World War II with Tom Hanks

It's hard to comprehend the scale

of the Pacific-Asian theatre of war.

It stretches from Hawaii to Burma,

from the Aleutian Islands to Indochina.

In 1942, the United States sends fighting men

to far-off places most Americans had never heard of.

They are soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines

from every town in America.

They will confront an enemy whose moral code

does not permit surrender.

All wars change the world.

But none of them changed 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 human 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.

And 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.

Hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor,

Japan invades the Philippines.

They begin with a devastating strike

against the US air base at Clark Field...

Then land 35,000 troops and advance

on the capital, Manila.

American and Filipino forces are overwhelmed.

Within weeks, Manila is captured.

There was a Philippine war plan that,

in the event of a Japanese major invasion,

the forces would withdraw to Bataan.

Bataan is strategically located next to Manila Bay.

It's this rocky peninsula.

It's got two dormant volcanoes that are sitting in the middle of it,

and so it's really good defensive terrain.

On December 23, 1941, US and Filipino troops

begin their retreat to the Peninsula of Bataan.

You have this chaotic retreat.

About 100,000 US and Filipino troops,

and we should add the 25,000 civilians,

Filipino but also Americans, now desperate to escape

the attacking Japanese.

As the troops retreat,

the Japanese continue following

a well-planned, well-coordinated offensive

aimed at British and Dutch colonies.

They have already invaded Burma, Borneo, and Malaya.

They take Hong Kong on Christmas Day,

then move further into Malaya.

Malaya is considered difficult jungle terrain.

But the Japanese,

using bicycle infantry and some tanks,

manage to push south...

...to the island of Singapore...

...known as the Gibraltar of the East.

Singapore was our military base,

with its massive naval facilities...

...guns facing into the sea

so that it could protect that position,

and really a military HQ

for the Empire in the Far East.

They begin their assault on February 8th.

Winston Churchill, back in London, is looking on in horror.

He's an Empire man.

He said many times, he didn't come to power

to oversee the liquidation of His Majesty's empire,

but it's crumbling before his eyes.

Churchill cannot abandon the defence of Britain

and the Battle of the Atlantic.

He cannot risk losing the whole of the Mediterranean,

North Africa, and the Middle East, to Axis forces.

So what's got to go?

Unfortunately for Churchill,

he's got to scrimp and save when it comes

to defence in the Far East.

It's just too much for Britain to handle.

The Japanese take advantage

of British military mistakes

and capture the island in only seven days.

Tens of thousands of Commonwealth troops

are trapped and imprisoned.

Singapore was the granite foundation

of the British Empire in Asia, and, boom...

...in the space of days, it falls.

The idea that Japanese forces could go into this historic place,

a real symbol of British power and prestige in Asia,

and take it within such a short time

is absolutely tremendous as far as Japanese are concerned.

This is Britain's Fall of Rome moment

in its Asian empire.

Japan has plunged into the war

and is ravaging the beautiful, fertile, prosperous,

and densely populated lands of the Far East.

The British Empire now for centuries

had been the most powerful empire the world had ever seen.

The Japanese had cracked it like an egg.

By the time the shock of Pearl Harbor,

you know, wears off,

the Japanese have taken their empire

and expanded it seemingly overnight.

Japan's Asian offensive has two primary war aims.

First, the seizure of raw materials like oil and rubber.

Second, to replace the Western colonial powers

who have long dominated the region

and establish an empire of their own.

This is one of the most audacious offensives in military history.

In late 1941, early 1942, it's good news every week,

almost every day, coming in.

They are liberating Asia.

They are pushing back white Western colonial power.

The speed and scope of the Japanese offensive

stuns the world.

A year earlier, General Tomoyuki Yamashita,

the commander of the assault on the Philippines,

consults with Japan's Axis ally, Nazi Germany.

Japan is eager to adapt

the Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg tactics

to a very different theatre of war.

He was really admiring the German blitzkrieg,

the German lightning war,

and he took the German blitzkrieg

as the role model for a future Japanese war in Southeast Asia.

So we must surprise the enemy. We must be fast.

It's always movement, movement, movement.

For the enemy, for their enemy, for the Allies,

it looks like the Japanese aren't even thinking

about what they're doing, because they're moving so fast

and they're moving constantly.

But this has a kind of shock effect on the troops there

that are trying to defend the peninsula.

The Japanese have learned to move quickly,

move stealthily. They fight well at night,

which is what most armies are not good at.

They are pretty good at operational art;

don't attack strongpoints, envelop the enemy,

put them in untenable positions either in time or space.

And, hence, it defines a lot of their victories early in the war.

The British underestimate the Japanese.

I think part of that was racism.

I think they were astonished

that a non-European race could defeat Europeans in battle.

They didn't consider Asian people capable

of what the Japanese are doing.

After the Japanese land in Malaya,

Singapore's governor,

Sir Shenton Thomas, allegedly says,

"Well, I suppose you'll have to shove the little men off."

But British hubris is no match

for Japanese military prowess.

There had always been this faction

in the Imperial Japanese Army called the Kodoha,

the Imperial Way Faction, whose belief was,

because of Japan's extraordinary fighting spirit

in the blood of their soldiers,

we can overcome the odds.

And that really is drummed into the soldiers.

So there is this esprit de corps within the Japanese Army.

It's guided by this belief in Bushido,

the way of the warrior.

Japanese military discipline is instilled

by physically harsh measures.

Officers abuse non-commissioned officers,

who in turn abuse the men.

You can see in diaries and in letters home people saying,

"I got beaten up today.

I got slapped. I got punched.

I had a rifle butt get me in the stomach."

There is a fair amount of ritualistic abuse

that takes place as they go through

what they would refer to as lessons.

It's all about self-sacrifice.

They are all about suppressing individual needs and desires

for the sense of whatever the nation needs,

for whatever the emperor might need.

In just two months of fighting,

Japan has achieved most of its objectives

and appears to be winning the war...

...except in the Philippines,

where US and Filipino troops are fighting back.

After more than a month of fighting,

US and Filipino forces