Fifty-three years after the “The World at War” debuted its comprehensive 26-episode arch chronicling the events of the Second World War, the History Channel and the National World War II Museum have teamed up with Tom Hanks to deliver what they hope to be updated docuseries uncovering “new dimensions of the conflict,” according to the History Channel.
“I think the sweep and scope of the documentary is itself illuminating,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham told Military Times via email. “We are saying, ‘In a fragmented culture dominated by the device in your hand, you need to look up and engage in a story that is at once larger than any one of us but also intimate, personal and resonant.’”
Rob Citino, senior historian at the National WWII Museum and lead consultant for the series, told Military Times that “For someone in my generation ‘The World at War’ was equivalent to a kind of historical gospel. We watched every episode, we memorized it, the footage, the interviewees, which at the time were largely German and Allied officers — men who actually fought the war — they were still alive.
“It’s impossible to do that kind of series 1779401819, but the museum and the History Channel alike thought this was an important project to bring to fruition.”
Citino added that nothing and no one in the latter part of the 20th century to the present day has remained untouched by the war.
“World War II is the largest event in human history, one that has shaped — and is shaping — everything since,” said Meacham, an executive producer on the documentary series. “Its lessons are essential — about confronting tyranny, checking appetite, battling discrimination. We ignore these things at our peril.”
It was a war that toppled empires and reshaped the modern world, but it didn’t just begin as German tanks rolled into Poland, nor did it just escalate with Operation Barbarossa or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
It was a war that was fomented in the 1920s and 1930s throughout beer halls in Germany and in Manchuria, China, Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Spain and beyond. With over 20 hours of footage, this is a fact that “World War II with Tom Hanks” — and its 20 episodes — does not appear to gloss over.
Nicholas Stargardt, a professor of modern German history at the University of Oxford and author of the acclaimed book “The German War,” appears in episode 15 of the series, examining how the German people came to understand the chasm that their violence opened up — and their own transition across it.
“You have this parallel thing of people being informed relatively reliably, but of course they don’t know it’s reliable because it comes through private conduits and information, and then being overwhelmed by it, doubting it, worrying whether this is like First World War atrocity propaganda,” Stargardt told Military Times. “So one of the things that really interested me was, first when did this become not just private information but publicly discussable in Germany, and in what context?
“You don’t have to do a very big thought experiment to think, well, for Jews facing impending destruction, it’s clear that what we talk of as the Holocaust would frame everything, and the war is secondary. They are all interpreting war news in terms of ‘Will we be liberated and Germany be defeated before we run out of time?’” he continued.
“And so the thought experiment was for ordinary Germans, the framing is the other way around. For them, the war is more important than the Holocaust. I realized that we could track this up to the end of March 1945 and it’s only in the last six weeks, five to six weeks of the war that you really get Germans not wanting to continue, and there’s a quite clear military reason for that.”
As the German military withdrew further and further across the Rhine, Stargardt continued, “it’s that use of terror, which actually tells you they’ve lost consent … it’s been turned into a kind of almost mythological set of events of seeing ‘we were their victims too’ kind of logic, rather than actually, if we look at this analytically, it shows that that kind of terror against the German population only occurs in these very specific circumstances and therefore we know we’re dealing with something else up to that point.”
While the series takes a relatively 30,000-foot view of the most destructive war in human history, the cadre of historians participating in “World War II with Tom Hanks” is akin to an all-star roster for history aficionados.
“I think we’re going to make sure that it’s going to be difficult to avoid World War II for the next 20 episodes, and frankly, that’s the way the museum likes it, the way the History Channel likes it and the way I like it as well,” Citino concluded.
“World War II with Tom Hanks” is set to premiere on the History Channel on May 25.
Claire Barrett is an editor and military history correspondent for Military Times. She is also a World War II researcher with an unparalleled affinity for Sir Winston Churchill and Michigan football.
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