Tom Hanks is bringing World War 2 back to television with a new 20-part documentary series that premieres Memorial Day on the History Channel, and he says the project grew out of a question he has been asking himself for years: why he keeps returning to the conflict. Speaking ahead of the release of World War II with Tom Hanks, the actor said he has been wrestling with his fascination with the war and the mix of "poetry and solace and enlightenment" he keeps finding in it.
Hanks said he has concluded the pull is about the present, not the past. He argued that the series is more about the choices people face in 2026 than about "what tough guys did back in the 1930s," and said the moral lines in the war were as clear as the difference between freedom and slavery. The series chronicles every major theater of the war from 1939 through 1945, turning that argument into a long look at how ordinary people faced extraordinary pressure.
That view fits the way Hanks has spent much of the past quarter-century. More than 25 years after Band of Brothers, he is still building on a World War II résumé that already includes Saving Private Ryan, Greyhound, The Pacific and Masters of the Air. The new project was created with the National WWII Museum and is executive produced by Hanks and Jon Meacham, giving it both a broad historical frame and a familiar pair of names behind it.
Hanks said the reasons for his fixation go back to childhood. When he was 10, he saw his father and a fellow veteran have an emotional reunion in a grocery store, an encounter he still remembers as something spoken in code that carried the weight of war long after the fighting ended. He said veterans often tried for years to avoid talking about their service, insisting, "I was just a guy," even when the stories clearly mattered to the people around them.
The tension in Hanks’ latest project is that it is both an act of remembrance and a warning. He said the war featured two forces built on the claim that one group was racially or theologically superior to another, and he asked whether that kind of thinking still exists today. In his view, the answer is yes, which is why he says the series is aimed squarely at the choices Americans and others are making now, not only at the battlefields of the past.
Even after all that work, Hanks said he is not finished with the subject. He said every time he reads a book, he finds another story he wants to option for a movie or miniseries, a habit that helps explain why World War II keeps pulling him back. With Memorial Day now set for the debut of World War II with Tom Hanks, he is asking viewers to see the conflict not as a finished chapter but as a mirror that still reflects the world of 2026.
