Tom Hanks Talks Revisiting WWII in Epic New Series

The Second World War is to the History Channel what hurricanes are to the Weather Channel and sharks are to Discovery. But on Memorial Day, the cable stalwart will debut a documentary series altogether more ambitious than any of the stand-alone History Channel WWII docs Tony Soprano used to binge. World War II With Tom Hanks brings to bear all the gravitas of its titular narrator, America’s undisputed chief chronicler of the conflict thanks to roles in films like Saving Private Ryan and Greyhound and the HBO trilogy he produced: Band of Brothers, The Pacific and Masters of the Air. Executive produced by Tom Hanks, 69, and Pulitzer-winning historian Jon Meacham, the 57-year-old author of numerous acclaimed presidential biographies, the 20-part project covers every major theater of the war, from the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 to the Japanese surrender in September 1945. Created in collaboration with National World War II Museum in New Orleans, it is the first docuseries to take such an all-encompassing, global perspective since 1974’s masterful The World at War on ITV, narrated by Laurence Olivier. By airing in 2026, World War II With Tom Hanks benefits from the clarity that time can bring to history, in the form of footage and accounts that have come to light over the past 80 years. It also comes at a moment when the American-led postwar global order is beginning to fragment, Holocaust denial and far-right politics are on the rise, and the lessons of the war are at risk of being forgotten. Hanks and Meacham joined THR for a Zoom conversation about the war Hanks describes in the first episode as “the largest event in human history.”

How did you two meet? Had you worked together before this project?

JON MEACHAM We have mutual friends in Tim McGraw and his wife, Faith Hill. And we all met up right after President [George H.W.] Bush died. And I remember we spent about an hour trying to one-up each other with dork anecdotes. So this has now produced 20 hours of dork anecdotes.

TOM HANKS You know what? A lot of those anecdotes I got out of Studs Terkel’s The Good War, which was nothing but reminiscences of the guys that were there. I read that not long after high school. And I distinctly remember thinking, “Geez, what would I have done in the same circumstances?” And Jon is great for those kinds of anecdotes. I’m delighted to know an anecdote that he is not aware of. Makes me feel like a million bucks.

MEACHAM Jon Stewart once called me a “Dork Wikipedia,” and I insisted on taking it as a compliment.

Tom, your fascination with the war and that period seems to have begun well before Saving Private Ryan or even A League of Their Own. What is the origin?

HANKS Oh yeah. My dad was in the Navy, and he saw no real danger of it, but his life was put on hold for that for four and a half, five years. I was 10, and I was with him in a Safeway, the supermarket. And my dad looked at a guy and said, “Brian Gallagher?” And Brian Gallagher looked at him and said, “Bud Hanks?” And they had not seen each other since they were in the South Pacific together in World War II. And I just saw these two men — they’re gods to you when you’re 10 years old — and they had a conversation then that was in such deep code that was not unlike moments I’ve heard again and again from an awful lot of veterans, who say, “Well, here’s something you have to understand.” You try to get these guys to talk about their war years, and for a long time, they wouldn’t do it because, Hey, I was just a guy.

How do you account for the fact that you keep returning to the Second World War as both an actor and a producer?

HANKS I’ve been wrestling with this just recently. I’ve been asking myself at nighttime, in those moments of the soul, why do I keep turning to it again and again for that combination of poetry and solace and enlightenment? And I divined that it has to be about today. It has to be more about the palpable choices that we face here in 2026 as opposed to, look what those tough guys did back in the 1930s. Along with all that comes the tactile decisions that every human being had to make at that time to get involved that is no different from the sort of tactile decisions that we have to make today about getting involved. The kinds of personal choices that had to be made in World War II were as blatant and as obvious as the difference between freedom and slavery. There were two forces out there that said we are racially superior to anybody else, or we are theologically superior to everybody else, because of what is inside our blood. Is that in existence anywhere today? Well, yeah. So in that regard, it always comes down to some kind of personal choice that we’re going to have to make no matter what the war is.

Jon, right before you joined the call, Tom was talking about how he’s constantly reading about World War II for pleasure and wondering what that said about him. How do you balance the telling of such a traumatic event with the desire to entertain?

MEACHAM Maybe “pleasure” is the wrong word. Horace once defined poetry as literature that both delights and instructs, and “delight” in the Latin just means “divert,” right? It takes you out of the workaday world. So, I wouldn’t feel guilty if that’s what you’re asking. My first encounter with the war was my grandparents — both my grandfathers fought — and then at an absurdly early age, I read Herman Wouk’s novels The Winds of War as well as War and Remembrance, and continue to read them every three or four years. Tom, did you know him?

HANKS I didn’t know him. But, you know, he kept writing well into his 90s. He kept cranking out these books. I ended up reading a ton of Herman Wouk. He was quite a talented novelist across the board.

MEACHAM In any case, Wouk calls those two novels together a “historical romance.” And that’s, to some extent, what I think about literature, art, about the war. That it is a dramatization of the starkest stakes we’ve ever known. Literally. And it is illuminating maybe more than diverting. History at its best is illuminating.

Tom, are those questions you think about?

HANKS I don’t think there is anything that we have done that has quote-unquote glorified war, although, quite frankly, it’s very cinematic. You know, one of the things about Band of Brothers or The Pacific and everything we ever do is it kind of looks like a fun camping trip. There are times around the campfire and, you know, a good cup of hot cocoa.

MEACHAM If it wasn’t for those damned Japanese!

HANKS But there was a guy that was one of the original Easy Company guys, because we went up and we added the actual old men, the actual veterans themselves, to the top of each episode of Band of Brothers. And he put it in this way where I just thought, “Well, what would I have done if I was 19 years old or 20 years old?” He said, “Hey, we were attacked. This wasn’t like Vietnam or Korea. They were trying to kill us from the get-go. And what was I supposed to do? What we all had to do. There was something I could do no matter what.”

This series premieres on Memorial Day and is being presented as part of the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary. Jon, do you feel any tension between the commemoration of — as it’s frequently depicted — the victory of democracy over the forces of fascism and the recognition that America’s track record on promoting peace, freedom and democracy is spotty at best?

MEACHAM I think you put your finger on it: There’s a distinction between celebration and commemoration. Look, the reason we were a target on Dec. 7, 1941, and the reason that Hitler declared war on us on Dec. 11 was because of the tradition that grew out of what happened 250 years ago. The Declaration of Independence was an assertion that the rule of law and individual sovereignty would create a world in which politics was not a perpetual battlefield for the strong to dominate the weak, but that it was an arena where we would contend against each other. We would have rivals and opponents, but we wouldn’t have enemies. And that was anathema to the march of the dictatorships in the 20th century. I’m doing a biography of Eisenhower right now — and in 1964, he went back to Normandy with Walter Cronkite on the 20th anniversary of D-Day. And he’s sitting on the wall there at the major cemetery above Omaha Beach. And he’s reflecting on what it all means. And he says, “You know, Walter, these men bought time for us to get this right.”

We have to wonder whether today’s America — particularly under a president who has looked upon the graves in Normandy and allegedly called them “suckers and losers” — would make the same decisions today to confront those anti-democratic forces. Do you have faith it would?

HANKS Wow. The reason I would say yes is because we have this extraordinary built-in machinery that doesn’t just let us choose our leaders, but it allows us to get rid of the leaders that have not done their job well. But the question is, have we learned the lessons of World War II enough to have them permeate our decisions and our moral choices today? I think it’s, you know, 50-50? You tell me. We also now are dealing with a rise of revisionist history, with people making money off of saying there was no Holocaust in World War II. It’s all a sham. How does that happen? Well, the reason that exists is because we have freedom of the press, and we have the freedom of assembly, and I have confidence that that works to the good more often than it works for the malevolent.

In the making of this documentary, did you learn anything about the war that you didn’t know before — or didn’t know the full extent of?

MEACHAM To me, seeing the imagery of the Eastern Front was … I probably should have seen it before, but I hadn’t. You wonder why the Soviets resented us? Watch this. I think that the scope and scale of what the Soviet Union did from June of 1941 until the end is just mind-boggling. [It is estimated that more than 20 million Soviet people were killed in the war, including approximately 10 million soldiers, compared with around 400,000 U.S. military casualties.]

How about you, Tom?

HANKS Alas, I have not been able to see the series in total, so I can only really react to the moments that I was in the recording studio and what I was saying. But I would say that two things stand out. One was just how powerful the Japanese navy was. It was huge, and their ability to take over the vast Pacific in a relative wink of an eye caused a lot of the fears for the American mainland. After Pearl Harbor, they just assumed that Seattle and San Francisco and San Diego were going to be invaded and we were going to lose. The other aspect was the Holocaust. There was a ton of footage here that I had never seen, or that I’ve now seen in its totality, as opposed to a judicious edit before you really see what happened.

Jon, what do you make of the criticism, frequently heard, that the West knew about the concentration camps well before they admitted to but didn’t do anything?

MEACHAM So there are degrees of knowing. There’s no question, as early as 1942, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a declaration warning Germany not to pursue this path, this course. If you look at the newspapers of the era, there were a lot of stories. There was word coming back out. The Holocaust Memorial is excellent on this. I believe that we did fail on refugee policy, and one wishes that there had been more attempts at rescue, but the prevailing view of the military authorities was the way to save everyone’s life, including Jewish lives, was to defeat Germany, and any move, any diversion of resources from that central mission was the wrong thing to do. The moral utility of this conversation, the reason to call Churchill and Roosevelt and others to account, is to remind ourselves that if even the most heroic people in the past could get something so wrong, we need to be forever vigilant about what we’re getting wrong in our own time.

HANKS The lesson to take from this, I believe, is what would we do now, given the same circumstances, the same kind of information?

Is this the final word on World War II for you or are you going to keep returning to it and wondering why?

HANKS Oh, every time I read a book, I come up with something else I want to option in order to try to turn it into a movie or miniseries.

This story appeared in the May 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.