“World War II with Tom Hanks”

The new History Channel documentary miniseries World War II with Tom Hanks launches with three back-to-back episodes at 7 p.m. (Central) on May 25, Memorial Day. The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, which collaborated with the network on the series, hosted an advance screening and panel discussion May 20 that offered a sneak peek at the first episode of the ambitious 20-episode project.

Learn more about the museum and its Higgins Hotel & Conference Center here and here. A story I wrote for nola.com about the screening is here. I also discuss the series on WYES-TV’s “Steppin’ Out” and on my weekly WWNO segment here and here.  

Hanks — — who starred in the film Saving Private Ryan and whose Playtone production house made the popular TV trilogy (Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Masters of the Air) of WWII docu-drama miniseries — is atop the marquee, adding wrap-around narration, coproduced by Playtone, to introduce each episode and presage the next.

Another star of the storytelling is Robert Citino, the longtime military historian and senior fellow at the museum’s Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy. Author of 11 books about the war and an expert on the war’s Eastern Front, Citino appears extensively throughout the series and served as a consultant during its production. Other scholars affiliated with the Institute, both staffers and contributors to conferences, symposia and travel tours, provide historical guidance for the production and are featured prominently on-screen as well.

In a discussion that followed the screening, Playtone executive Kirk Saduski and Citino spoke about the fading generation of WWII veterans, the challenge of condensing a global conflict into 20 episodes, and why the story still matters eight decades later. The following is an edited transcript of their remarks.

Kirk Saduski: The question always comes: Why now? Before you answer, I’ll give you what I think is the answer: Why always? Because, as Tom says, World War II is the largest event in human history. So, why now?

Robert Citino: I’m moved by this. I worked on this for two years. This is the first time I’ve seen the whole episode. It’s frightening seeing yourself that large on a screen. But why now? We have an answer at the museum, and it was really brought home to me during the years I was privileged to work here. And that’s the veterans generation — 16 million Americans put on a uniform in the course of World War II, and the country was nowhere near as large as it is today. There were 125 million, give or take, Americans. About one out of every eight (Americans served).

That generation, of course, nature taking its toll, has been passing from the scene. When I started at the museum in 2016 … there were still about 500,000 veterans alive. Today we’re under 100,000. If you were 20 years old in 1945, about standard for a soldier, you’re 100 today. And the actuarial tables being what they are … World War II is about to pass from memory into history. It’s no longer living memory — people telling you what happened to them. It’s words on a page or images on a screen.

So, I think this is the perfect time. And what better tribute to that generation than a beautiful, sumptuous 20-episode television series? I thought I died and went to heaven when I was asked to work on this project. I suddenly became a 12-year-old again, when I first started reading about this stuff.

Saduski: Let’s talk about the scope and scale of this project. The Pacific. The Atlantic. The European theater. The Pacific theater. The China-Burma-India theater is well represented. Talk about the scale and scope of this series.

Citino: This is the Full Monty on World War II. There’s nothing missing. From the beginning, everyone involved with the project (said): How many shots do you get to make a 20-part series on World War II? Let’s make this definitive. Let’s make this the most comprehensive we can.

You have the European theater, the Pacific theater. There are (areas) often ignored in discussions of World War II. The North African theater, particularly after American and British forces land in Operation Torch, and the China-Burma-India theater. I personally, at the museum, and many other folk who work here, talk to veterans of the CBI, and they constantly say, “It’s like it didn’t happen.” It just doesn’t show up. It’s hard to fit in a single book or a single chapter or a single article. But when you’re playing a large canvas of 20 episodes, you want to make sure this is as comprehensive as you can possibly make it.

Saduski: One of the episodes, and this is almost never shown, (focuses) on the home front on the Axis side. What was it like in Japan? What was it like in Germany during the war? There are similarities between the two, and vast differences.

Rob, “historical consultant.” You hear that term (but) how does that work? How did that work with the network and the producers. 

Citino: I was asked every question under the sun. “What was the home front like in Japan?” I’d have to say, “I don’t know. I’ll get back to you.” Think about that. These are questions that, by and large, American audiences, American readers, don’t really know much about.

As dictatorial and totalitarian as Hitler could be, or the Japanese militarists who were running Japan, they had to sell this war to their people constantly. And they had to sell it even when it went bad. When it went badly bad, when their cities were being vaporized one by one. But one thing that did not happen in either of those countries was a kind of morale collapse where the people marched on the government quarters and demanded an immediate end to this war. And I think our series here captures that better than any other, certainly any other television production I’ve ever seen on World War II. I’m particularly proud of that. So, we do the American and Allied home fronts as well, in full living-color versions at that. But those sections on what was happening inside Germany, what was happening with the people inside Japan, I think are going to be eye opening for people who watch the series for the first time.

Saduski: Of course, we cover the Atlantic, the Pacific, Europe, Asia — and also the skies above all of them. Some of the strongest episodes have to do with the war in the air. That’s particularly close to us at Playtone, having made Masters of the Air a couple of years ago. I think this is what the series does across the board, is help you understand the unique position, the unique part, that every service played – the difference between the war in the air, the war on the sea, the war on the ground, it really does such a great job, episode by episode, breaking it down.

I’ll say one personal thing. I’m connected with the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. I got to help (the production) team tell the story of the Holocaust. And I never thought I would get that opportunity. And I will say, when you get to episode seven, it is good. It is as good as you can do in an hour. You cannot tell a story of something as enormous as the Holocaust in an hour, but you can … hint at what it was. As Tom says, it was murder on an industrialized scale, but it was understood individually and was experienced individually. And I think the episode does a spectacular job at doing that.

Citino: More and more from historians, (the Holocaust) is being looked at not as some sidelight to World War II but as integral to the entire process. It was why Hitler launched the war, so he could pursue this mad dream of racial purity.

We have the Soviets in full living color. I’ve spent most of my career as a scholar writing on the Eastern Front, the Germans versus the Red Army. And you know, when I first started doing that in the 1980s, it was relatively rare. We’re still in the Cold War. People didn’t really want to hear that the Soviets behaved heroically in any way in World War II, for all the horrific things they did. But nevertheless, they played a key role in bringing the Germans down.

I think we were very careful not to go overboard on new interpretations and try to stand World II on its head.

I write books for a living. People often say, “Well, you write books (so) you get to tell the whole story.” But you leave a lot out of books, too. So, when people look at an hour-long episode of World War II with Tom Hanks, if you’re an expert you might say, “You left out the battle of Schmidlapp” or whatever it might be, but you can’t tell everything. You can’t tell everything in a book, you can’t tell everything in an hourlong TV series, you can’t tell everything in a feature film. But what you can do is make quality, and I think it’s the quality that is going to really come off to people when they see this.

Saduski: There’s a saying in moviemaking: if you try to tell everything, you end up telling nothing.

We’re going to open it up to questions, but I want to make one final comment and then Rob I want to hear your thoughts.

One of the things that Tom says at the open, and I think is not thought of enough, and to me, it’s the unsung heroes of World War II, and that’s the parents. As Tom said, imagine you sent your  children, mainly your boys, but in many cases your daughters, put them on a train, put them on a bus, put them on a ship, and ship them God knows where. God knows for how long. Imagine that. How many parents are in the audience today? Imagine not knowing where they’re going. Certainly, they’re not keeping in touch with their cell phone. You would have no idea at any time where they were or how they were. So, imagine when Tom talks about stasis, imagine the stasis of the parents between 1939 and 1945, the emotional stasis that they had to endure.

Citino: That’s a good point, Kirk.

I’ll end this on a personal note, but my father was a soldier in World War II in the US Army. He was on Guadalcanal. But in working on the Guadalcanal episode – my father passed away in 2000 — I gained, I don’t know, a sense of closeness to him that I haven’t had in many, many years. You really had to think about Guadalcanal not just as a series of facts that happened, but how to tell people about Guadalcanal. And it struck me that that’s what my father had done for his whole life after getting back from Guadalcanal. Never told me any horrible stories. He told us funny, soldierly hijinks stories. That he got in trouble because he was a sergeant and he yelled at the captain because the beer wasn’t cold, or something like that. My father had a series of pugnacious Italian anecdotes. They always made us laugh, but he never really told us about the horror of Guadalcanal. I found out about that on my own.

But I just want to make a shout out to (author and museum co-founder) Steve Ambrose. And a shout out to John Citino, who built himself a life in Cleveland, Ohio, after what must have been a harrowing 18 months on the South Pacific island of Guadalcanal.

Saduski: Well, we say it in the show. It was a saying at the time. Guadalcanal was not a place. It was an emotion.

(Text continues below photo.) 

Audience Question: I work here as a volunteer. We’re always asked, “Why don’t you have an exhibit on this? Why don’t you have an exhibit on that?” You mentioned this, but the question I have is, it’s not only important what you include, but what you exclude, because you have to. So, I’m curious how did you decide what to leave out? Even with 20 episodes, there must have been difficult choices.

Citino: Oh, that’s a good question. There was quite a lot of debate about just what would be in the 20 episodes, and what was worth an episode, and what perhaps had to be folded into another episode. By and large, in each of the 20 episodes, I would say operational detail —  the names of all the divisions and all the commanders and the muzzle velocity of the tanks and the precise caliber of the ammunition. I love that stuff. I don’t mind admitting to it. A lot of people in the audience do, too. But I think we all made a conscious decision that if we started going down that route – that, shall I say, rabbit hole — that we never tell any story. We’d have a series of facts and statistics and diagrams on screen, which would not make compelling television.

What TV can do is bring things home in a vivid way that an academic will never be able to reach. So, I think we always went for those telling emotional details at the expense of operational detail, operational statistics, unit designations. You can name every commander of every division in the United States Army. I’m sure that a lot of people would want us to do that, but that wasn’t going to be possible given the limits of even a 20-episode series.

We wanted emotion. Personal stories are going to play a role.

Saduski: An unappreciated part of the art of storytelling on film is breaking it up … (finding) exactly how to do that in a dramatically comprehensive way. I promise you that’s not easy. I know how long and hard that is. How do you break it up into chapters? How will this tell a particular story. How will it contribute to the story? So, hats off to (the History Channel).

Audience question: How difficult is it to set up a series as detailed as this without going off on a tangent on those decades prior?

Citino: As a historian, my original sin is, I want to keep going back. … (But) you want to get to the point. If the first (episode) is called “Poland 1939,” you can’t spend half of the time talking about the historic relations between the Germans and the Poles going back to the Middle Ages. As much as you know that that’s a fascinating story. So I think that process of sort of internal editing is present in every single one of the episodes.

Saduski: Part of it is having trust in (the audience). … Will the audience understand? Will they get the connection. … You have trust that the audience will come into it with a certain amount of knowledge, certainly with a certain amount of curiosity.”

(End program.)

Full series credits, per History Channel:

World War II with Tom Hanks is produced for The HISTORY Channel™ by Nutopia and A+E Factual Studios™ group, in association with Motion Entertainment, a WPP Media company. Ben Goold, Jane Root and Steve Condie serve as executive producers for Nutopia. Sharon Scott, Steve Ascher, Matt Pearl and Andy Seestedt serve as executive producers for A+E Factual Studios. Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman serve as executive producers. Jon Meacham serves as executive producer. Chet Fenster serves as executive producer for Motion Entertainment. Eli Lehrer, Mary E. Donahue and Jennifer Wagman serve as executive producers for The HISTORY Channel.