Oscar winning actor Tom Hanks is fronting a fascinating new series on World War 2, and the Saving Private Ryan star says he’s been enthralled by its history since childhood
Eighty years on from the end of World War II, the global population is again on tenterhooks, as Trump and Putin appear to gamble with our future. But current global uncertainty doesn’t compare with World War II’s six long years of bloody conflict, which claimed more than 65 million lives, according to Oscar winning actor Tom Hanks. He says: “The Second World War is the largest event in human history. No part of the globe is unaffected. World War Two changed everything for all of us.”
With acclaimed performances in World War II films, Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Greyhound (2020), together with the wartime miniseries Band of Brothers (2001), Tom is now to narrate an epic documentary series about the conflict. The 20 part Sky HISTORY series, WWII With Tom Hanks, promises newly uncovered archival material, state-of-the-art restorations and insights from leading historians.
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Tom, 69, says: “When I was a kid, every adult I knew shared one thing in common; a gap in their lives … when time itself seemed to stand still. For six dark years, the world was on fire, cities were demolished, and whole populations threatened. When would the war end? No one knew. How would it end? No one knew. Life was in stasis.”
Tom, who lives in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, with wife Rita Wilson, 69, an actress and singer, who he has two children with – actors Chet, 35, and Truman, 30 – says war had an indelible effect on those who lived through it. He says: “Their lives were divided into thirds, before the war, after the war and during the war. The war is now a part of our culture.”
But with the wealth of TV and film already available about the global conflict, why does Tom – awarded best actor Oscars for his roles in Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994) – want to narrate yet another series on the subject? He says: “First of all, there is a ton of footage that we have never seen. Not only are there new scenes, literally new celluloid, new imagery; they are also wrapped more in the context of the immediate time.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a clip from a piece of footage or a perspective of a specific moment in history that you thought, ’well, this black and white, 16mm, soundless collection of maybe 100 feet of film is pretty much all there is.’ No, there’s more. And with those new shots continuing on, in order to see what happens after the moment, or how it got set up before that, this is, visually, a type of storytelling that is no longer being told. It’s being shown what happened and this is huge.”
But Tom feels the poignant lessons that the war taught us require no modern finessing and simply need to keep on being told – loud and clear. Tom, who also had two children, actor Colin, 48, and writer and editor Elizabeth, 45, with his first wife, actress Samantha Lewes, who died from cancer in 2002, aged 49, says: “The only yardstick for who we are – are we villains or are we heroes? It’s in our behaviour, and that’s where the example comes in of why World War II is worthy to study.”
While the Nazis were obsessed with genetic superiority during World War II, Tom says the Empire of Japan was based on racial superiority. Fortunately, the West was “governed by a sense of what is right and wrong.” He explains: “Imperial Japan wanted to enslave their part of the world. Nazi Germany wanted to enslave everybody that they conquered. They did for about six years, until enough of the Western World, the democracies, said, ‘no, no, no, no. You do not get to shut down the basic freedoms of what it means to be alive and free’.”
Looking back at the past, says Tom, can impress on us today the right way to live and gauge the difference between right and wrong. A history buff since boyhood, he continues: “As a guy that was always searching out some degree of non-fiction entertainment – which is what I looked for as a kid, it’s [World War II is] what I read, it’s what I saw and it was the stories that I was fascinated in – it was history, pure and simple.”
As adults all around him had personal experience of the global conflict, the stories came thick and fast. Born to cook Amos, who was of English descent, and hospital worker Janet, whose heritage was Portuguese, he says: “My dad, my teacher, my dad’s friends and my friends’ parents talked about[the war]. There were television shows, there were documentaries, there were movies, there was music that was all about the war.
“My trigonometry teacher, Dr Charrington, 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. It was so fogged there was no way they thought they were going to be able to make the landing. They thought they would run out of gas and land somewhere in the Pacific.”
His B-17 navigator’s skill saved them. Tom continues: “They saw nothing but clouds ahead. 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.”
He also remembers a wealth of amazing programming about World War II. He continues: “There was just a great saga of magnificent stories. Documentaries such as The World at War , that was narrated by Lawrence Olivier, and episodes of Combat! , or movies like Kelly’s Heroes , or The Great Escape . Man, when The Great Escape was on, there wasn’t a kid in town that wasn’t talking about that come Monday.”
The Sky HISTORY documentary also provides the context for the rise of the far right and Nazism, which has chilling parallels with the world today. After losing World War I, Tom says of Germany: “The economy was burdened by heavy war reparations. In 1923 the cost of one loaf of bread rocketed from 3 Marks to 80 billion!”
This was compounded by the Great Depression, that saw 6 million Germans out of work. Hitler promised to make Germany great again and the desperate people bought it. Now Tom hopes the new documentary series will both entertain and educate. He says: “What I hope that anybody of any generation gets from watching is,‘I didn’t know it was this dangerous. How in the world did people do that? What prompted them to go off and even attempt to save the world in the first place?’”
The series also offers brilliant raconteurs, who Tom calls “grand storytellers.” He adds: “They are buttressed by the incontrovertible facts of what went on. The grim reality of the war is almost impossible to comprehend.”
*World War II with Tom Hanks premieres on Sky History on 26th May.
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