C. Carwood Lipton

Hardly 22 years of age, C. Carwood Lipton joined the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division in 1942 as a lowly private. He left the Army after World War II having received a battlefield commission to the rank of second lieutenant. In the meanwhile he had joined in the paratrooper invasion of bloody Utah Beach in Normandy, France, on 6th June 1944 -- the initial drive against the Germans. He participated in the Battle of the Ardennes (aka The Battle of the Bulge) from Dec. 1944 to Jan. 1945, by which time he had risen to the rank of first sergeant. He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster and the Purple Heart with two Oak Leaf Clusters. It was Lipton who suggested the title for Band of Brothers (2001) - it comes from the king's address to his troops in William Shakespeare's "Henry V".