To tell the story of Easy Company accurately, it was important to the "Band Of Brothers" production team to make it as realistic as possible, especially in the battle scenes. To do that without injuring anybody was the work of stunt coordinator Greg Powell and special effects supervisor Joss Williams.

Powell and Williams’ first task was to find out from each episode’s director his expectations based on the script. Although there was room for each director to imprint his own style on an episode, one of Williams’ responsibilities was to maintain continuity so that machine gun fire in one scene looks the same as in the next, a grenade’s impact isn’t bigger in one part than in another. Although the actors did most of their own stunts, Powell and his team came in when there was close work with explosions.

The explosions were Williams’ domain. Many of his crew had worked on "Saving Private Ryan," and built on lessons learned there to take the "Band Of Brothers" special effects several steps further. One important innovation was the use of human dummies on electromagnetic bases, which could be posed in any position, holding weapons and gear. The dummies were modeled after auto crash test dummies, so they had the proper weight and dimensions, and their joints behaved like human joints. When the dummy took a hit, the electromagnet was released and the dummy crumpled as a human would.

Several innovations involved the use and firing of squibs, the small charges that cause the bullet holes in costumes and sets. Williams’ team came up with a firing mechanism using compressed air, instead of the traditional pyrotechnics, so that actors could be much closer together when a squib went off without the dangers inherent in conventional squibs. They also invented a new firing system, whereby an actor was pre-wired with up to eight hits, controlled by a button he activated that was hidden in the sleeve of his costume. There were too many actors getting hit too many times in big battle scenes on "Band Of Brothers" for the traditional hard-wired firing systems. This way, the squibs could be set to go off one at a time for handguns, or rapid-fire for machine guns, with the actor controlling the effect. For large hits, either to buildings or bodies, the effects team came up with a way to fire up to ten squibs simultaneously, ensuring a large hole. In the old way, squibs went off one at a time, in very close succession, but it was sometimes not enough firepower to blow out what needed exploding. Finally, they invented a way to stage large explosions off in the distance without running miles of wires by using secure, encrypted radio frequency detonators that couldn’t be set off by outside interference.

Some of the most spectacular use of special effects occurs in parts 6 and 7, where Easy Company is embroiled in the Battle of the Bulge, which happened in the dead of winter in the Bois Jacques, a forest near Bastogne, Belgium. For these episodes, the Bois Jacques was recreated inside one of the airplane hangars at the Hatfield Aerodrome. The art and construction departments drilled hundreds of holes in the concrete floor, brought in real trees to fill them, then backfilled the entire set with up to five feet of earth. Scattered among the real trees were about 250 foam and fiberglass trees from Williams’ department, primed to explode. In the battle, the Germans heavily shelled the American lines, timing their mortars to explode in the treetops, so the forest literally shattered and the Americans dodged not only artillery fire, but shrapnel from exploding trees. The trees the effects team manufactured allowed an actor to be within five feet of a major explosion, and come to no harm.