7 reasons to watch World War II With Tom Hanks on Sky HISTORY

There have been a lot of documentaries about the Second World War. A lot. And yet, when Tom Hanks – the star of Saving Private Ryan and the driving force behind Band Of Brothers and The Pacific – signs up to front a 20-part premium series drawing on never-before-seen archival footage and the world’s leading historians, you pay attention.

For many of us who grew up with Laurence Olivier narrating The World At War, this is the kind of deep-investment documentary series that has been absent from our screens for a long time. And who better than Hanks (with that smooth, authoritative voice) to take us through the entire history of the conflict in this spiritual successor to that classic 1970s series.

World War II With Tom Hanks starts on Tuesday 26 May at 9pm on Sky HISTORY (CH 131). Here are eight reasons why it deserves a place in your viewing schedule.

This isn’t a case of a celeb slapping their name on a project they’ve briefly glanced at on their way to the recording studio. Tom Hanks has been obsessed with the Second World War since childhood, an interest shaped by the adults around him. “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,” he says. “Their lives were divided into thirds: before the war, after the war and during the war.”

The history wasn’t abstract to Hanks – it was in the rooms where he lived. He recalls how his trigonometry teacher, Dr Charrington, had served during the war and told him about being on a B-17 that got lost in thick fog on the way to Pearl Harbor, the crew convinced they were going to run out of fuel. “When they finally came underneath the ceiling, there the runway was lined up right in front of it,” Hanks excitedly remembers. “Now that’s a story about the war that you hear in your junior year of high school.”

He adds: “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 what I read, it’s what I saw and it was the stories that I was fascinated [by] – it was history, pure and simple.”

This is maybe the most compelling reason to watch, even if you consider yourself something of a Second World War expert. The archive material isn’t the same clips recycled across decades of documentaries you’ve probably seen time and time again. The incredible footage comes from archives around the globe and has never been broadcast to such a wide audience, and is presented with more context than was previously possible.

The scope of this series takes in the full span of the global conflict, from Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 to the fall of the Axis powers and the atomic age that followed. That means the Eastern Front, the war at sea, the Pacific campaign, the Italian slog, the Battle of the Bulge, Stalingrad and Guadalcanal all get proper, dedicated treatment.

The episodes on the Holocaust (“Darkness Falls”) and civilian resistance (“Resistance”) cover the full human cost of those six years. “Secrets And Lies” goes deep on Alan Turing, Bletchley Park and Operation Mincemeat. “Home Front” examines how Germany and Japan managed – very differently – the psychological demands on their own people. This is genuinely comprehensive in a way few previous series have managed.

What makes this series feel different from a purely academic exercise is the explicit moral framework Hanks brings to it. He isn’t interested in the history as a museum piece. He’s interested in what it tells us about human behaviour – and human choice – at the moments that mattered most.

“A huge swath of the world could have not cared about Nazism that was based on genetic superiority, or the Empire of Japan that was based on racial superiority. But here was this whole other section of the world, let’s call it the West, in which we were governed by a sense of what is right and wrong. And enough of that generation in the West said that what is happening is wrong.”

And the reason to revisit it now, in his view, is clear: “The only yardstick for who we are, are we villains or are we heroes, is in our behaviour, and that’s where the example comes in of why World War II is worthy [of] study.”

Hanks is clear that the irreplaceable ingredient in this series is the weight given to personal experience – the accounts of soldiers and civilians who were actually there. No amount of historical analysis quite replaces the testimony of someone describing what it felt like to be wet and terrified in a foxhole in Italy, or to be a civilian watching their city disappear around them.

“We can now all look back and say, of course, we know when the war began and we know when it ended. But if you were actually alive during those years, you had no idea when the war was going to end. In fact, many of them just assumed it would go on for the next 10 or 15 years, which was a real possibility.”

That uncertainty – the lived, grinding not-knowing of it – is what the personal accounts in this series bring to the fore. The facts tell you what happened. The people who experienced it tell you what it felt like.

The historian lineup is as strong as you’ll find anywhere on television. Sir Antony Beevor – author of Stalingrad and D-Day: The Battle For Normandy – speaks of the Eastern Front as the war’s most brutal theatre. Historian Dr Tessa Dunlop, Royal Television Society award winner and author of The Bletchley Girls, focuses on the vital contribution of women to wartime intelligence. Guy Walters, author of Hunting Evil and Berlin Games, covers the craft and risk of Allied deception operations, from pinch raids to Operation Mincemeat. Dr James Bulgin, Head of Public History at the Imperial War Museum London and a leading expert on the Holocaust, features throughout – as does broadcaster Dan Snow.

This is what Hanks means when he talks about what makes historical TV shows truly land for the viewer. “There is a type of experience that can only come across [from] the people who experience it, which we do have in droves in this series. But also interpreters of what that was, grand storytellers themselves that are not buttressed only by their opinions of it – they are buttressed by the incontrovertible facts of what went on.”

Even if you know the broad sweep of the war, this series will surprise even the biggest history buffs. For instance, it reveals how Stalin received as many as 80 separate warnings about Hitler’s intention to invade the USSR – and didn’t believe them until after the German invasion had started. In the first six months of Operation Barbarossa, German forces wiped out one in every 500 people on the planet. The Maginot Line was so advanced it had electric internal railways for shuttling soldiers along the front. A third of the population of Hawaii, where Pearl Harbor is situated, had Japanese heritage in 1941. The Germans assembled an invasion force of 3.3 million soldiers – the largest army in history – for the assault on the Soviet Union.

For a conflict that has spanned probably more hours of documentary and film than anything else in human history, it’s staggering to genuinely learn something new.

This is a series that trusts its audience. The Italian campaign – the long, grinding, muddy slog up the peninsula – gets its own episode. The war at sea gets its own episode. The home fronts of Germany and Japan each get proper examination. The Guadalcanal in the Pacific, rarely given its full due in British documentaries, has an entire episode to itself. 

“One of the things that I’ve learned about from this series is just how long and miserable the campaign in Italy was,” Hanks says. “Imagine being wet and muddy and under fire for the better part of a year and a half. Well, that’s what it was.”

And at the heart of the series is that newly unearthed footage which shows not just the moment, but what came before and after it. If The World At War (which itself had 26 episodes) shaped a generation’s understanding of the Second World War 50 years ago – and Hanks grew up on it, on Combat!, on Kelly’s Heroes, on 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”) – then this is the series that does that work for the present day, with tools and archive access the makers of those earlier productions could never have imagined.

World War II With Tom Hanks starts Tuesday 26 May at 9pm on Sky HISTORY (CH 131).

If you’re a Virgin Media customer, you can watch live on CH 131 or catch up on anything you’ve missed in On Demand through your Virgin TV box. You can also watch on the go. Just download the Virgin TV Go app, sign in with your My Virgin Media details, and Sky HISTORY is right there in the Live TV section, as long as it’s part of your package.

Not sure if Sky HISTORY is included in your package? Log in to My Virgin Media to check what you’ve got and to see what you can add ahead of the premiere.

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