted. He rested in a ditch and fell asleep, possibly helped along by the airsickness medication the men had been given. Eventually, other lost paratroopers discovered him, and together they found the rest of Easy Company near Saint-Marie-du-Mont.
It was there that the famous photograph of paratroopers holding a captured German flag was taken, with Blithe visible on the far right. On June 12, Blithe took part in the attack on the rural town of Carentan, Easy Company’s first major engagement of the war. During the fighting, he suffered from what was then called hysterical blindness, a condition in which overwhelming psychological stress produces physical symptoms. In Blithe’s case, the stress of battle left him unable to see.
Dick Winters, who later commanded Easy Company, recalled that Blithe was so scared he blanked out. After the company took the village, Winters, who had come to the aid station to have a ricocheted bullet removed from his leg, spoke to the young private. Blithe told him he could not see, and Winters calmly reassured him that he was going to be okay and would be sent back to England. As Winters began to walk away, Blithe suddenly sat up and said he could see.
According to Winters, all Blithe had needed was someone to talk to him and calm him down, and it snapped him out of the condition. Blithe rejoined the company and stayed in the fight. Moving through a field outside Carentan, encouraged by the other men, he overcame his fear and opened fire on enemy positions. One of his bullets struck and killed a German paratrooper.
After the 2nd Armored Division fought off German tanks, Blithe walked over to the enemy lines and knelt beside the man he had shot. He took the white edelweiss flower from the dead soldier’s jacket and put it on his own. The flower, which only grew at high elevations, was a symbol of courage, and wearing it meant a soldier had climbed significant heights to obtain it. For Blithe, the moment marked a personal turning point.
He had finally found the courage that had been eluding him. On his 21st birthday, June 25, 1944, Blithe volunteered for a patrol outside Carentan to gather intelligence on the German infantry facing Easy Company’s position. Moving along hedgerows for concealment, the patrol came within about 25 yards of a farmhouse believed to be a German command post. A German sniper hiding in a tree shot Blithe in the collarbone.
Easy Company veteran Joe Lesniewski later described the wound: the bullet caused a piece of Blithe’s collarbone to come out, leaving a hole so large in the back of his upper right shoulder that Lesniewski turned him over on his front and stuffed a spare shirt into the wound to stop the bleeding. The men took turns carrying him back to the hedgerow where medics were waiting. According to Lesniewski, the Germans kept shooting at them the whole way, and they could feel bullets passing by their ears, though nobody was hit. The Band of Brothers series depicted Blithe as being shot in the neck, an error that appears to have originated with the source material.
When historian Stephen Ambrose interviewed some Easy Company veterans for his book, their clearest memory was that Blithe had been seriously wounded in the neck area near Carentan. In reality, Blithe’s World War II hospital admission card records that he was shot in the clavicle, which is the anatomical term for the collarbone. The result was a compound fracture that was repaired and closed. He was discharged from the hospital in England in October 1944 and sent home to recover in an Army hospital, where he remained until his release on October 8, 1945.
He recovered fully, with only occasional pain when raising his arm too high. The series claimed Blithe never recovered and died in 1948, but the entire assertion was wrong. Ambrose reportedly heard the story from Easy Company veterans and accepted it as fact. In reality, none of the veterans knew exactly what had happened to Blithe after he was injured.
He had attended only the very first 101st Airborne Division reunion after the war, and it is unclear whom he met there. The false death claim apparently began with veterans Edward “Babe” Heffron and Bill Guarnere, who in 1948 attended the funeral of a Pennsylvania soldier named Albert Blithe, mistakenly believing it was their old war buddy. It was a different man entirely. After the miniseries aired, the Blithe family refuted the death claim and received an apology from Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg.
The inaccuracy led to corrections in later editions of Ambrose’s book, though the series itself was never revised, and its DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming releases still display the false death claim. Blithe was awarded the Purple Heart for his wound in Normandy, but his service was far from over. After his release from the hospital in the fall of 1945, he waived the partial disability payments he had been receiving so he could return to the Army. He served in the Korean War with the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team, the same regiment in which his former Easy Company comrade Ronald Speirs also served.
During one mission in Korea, Blithe jumped behind enemy lines and ended up in the middle of a Chinese division. For that action, he received the Silver Star, and he also earned the Bronze Star. When Dick Winters discussed the scope of Blithe’s service, he noted that receiving the Purple Heart, the Silver Star, and the Bronze Star was nothing to scoff at. It spoke for itself.
After the hostilities in Korea ended, Blithe was assigned to the Military Assistance Advisory Group in Taiwan. He rose to the rank of master sergeant and became a master parachutist with more than 600 jumps to his name. In June 1967, he was stationed in Baumholder, Germany, with the 8th Supply and Transport Battalion of the 8th Infantry Division. His personal life was marked by struggle.
He married his first wife, Flora May, and they had a daughter named Barbara before divorcing around 1951. He married his second wife, Kay, in 1957, and they had a son named Gordon in 1959. Kay had two daughters from a previous marriage. According to Gordon, combat had taken a heavy toll on his father.
He called Blithe a chronic alcoholic, likely because of the war, though he was also a fun-loving man who enjoyed being with people. Gordon recalled that his mother often told him that he did not know how badly the war had messed up his father’s mind. When Gordon was seven, he asked his father if he had killed anyone in the war. Blithe nodded slowly but said nothing more.
When his son asked if he had been scared, Blithe replied, “Yeah, of course I was scared. ”
In December 1967, Blithe traveled from his post in Germany to Bastogne, Belgium, for a weekend ceremony commemorating Easy Company’s role in the Battle of the Bulge. He felt nauseated on December 10 and was taken to an Air Force hospital in Wiesbaden on December 11, where doctors diagnosed a perforated ulcer. He underwent emergency surgery on December 12, but complications led to kidney failure.
Master Sergeant Albert Blithe died in the intensive care unit on December 17, 1967, at the age of 44. His body was returned to the United States, and he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery on December 28 with full military honors. A letter from his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Dwayne Stubbs, described him as an efficient and highly dedicated professional soldier who was liked by everyone who met him. Years later, his son Gordon offered a blunter assessment.
He said he did not doubt the letter’s truth, but it was mostly polite talk. In his view, his father drank himself to death. Blithe drank every day after work, frequenting the NCO Club until it closed at two in the morning and often returning home with bottles of Seagram’s 7, his favorite. When his parents were still together, they were drinking buddies who loved to go out dancing, often until five in the morning.
Gordon said he had never seen a man drink as much as his father, and while Blithe was a happy drunk, the addiction took its toll. Alcoholism and gambling were among the factors that led to the split with his wife in the years before his death. Gordon also remembered the pride his father took in his military career. He was a true American paratrooper who put his life on the line for his country and for people he did not even know.
Despite the flaws and the pain, Gordon wanted his father remembered for that service. The man who was written off by history as a casualty of 1948 actually survived the war, returned to fight again, earned the Silver Star and the Bronze Star, and served his country for decades. His real legacy was not the false story of a slow death from a wound in Normandy, but a lifetime of service that outlasted the war itself.