History Channel will debut World War II With Tom Hanks on Memorial Day, unveiling a 20-part documentary project that follows the conflict from the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 to the Japanese surrender in September 1945. The series, made with the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, is being billed as the first docuseries to take that kind of global view of the war since 1974’s The World at War.
Tom Hanks, 69, and Jon Meacham, 57, discussed the series in a Zoom conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, where Hanks called World War II “the largest event in human history.” He also recalled that his father was in the Navy and described being 10 years old in a Safeway supermarket with him when his father recognized an old acquaintance. Hanks said he read Studs Terkel’s The Good War not long after high school, a book that helped shape the way he thought about the conflict and later drew him back to it.
The project fits naturally into Hanks’s long run as America’s most visible chronicler of the war, through his performances in Saving Private Ryan and Greyhound and his work producing Band of Brothers, The Pacific and Masters of the Air. Meacham, meanwhile, brought a historian’s frame to the conversation, including a joking reference to “Dork Wikipedia” as the pair talked through how the series was built. The collaboration also reflects a broader effort to tell the war with more scale than a single film or miniseries can usually allow, using footage and accounts that have emerged over the past 80 years.
That timing matters. The series arrives as the American-led postwar global order is fragmenting and as Holocaust denial and far-right politics are gaining ground, giving the project a sharper present-day edge than a simple anniversary package would have. Hanks’s line from the first episode lands with that weight: if World War II was, as he put it, the largest event in human history, then the question is not whether there is still more to learn, but whether audiences are ready to look at the war again with the full scale it demands.
The answer, at least for Memorial Day, is yes. History Channel is making the war the center of its holiday programming, and Hanks’s return to the subject gives the network a built-in audience for a story that is both familiar and unfinished.
