World War II with Tom Hanks

The 1930s is a decade of aggression.

Italy attacks Ethiopia,

dreaming of a modern Roman Empire.

Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich calls for his seizure of Austria,

Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

The Japanese Empire expands

with the invasion of Manchuria and China,

but intends to dominate all of Asia.

To accomplish that,

the military in Japan know they must first eliminate

the United States as a seaborne power.

They act accordingly.

All wars change the world. But none of them change the world

like the Second World War did.

Japan's on the march. Germany's on the march.

No-one can imagine the nightmare

they're about to unleash:

the most destructive war in history.

Suddenly, the world is turned upside down,

and all hell is let loose.

The West is stunned by the speed of the advance.

You get the Allies, led by the Big Three:

Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin.

Men who are dealing with immensely complicated questions.

It's the biggest military operation of human history.

The Allies have to come together not just militarily,

but industrial-scale. It's a global perspective.

They have to fight in every climate,

from the Arctic to the jungles of the Pacific,

to the deserts of Africa and the depths of the ocean.

But there was no certainty of victory.

It was going to be a horrific bloodbath.

We see humans at their absolute worst,

how they treat other human beings.

We see them at their absolute best, willing to give their lives

that others might live. - World War II was a struggle

in which there could be one victor and one vanquished.

In late 1937,

the Japanese escalate their military campaign in China.

They already occupy Manchuria.

After three months of fighting,

they take Shanghai...

...and move to the ancient Chinese capital of Nanking.

The Japanese brutality that follows will shock the world.

They enter the city, but instead of just occupying it,

they let the Japanese troops off the leash. They rape,

they pillage, they burn, they steal.

The Japanese commanders

ordered their soldiers not to take any prisoners,

which meant executions.

This was Japanese soldiers

looking down on the Chinese as an inferior people

and as being non-humans.

Japanese soldier who committed atrocities himself,

he described it as killing pigs.

Japanese officers had a competition

to see who could be the first to kill 100 civilians with a sword.

This was printed in Japanese newspaper.

To show pictures of swordsmen

decapitating bound prisoners

in the 20th century...

...made the people doing the killing

seem almost like they were barbarians from another era.

And it struck Americans and people in the Western world

in a different way than had they shown

people being lined up and shot.

Hundreds of thousands of people raped and murdered by the Japanese.

It was called the Rape of Nanking.

In just six weeks, the Japanese army

kill 200,000 Chinese in Nanking.

Most are civilians.

The Japanese invasion does identify the Japanese

as an aggressive power in the Pacific, that they are brutal

in the way that they've treated the population.

And this starts to change people's perceptions

with regards to the Japanese.

By the end of 1939,

Japan controls vast areas of north and central China,

as well as the southern port cities.

The Japanese are driven by the desire for raw materials.

The luck of the historical draw has put the Japanese people.

on a series of beautiful islands

which are, unfortunately, resource-poor.

Take iron ore. The Japanese have almost no indigenous sources

of iron ore. Their steel industry is based on U.S. scrap iron!

They need the raw materials

and almost limitless manpower of China.

Japan is a modern and complex nation.

At the pinnacle of society is the emperor Hirohito...

...the 124th Emperor of Japan.

The constitution made the Emperor of Japan

a divine figure...

...literally a living god.

Taken literally, he's a god on Earth,

or a mystical figure who people aren't really supposed to have

much direct contact with.

Emperor Hirohito is not really a policymaker in Japan.

He's not the wartime planner.

He doesn't go through details of tax policy

in the way you would think a president or prime minister does.

He's a guarantor and a protector of Japanese tradition.

Emperor Hirohito approves government policy.

But real power lies with the Japanese army and navy

and its political allies.

They want Imperial Japan to control Asia.

For the last couple of decades,

it has been a major industrial power,

powerful economy.

Its armed forces have been built up.

It's in a really strong position.

The Japanese resent the Western colonial empires

that dominate Southeast Asia and control resources.

The British rule over Hong Kong,

Burma, Malaya, and Singapore.

There's French Indochina...

...and the Dutch East Indies.

Even the United States has territories,

called protectorates, in Guam and the Philippines.

Japan intends to create what they term

the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

under their leadership.

By this point, Japan is Asia's pre-eminent power

by a long way, and I think because of that

the Japanese have a sense that they are destined

to bring the rest of Asia with them.

Japan had an interest in becoming the supreme power

of not only continental China

but also Asia. "Asia for the Asians" was one of the propaganda slogans,

one of the key slogans of the Japanese Empire.

Asia for the Asians was understood

by some Japanese politicians at the time

as an honest interest in liberating Asia

from the Western colonisers.

But there were some voices in the Japanese military

who had a different understanding of the phrase "Asia for the Asians,"

saying, OK, Asia for the Asians means actually Asia for Japan.

You get people in the Japanese government

who are militarists,

who have a very constrained view of the world.

Their attitudes are somewhat disdainful

of Western comfort and softness and all these sorts of things.

The Japanese believe their soldiers

are the toughest in the world.

They combine modern weapons

with the traditional training and values of the samurai warrior,

known as the code of Bushido.

Bushido was an older tradition that had now been inculcated

into the manpower of the Japanese army.

The Japanese didn't choose this aspect of their history

randomly. They don't have the aircraft

to compete with the West.

They don't have the heavier tanks and artillery.

There needs to be an equaliser. And they believe they've found it

in the superior fighting spirit of the Japanese soldier.

By 1940, Japan controls most of China.

In Washington,

President Franklin D. Roosevelt is alarmed

and fears further Japanese aggression

could threaten the entire Asian Pacific region.

Japan is an authoritarian power

organised and driven by a theory of racial superiority

on a march of aggressive conquest.

That was what Japan was doing.

Now, the only problem there is that the United States

has traditionally seen the Pacific as its own area of operations.

Roosevelt is determined to dislodge Japan from China,

and the Japanese are determined to stay.

To counter continued Japanese aggression in China,

Roosevelt orders the U.S. fleet to move from San Diego

to Pearl Harbor, a naval base on Hawaii

2,000 miles closer to the Japanese mainland.

This is a land that is an extension of the U.S.

It IS the United States.

Roosevelt is sending a clear signal

he hopes will deter Japan:

the Pacific is America's sphere of influence.

He wants the fleet to be positioned far enough forward

that the Japanese take it seriously, but at the same time

not to be too provocative by moving it

to the Philippines or maybe Singapore.

Pearl Harbor is now the front line

of American naval power in the Pacific.

The Pearl Harbor naval base is perfect,

because it's got a narrow channel into a wide harbour

with an island right in the middle. So it looks like a fortress.

Outside the naval base is the thriving city of Honolulu.

The Hawaiian islands to America looks like a paradise:

beautiful beaches, relaxed culture,

amazing weather.

But there are security concerns

among top naval and army commanders.

Because now they are surrounded

by a population that is disproportionately Asian

and a population that also includes

a very large percentage of Japanese-Americans.

30% of the population of the Hawaiian Islands

has Japanese heritage. - One of the major fears

is sabotage from local Japanese-Americans.

General Short, who is in charge of the army at Hawaii,

is much more afraid of sabotage than air attack.