National WWII Museum

We flew into New Orleans in the late afternoon and took a quick taxi ride to our hotel in the Garden Quarter.  At check-in I saw a brochure for The National WWII Museum ,and I knew I had to see it.  It's not that I'm super patriotic or a great history buff, but museums about warfare are filled with "guy stuff", and I knew that this would be no exception.  The Museum was actually opened in 2000 as the National D-Day Museum, but in 2003 Congress designated it the National WWII Museum. Friday morning Claudette and I would be there when it opened for the day.

After a short walk from our hotel we entered the Louisiana Pavilion part of the museum.  Its fifty-foot ceiling has a C-47/Gooney Bird/Dakota/Skytrain airplane hanging from the overhead along with a US Navy fighter aircraft of the same era. The C-47  in its olive drab paint job appears to have just returned from a recon mission from war-torn Europe of the early 1940's.  At ground level are a half-track (one of my favorite vehicles combining the tracks of a tank with the front wheels of a truck), a small tank, and a deuce and a half truck, as well as a jeep and a landing craft.  Another very interesting piece was the M1  75MM Pack Howitzer.  This artillery piece was designed to be disassembled into three pieces to be transported by pack mules.  One sour note though. There is an Allison aircraft engine on display that is painted glossy black with red detailing and chrome plated exhaust pipes. Obviously not an artifact of the war.  We climbed the stairways  to two upper levels with overlooks of the main lobby.  These areas have smaller displays of Navy memorabilia.  We had overlooked the main display area. It was on the ground level to the right after the entryway.

The major display area is divided geographically into the European and Pacific theaters.All the displays are extremely modern, and there are many mini-theatres where a half dozen people or less can enjoy a film portraying an event in the war.  These were usually original films shot on location.  This museum provides a lot of information if you read all the signage and watch and listen to all the audio-visuals.  Many artifacts are displayed under Plexiglas, so they can't be touched by little boys and guys like me.  There are many stories about individual soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen.  One that caught my eye was the display of a Japanese katona, a GI's helmet and an American pistol. Reading the captions I find that a Japanese officer had hit the American over the head with his encased sword, denting his helmet.  While falling, the American pulled his piston and dispatched the officer. The museum is full of stories of the undaunted courage of the American fighting man. There is a mock up of a glider used to ferry tops in to France on D-Day very similar to the one at the Airborne and Spec Ops Museum in Fayetteville, NC. The fantastic displays of weapons and machines of warfare are a testament to mankind's technological ability to find ways to destroy his fellow man. 

We thoroughly enjoyed our visit, but in our last hour it was inundated with high school students. But I did get some good photos.