Revisiting World War II with Tom Hanks

Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks explores the enduring legacy of one of the most significant events in human history in World War II with Tom Hanks.

The sweeping 20-episode docuseries premieres on Tuesday, 26 May at 9:05PM on History channel 186. Blending rare archival footage, expert insight and powerful storytelling, the series examines the battles, decisions and human experiences that shaped the war, offering a deeply human portrait of the global conflict that reshaped the modern world.

In this interview, the acclaimed actor and executive producer reflects on revisiting the conflict through a modern lens.

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Why go back and reexamine World War II?

It's an evolving understanding of where we are that has been created by those six years that was World War II. When I was a kid, every single caretaker in my life had a perspective of the war that was reminiscent of them talking about a great plague or a great flood. Their lives were divided into thirds: before the war, after the war and during the war.

What did that perspective feel like growing up?

There were television shows, there were documentaries, there were movies, there was music that was all about the war. Everybody you saw on TV who was an established performer had a history and a participation during those years. They talked about it from a life that was held in stasis for an undefined amount of time.

How did personal stories shape your understanding

It was history, pure and simple. It was an immediate history, for example my trigonometry teacher, Dr Charrington, he served during the war. He told a story about being on a plane that got lost on the way from San Francisco to Honolulu to Pearl Harbor during the war.

It was so fogged, they thought they weren't going to be able to make the landing. They thought they would run out of gas and land somewhere in the Pacific. But his navigator on that B-17 was so good that when they came down through, he said, ‘No, we're on course. We're on course.’

They're getting lower and lower and lower, they saw nothing but clouds ahead of them. They had no idea what their altitude was, where they were, what their heading was. When they finally came underneath the ceiling, there the runway was lined up right in front of it.

Now that's a story about the war that you hear in your junior year of high school so, studying it then and hearing about it then was just a great saga of magnificent stories.

So why revisit it now?

Well, first of all, there is a ton of footage that we have never seen. Not only are there new scenes, they are also wrapped more in the context of the immediate time. This is, visually, a type of storytelling that is no longer being told. It's being shown what happened and this is huge.

What should people take from the war and watching the docuseries today?

The only yardstick for who we are is in our behaviour, and that's where the example comes in of why World War II is worthy of study. “No, you do not get to shut down the basic freedoms of what it means to be alive and free”. So go back and look at examples in the past that can impress upon us today as to how we should live and how we should also gauge between what is right and what is wrong. I didn’t know that it was as simple as that… but also the details of how much it cost and how long it took to get there.