Our Crack Team made another visit to New Orleans, and spent an afternoon at the National World War II Museum there. The Museum began life in 2000 as the D-Day Museum, focusing on the amphibious landings at Normandy which relied on landing craft built in New Orleans by the Higgins Boat Company. It then expanded with a section devoted to the island-hopping campaigns of the Pacific, and then took on the entire war as its subject matter.
The Crack Team for this mission consisted of a middle-aged history buff, a teen-ager with only passing familiarity with the war, and a six-year-old who likes to fight imaginary battles with toy soldiers. We all found much to interest us. The Museum is fairly heavy on visual displays -- maps and pictures with lots of explanatory text. These worked well for the elder visitors, less so for a kindergartener. We had to explain a lot. There are several short films and video presentations, which were quite informative and held the attention of all three. (The Team skipped the 45-minute documentary in the downstairs theater.)
The displays of military hardware and gear focus on what individual infantrymen carried and used. We were all a little disappointed that everything is in glass cases, with no "hands-on" items to heft and try out. Obviously artifact conservation is important, but given the lively market in replicas and reproductions, it's kind of surprising there aren't a few out for visitors to touch.
Whoever designed the layout of the Museum did a good job. It is housed in converted industrial space in downtown New Orleans, so the galleries had to be shoehorned into the existing shape of the building. The visitor easily follows the course of the war from buildup, to Pearl Harbor, to Normandy, and then the Pacific. A purist might complain that doing it that way violates strict chronology, but it would be odd to have the North Africa campaign cheek-by-jowl with Guadalcanal.
Obviously, as a museum in the United States, the National World War II Museum focuses almost entirely on the American war. You won't find much about the London Blitz, or Stalingrad, or Kursk, or the fall of Poland. Nor is their much about the rise of Naziism or Japanese militarism. Instead, the experience is rather like that of an American who lived through the conflict: it starts with a bang at Pearl Harbor, Americans go to various places to fight, and eventually both Germany and Japan are defeated.
The Museum is set to open a massive expansion this fall, more than doubling its present size. It will be interesting to see if that fills some of the gaps mentioned. It's already a great museum, and we look forward to seeing the new sections on our next visit.
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