The project has already taken almost as long as the war it chronicles, and the most difficult part is yet to come. But when the National World War II Museum opens its third building, it will be just midway through a strategic expansion, creating a $325 million campus of six buildings, extending along three square blocks near the Pontchartrain Expressway. What is promised by 2016 is an epic survey of the American experience during the war.
The place is a museum, surely, but also something of a theme park, with 178,000 square feet and a hundred thousand more yet to come. There is spectacle (a special-effects theater with falling “snow”, vibrating seats, and an introductory history of the war shown on a 120-foot-wide screen) and solemnity (a careful survey of the brutality of the battles in the Pacific and the casualties of the European theater). The museum features entertainment (at a Stage Door Canteen modeled on the one in wartime Times Square) and dining (a much-praised restaurant, the American Sector, whose chef, John Besh, is a former Marine). And, not incidentally, it includes what may be this country’s best permanent exhibition, on D-Day and other aspects of the war, which has attracted 3.4 million visitors since the museum opened in 2000.
This is already an impressive achievement, shepherded by Gordon H. Mueller, the museum’s president and chief executive. But why all this here, in New Orleans? And what kind of understanding of the war is being presented?
Here things get more complicated, and the newest building, the $35 million US Freedom Pavilion: the Boeing Center, designed by the firm Voorsanger Mathes, does not provide the answers. When the campus is complete, it will act as a kind of interlude, a salute to the nation’s fighting forces during the war. As you enter its seven-story atrium, you look up to see a B-17 Flying Fortress, a Corsair fighter (also known as Whistling Death) and other warplanes, a sight that at one time might have chilled skygazers of the Axis powers. Two levels of catwalks bring you eye to eye with them, and touch screens let you explore cockpits and controls.
Some exhibits designed by Gallagher & Associates are less enticing, including enormous interactive video databases. One includes information about the war’s 464 Medal of Honor winners; the other about the more than seven hundred government leaders who were its veterans (including Presidents George H. W Bush, Gerald R. Ford, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson). Oral histories and films are alluring, but you have to discover the best ones for yourself.
But one display at the building’s center, What Would You Do?, connects to a recurring preoccupation here and may— once other narrative exhibitions are completed by 2016— shape the kind of understanding offered. On enormous video screens, various situations of the war are presented, and visitors vote on touch screens for how they would handle them.
Should French and Belgian railway lines be bombed, for example, resulting in numerous civilian casualties, to assure the safety of Allied invaders on D-Day? (They were). Should a black man subjected to racist rudeness at a recruitment office try again to serve his country? (He did, and was honored for his valor.)
Not all of these examples are effective, but the idea is to present history not as something complete but as something unfolding; it is really an appeal to experience. This is also the approach taken in a submarine simulation here in which video and special effects provide a vicarious thrill. But we also learn that American submarine attacks accounted for ninety percent of Japanese merchant and naval losses, but that submariners also had the highest military casualty rate: twenty-two percent were killed. This knowledge changes the effect of the simulation, particularly when we learn that this sub (the USS Tang) was accidentally destroyed by its own torpedo after an attack on Japanese ships.
The idea of teaching history as experience, though, is risky, unless context is carefully prepared. Unfortunately, in the new pavilion it often isn’t. For that, you have to proceed to the original exhibits, whose strategies, with any justice, will also guide the three new shows planned for the next two years.
The museum came into existence here partly because flat-bottomed boats made here by Andrew Jackson Higgins could maneuver easily in the shallow waters of bayous. Modified versions, Higgins argued, would allow easy delivery of troops to beaches. By September of 1943, 92 percent of the Navy’s boats were designed by Higgins (almost thirteen thousand vessels). His boats were used on D-Day.
Eisenhower told the historian Stephen E. Ambrose that Higgins “won the war for us.” Without boats that could land on open beaches, he explained, “the whole strategy of the war would have to be rethought”.
Ambrose, who taught at the University of New Orleans (he died in 2002), came up with the idea of a “small” museum that would focus on D-Day. The exposition that resulted is the oldest here but remains the most powerful. We see the difficulties faced by landing troops as they approached Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, with its narrow, slitted concrete bunkers. We see the feints used by the Allies to keep Hitler guessing at the nature of the invasion (including decoy dummies dropped with parachutes). And the battles are recounted, beach by beach.
The approach is less successful in the attentions given to the Pacific theater, with each island’s invasion treated as another D-Day, sometimes in eye-glazing detail. But there is a smart survey of the racist propaganda of both America and Japan. And, throughout, the experience of the individual soldier, caught “between tedium and terror” as a veteran quoted here puts it, emerges with great clarity.
In fact, we never forget the people involved. It is unusual to work through a war museum and not lose sight of individuals on the battlefield and among the casualties. Moreover, the experience of war is not used here to attack the idea of war, but to clarify its nature in suffering. It is unnerving to see the human costs weighed; before the atomic bombs were dropped, plans for a Japanese invasion required more than twice as many troops as Normandy (335,000) and almost four times as many ships (967), along with expectations of enormous casualties.
At any rate, there is something American about this view of history as cumulative individual experience. But it would be a mistake if the museum’s focus on the United States completely eclipsed other national experiences. (Without the stupefying carnage on the Soviet front, D-Day’s strategy might never have had a chance.)
It is also time to retire the idea, repeated in the introductory film, that eleven million were killed in Hitler’s death camps; this was, as the historian Yehuda Bauer has said, an invented figure; aside from the six million Jewish victims, there may have been about a half a million murdered.
But the evolution of this institution is extraordinary, and if in the crucial next steps the original perspective is embraced, it could become the national museum it now is in name.
Rico says he and his father visited the current museum while visiting his father's friend John Robinson in New Orleans; the city would be worth a return trip, let alone more of this splendid museum.
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