Why Tom Hanks Keeps Going Back to WWII

Published: May 28, 2026

By India McCarty

Tom Hanks opened up about his latest project, History Channel series WORLD WAR II WITH TOM HANKS, and why he’s so interested in this time period.

“I’ve been wrestling with this just recently,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “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.”

Hanks continued, “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.”

The FORREST GUMP star also shared what he learned while working on the series, from “just how powerful the Japanese navy was” to footage of the Holocaust he had never seen before.

“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,” he explained. “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.”

A synopsis of the 20-part series describes WORLD WAR II WITH TOM HANKS as spanning “the global conflict from the opening shock of Germany’s invasion of Poland through the rise and fall of the Axis powers, capturing the ferocity of battles fought on land, sea, and air — from Stalingrad and Normandy to the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the jungles and islands of the Pacific.”

“During my formative years, every single adult in my life would make references to two words: The War,” Hanks said in a statement about the series. “The lasting effects of WWII on the world and my own family was not lost on me. I am thrilled to partner with The HISTORY Channel to produce this all-encompassing series with a long form format that will give us the ability to tell this important piece of history in its entirety.”

New episodes of WORLD WAR II WITH TOM HANKS premiere on Mondays at 8 p.m.

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