A man who trained 140 soldiers so well that they survive Normandy, Bastogne, and the deadliest war in human history. Decades later, that same man dies in a VA facility. Blind. Malnourished. His cause of death listed on the certificate as malnutrition. Nobody comes to his funeral. Not a single one of the soldiers whose lives he saved. His family doesn’t even know he’s dead until days later.
This is the story of Captain Herbert Sobel. And it’s worse than you think.
The Man Before Easy Company
Herbert Maxwell Sobel was born on January 26, 1912, in Chicago, to a Jewish family. He grew up with three siblings and attended Culver Military Academy in Indiana, where he was on the swim team. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1933 with a business degree and joined the Army Reserve Officer Corps.
By 1937, he’d already made First Lieutenant. That’s before Pearl Harbor. Before the draft. Before most of the men he’d later command had even graduated high school.
In March 1941, Sobel reported to Fort Riley, Kansas, joining the Military Police Corps. When the call went out for volunteers for the newly formed parachute infantry, he stepped up. He was assigned to the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, at Camp Toccoa, Georgia.
And then he was given Easy Company.
Herbert Sobel’s Training at Camp Toccoa
Sobel didn’t just train Easy Company. He broke them down and rebuilt them.
The centerpiece was Currahee. Three miles up, three miles down, in under 50 minutes. That mountain became a test of will more than fitness. Sobel made his men run it again and again. Sometimes after meals. The spaghetti run became infamous. The men ate a full pasta dinner, and then Sobel ordered them up the mountain. Soldiers vomited on the trail. Some collapsed. Those who accepted a ride back from the medics were shipped out the same day.
Think about that. Accepting help meant you were gone.
His punishments were creative and constant in ways that felt personal. Dirty ears meant extra duty. A spot of rust on a bayonet meant lost weekend passes. He confiscated canned peaches from footlockers like contraband. During one 12-mile march, he ordered every man to pour out his canteen to make sure nobody had been drinking water.
Dick Winters, who would later become the company’s most famous leader, put it simply in Beyond Band of Brothers (Chapter 2): Sobel “was not just unfair; he was plain mean.”
But Winters also said something else. Something most people skip over. “Herbert Maxwell Sobel ‘made’ Easy Company by producing a combat company that acted with a single-minded purpose.”
Sergeant Forrest Guth agreed. “As far as I’m concerned, Sobel was the one who made Easy Company tough.” And Donald Malarkey, years after the war, admitted something painful: “When the war ended, I wondered if he wasn’t a big reason some of us were still alive.”
Why Easy Company Hated Sobel
Here’s the problem. Sobel could train soldiers. He couldn’t lead them in the field.
During tactical exercises, he got lost. Repeatedly. He couldn’t read a map. He made decisions that, in real combat, would have gotten men killed. In one training exercise, Private George Luz did an impression of Major Horton over the radio and tricked Sobel into ordering his men to cut a farmer’s fence. Sobel fell for it completely.
As deployment grew closer, the gap between his garrison discipline and his field incompetence became terrifying. The men realized something: this man was going to get them killed in France.
Winters wrote in Chapter 4 of his memoir that Sobel’s fundamental flaw was his desire to “lead by fear rather than example.” The men respected toughness. They didn’t respect pettiness dressed up as leadership.
The Court-Martial That Changed Everything
On October 30, 1943, in England, things came to a head.
Sobel ordered Winters to inspect the latrines at 1000 hours. Then he quietly changed the time to 0945 without telling him. Winters was busy censoring mail under direct orders from Battalion Commander Lt. Col. Robert Strayer. He showed up at 1000, as originally scheduled.
Sobel hit him with a charge. Failure to inspect latrines at 0945. The punishment: six weeks with no leave, no 48-hour pass.
Winters could have taken it. Most officers would have. Instead, he responded with six words that shook Easy Company.
“I request trial by court-martial.”
He wasn’t going to let Sobel win on a technicality. The official documents showed Winters followed every original order. This wasn’t a misunderstanding. It was a setup. And Winters called his bluff.
Lt. Col. Strayer eventually dismissed the charges. But by then, something bigger had started.
If you want to understand why Dick Winters clashed with authority throughout the war, this moment is where it began.
The NCO Mutiny Against Captain Sobel
Winters’ stand gave the noncommissioned officers courage. Sergeants Mike Ranney and Terrence “Salty” Harris organized a secret meeting. Almost every NCO in Easy Company agreed to surrender their stripes rather than go into combat under Sobel.
Winters attended the meeting. He tried to stop them. “Don’t even think about it,” he warned. “This is mutiny.”
They did it anyway.
When Colonel Robert Sink found out, he was furious. He summoned the NCOs and threatened them with execution by firing squad. Mutiny in wartime carries the death penalty. Ranney was busted to private. Harris was transferred out of the regiment entirely.
But Sink was smart enough to see the real problem. Sobel had lost his men. Completely. And you can’t lead soldiers who won’t follow you into a firefight. Within days, Sobel was reassigned to command a parachute training school at Chilton Foliat in Wiltshire, England. His job was now qualifying non-combat personnel, doctors and chaplains, for airborne jumps.
In February 1944, First Lieutenant Thomas Meehan took command of Easy Company. The Sobel era was over. Four months before D-Day.
And that’s not even the worst part of his story.
Sobel on D-Day and Beyond
Here’s something most articles get wrong. Sobel didn’t sit out the war after losing Easy Company.
He jumped into Normandy on June 6, 1944, with Regimental HQ elements of the 506th. He reportedly led a small group of scattered paratroopers who destroyed a German machine gun nest with a grenade. He was there. He fought.
Later in the war, he served as a staff officer and was appointed the regiment’s S-4 logistics officer on March 8, 1945. He earned a Bronze Star Medal.
And there’s a scene in Band of Brothers that captures one of the most loaded moments in the entire series. A promoted Major Winters crosses paths with the now-outranked Captain Sobel. Sobel tries to walk past without saluting. Winters stops him.
“We salute the rank, not the man.”
The real-life version of this moment is disputed. Winters said it happened on a quiet street. Don Malarkey described something more deliberate, suggesting Winters went out of his way to embarrass Sobel. We’ll never know the full truth. But the tension between these two men was real and lasted until the war ended.
What Band of Brothers Didn’t Tell You About Herbert Sobel
The show gives you three episodes of Sobel. A petty tyrant. A man who can’t read a map. A punchline played by the guy from Friends. Then he disappears from the story.
Here’s what they left out.
Sobel had a daughter. She died just days after birth. The show never mentions it. Neither does Ambrose’s book. His wife Rose was a Catholic military nurse from South Dakota who served with the Allies in Italy. Sobel’s Jewish family disapproved of the marriage. He married her anyway.
After the war, he didn’t become a bitter recluse. He made his wife breakfast every single morning. He mixed her a cocktail every evening. On winter mornings, he went outside and warmed her car before she left for work. He put every spare dollar toward his sons’ college education. His son Michael called him “a great father” and “loving and attentive.”
The show also skipped his Korean War service. Sobel was recalled to active duty in 1950 and served until 1953. He retired from the Army National Guard as a Lieutenant Colonel. Not a captain. A Lieutenant Colonel.
And there’s the irony the show couldn’t have scripted better. When Sobel was removed from command, Thomas Meehan replaced him. On D-Day, Meehan’s C-47 was shot down over Normandy. Everyone aboard died. Bill Guarnere later said it plainly: “In reality, we saved Captain Sobel’s life.” The mutiny that humiliated him may have been the only reason he survived the war.
The Question Nobody Asks: Was Antisemitism Part of the Story?
This is the part most articles skip. And it matters.
Herbert Sobel was likely the first Jewish person many of his rural, small-town enlisted men had ever met. According to Stephen Ambrose’s own book, the most common insult used behind Sobel’s back was a slur combining profanity with his religion.
Look at how Ambrose physically described Sobel: “His eyes were slits, his nose large and hooked… in no way athletic.” Sobel’s son Michael later pointed out that his father was on the swim team at Culver Military Academy and routinely did 50-plus pushups every evening. Ambrose claimed Sobel could “barely complete 30 pushups with arms trembling.”
That’s not just inaccurate. It reads like a stereotype.
Ed Shames, another Jewish officer in Easy Company and the last surviving officer who died at 99, had his Jewish identity completely removed from Ambrose’s account. Ambrose’s credibility itself took a hit later when he was found to have plagiarized and fabricated material in other works.
None of this excuses Sobel’s failures as a field commander. But it raises a question worth sitting with: how much of his reputation was shaped by who he was, not just what he did?
David Schwimmer, who is himself Jewish, was cast to play Sobel. That adds another layer to a story that’s more complicated than the show ever let on.
But what happened to him after the cameras stopped rolling on the real war? That’s where the story gets dark.
Herbert Sobel After the War
Sobel came home to Chicago. He worked as an accountant and later as a credit manager at A.C. McClurg & Co., a wholesale company. By all accounts, he settled into civilian life quietly. He never talked about the war. Not to his wife. Not to his sons. Whatever happened between him and Easy Company, he kept it locked away.
But here’s the thing nobody expected. The man who terrorized 140 paratroopers turned out to be a devoted husband and father. That contrast is the part most people can’t square with the character they saw on HBO.
The Tragic End of Captain Sobel
In the 1960s, things started falling apart. Sobel’s son Michael became politically active in left-wing circles at UC Berkeley. Herbert was conservative. The distance between them grew.
Then came the divorce from Rose.
In 1970, Herbert Sobel shot himself in the head with a small-caliber pistol. The bullet entered his left temple, passed behind his eyes, and exited the other side. It severed both optic nerves. He survived. But he would never see again.
Rose later speculated that Herbert feared he had cancer but refused to go for testing. Whether that’s true or not, the man who once commanded 140 paratroopers was now permanently blind at 58 years old.
He spent his last 17 years at a Veterans Affairs assisted-living facility in Waukegan, Illinois. The conditions were grim. Dimly lit rooms. Cold, insufficient food. Overworked staff who couldn’t give him the attention he needed. He remained ambulatory but sometimes entered unresponsive states, likely from neurological damage caused by the bullet.
Let that sink in. Seventeen years.
At one point, Bill Guarnere organized an invitation for Sobel to attend an Easy Company reunion. When the visitors mentioned the 101st Airborne, Sobel became agitated and sent them away. Whatever Easy Company meant to his men, it clearly meant something very different to him.
Herbert Sobel died on September 30, 1987. He was 75 years old. The cause of death on his certificate reads: malnutrition.
No one from Easy Company attended his funeral. His own family learned of his death days afterward. Michael said, “Our contact with him had waned over the years. When he passed, we were unaware of the event.”
His sister handled the arrangements. He was cremated. His ashes were scattered at Montrose Cemetery in Chicago. There is no headstone. No marker. The man who built one of the most celebrated military units in American history has no grave.
Did Herbert Sobel Know What He Was Doing?
His son Michael believes he did.
Michael argues that his father intentionally made himself the enemy to forge unit cohesion. By giving Easy Company a common target for their anger, Sobel bonded them together in ways that no amount of normal training could have achieved. “I believe that the men understand what my father’s function was and how he operated,” Michael said.
And the men, eventually, did understand.
Sergeant Rod Strohl said it plainly: “Herbert Sobel made E Company.” Bill Wingett pushed back against the popular narrative: “I’ll argue hands down with anybody who says Sobel is the SOB they often say he is.”
At an Easy Company reunion in 2002, a veteran’s son approached Michael Sobel in tears. His father, the son said, credited Captain Sobel with saving his life.
You can argue about Sobel’s methods. You can argue about whether his cruelty was calculated or just who he was. What you can’t argue is the result. Easy Company became one of the finest combat units of the Second World War. They liberated towns across Europe. They discovered concentration camps. They survived Bastogne, the Bulge, and everything the German army threw at them.
And the man who made that possible died blind and forgotten in a room that smelled like disinfectant.
So here’s the question that doesn’t have a clean answer: Was Herbert Sobel a bad leader who accidentally produced great soldiers? Or was he a man who sacrificed his own reputation, knowingly, to build something that would outlast him?
The men of Easy Company spent decades debating it. They never agreed. You probably won’t either.
Watch the Short
This article was inspired by our YouTube Short on Captain Sobel’s tragic life. Watch below:
What Happened to Captain Herbert Sobel After Band of Brothers?
Captain Herbert Sobel — Easy Company’s first commander, played by David Schwimmer in the HBO miniseries — was relieved of command before D-Day, returned to Army administration, served again in the Korean War, and worked as an accountant after the war. In 1970, after retiring from a telephone-company management job, Sobel attempted suicide with a small-caliber pistol fired through his temple. He survived, but the bullet severed his optic nerves. He spent the last 17 years of his life blind and brain-damaged in a Veterans Affairs facility in Waukegan, Illinois. He died on September 30, 1987, at age 75. His body was cremated. His death certificate listed malnutrition as the cause.
Sources
This article draws from the following sources:
- Dick Winters and Cole C. Kingseed, Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters (Chapters 2 and 4)
- Stephen Ambrose, Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest
- Interviews with Michael Sobel (Herbert’s son), as reported by Fox News and various veteran publications
- Herbert Sobel, Wikipedia
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Veteran of the Day: Herbert Sobel
FAQ
What happened to Herbert Sobel after Band of Brothers?
After being removed from Easy Company, Sobel continued to serve in WWII and jumped into Normandy on D-Day. He earned a Bronze Star and later served in the Korean War. He worked as an accountant in Chicago, married, and had children. In 1970, he attempted suicide and was left permanently blind. He spent his last 17 years in a VA facility in Waukegan, Illinois, and died of malnutrition in 1987.
Was David Schwimmer’s portrayal of Sobel accurate?
Schwimmer’s performance is widely praised, but the accuracy of the character is debated. The show relied heavily on Dick Winters’ perspective, and Winters strongly disliked Sobel. Sobel’s son Michael argues the show made his father a one-dimensional villain, and that Ambrose’s descriptions contained antisemitic stereotypes. The real Sobel was physically fit and served in combat, details the show largely omits.
Did the Easy Company NCO mutiny really happen?
Yes. In late 1943, almost every NCO in Easy Company turned in their stripes rather than serve under Sobel in combat. Sergeants Mike Ranney and Salty Harris organized the protest. Colonel Robert Sink punished the NCOs but recognized Sobel had lost his men. Sobel was reassigned to a training school, and Lt. Thomas Meehan replaced him months before D-Day.
Where is Herbert Sobel buried?
Sobel was cremated after his death in 1987. His ashes were scattered at Montrose Cemetery in Chicago (5400 N Pulaski Road). There is no headstone or grave marker. No one from Easy Company or his immediate family attended his funeral.
Was Captain Sobel in Band of Brothers a real person?
Yes. Captain Herbert Maxwell Sobel was a real US Army officer, born January 26, 1912, in Chicago. He commanded Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division during their training at Camp Toccoa, then served in WWII (jumped into Normandy on D-Day, earned a Bronze Star) and the Korean War. He retired from the Army National Guard as a Lieutenant Colonel. The Band of Brothers character played by David Schwimmer is based directly on him, though Stephen Ambrose’s source material has been criticized by Sobel’s son Michael for one-dimensional portrayal and stereotyped physical descriptions.
Did Herbert Sobel fight on D-Day?
Yes. Despite being removed from Easy Company’s command, Sobel jumped into Normandy on June 6, 1944, with regimental headquarters elements of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. He reportedly led a small group of paratroopers who destroyed a German machine gun position with a grenade.
