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For Ambrose, this anniversary is a little special. Today, in New Orleans, he and thousands of WWII veterans celebrate the opening of the National D-Day Museum. While the battlegrounds of Normandy boasts dozens of such museums, the American version should prove to be quite unique.
Ambrose spoke to NR in detail about operation National D-Day Museum — no small task, by any stretch. But well worth it. Chris McEvoy: Can you tell us where the idea for a National D-Day Museum in New Orleans came about and what was involved? Stephen Ambrose: I went to Gettysburg to meet with Dwight Eisenhower who asked me to be his biographer and I spent a few days talking to him. At the end of this period he said, " I see you're living here in New Orleans. Did you ever know Andy Higgins?" I said, "No, sir." Mr. Higgins died in 1953 and I moved there a couple years later. And he said, "That's too bad because he was the man who won the war for us." And I was astonished to hear such a statement from such a source. And [Eisenhower] saw the look on my face and said, "That's absolutely right — if Andy Higgins hadn't developed and built those landing crafts we never could have gone in and over the beach." So I then went to work on his biography and I had other things to do but I never forgot that. And I always wanted to do something in New Orleans to honor Andy Higgins and the people that worked for him. There was no street named for him. No statue. The company was out of business. So then I worked on D-Day and I was doing a lot of interviewing and [veterans] start sending me artifacts. The first one was a red beret from Wally Parr who wore it on D-Day. He was in the British Airborne company that began the whole action at 17 minutes after midnight on June 6th. And Wally sent me his beret with this rip in it which was caused by shrapnel that cost him 18 stitches in his head. And he said, "You can do something with this." I had it up in my office for a few years. . . and it was out of that beret that I told a friend of mine, Nick Mueller, "We've got to build a museum." Other guys were sending me artifacts — knives and crickets and cigarettes that they carried. And I said, "Nick, we've got to build a museum to show these things off." I said we could do it for a million bucks. And he said $4 million would be more like it. So we committed ourselves — two history professors. And that's when it started. McEvoy: How long ago was that — when did you decide to go ahead with this? Ambrose: About 1983, and then [we] struggled [with it]. Peter Kalico, who at that time owned the New York Post, had me come and talk to him about World War II. At the end of the conversation he said, "I want to help you out. What can I give — money?" On the spot he wrote out a $50,000 check. That really got us going. Then I went where the money is — to Congress. Bob Livingston was our representative. Bob got through a $4 million appropriation and we were off and running. McEvoy: Since then, has the money raising been the most difficult aspect of putting this together? Ambrose: By far. I thought that would be the easy part. I thought designing the museum and getting the displays and figuring out how to use these artifacts would be the tough part. I thought you could go to a corporation like McDonnell Douglas and [tell them] we're going to build a museum and it's going to have the DC-3 in it. I thought they would be falling over themselves to write out checks. What I discovered was that the modern American corporation doesn't care anything about the past. All they are interested in is the future. I didn't get any money. These guys — and to a man — would look at me and say, "That's a terrific idea, you should go and see so and so." And eventually, raising money out of national corporations was impossible. And New Orleans is a tough town to raise money in. [There's not] a hell of a lot of money and what it does have goes into Mardi Gras. But eventually I got some more money out of the Feds, got the state of Louisiana to match that, and then I got private people in New Orleans [to donate], and I put in a lot of my own money to match that. So we raised $25 million and now we're…open. McEvoy: Is the museum modeled on anything else? Ambrose: No. McEvoy: So what are the highlights? Obviously, the Higgins boat is central? Ambrose: There are no Higgins boats in existence anymore. They were all made out of plywood. There were 20,000 of them, but they're gone. But we have the plans, and the workers — the men who worked for Mr. Higgins were teenage kids. They were 14 and 15 years old at the time and for two and half years they have come out every Saturday and we built a Higgins boat exactly to the specifications. And that's there. We don't have it in yet but we're going to have a Sherman tank and so on. The planes are hanging from the rafters. In the museum we start off with a display that shows the Japanese army in 1939, the German army in 1939, and the American army. We had a 16th largest army in the world, right behind Romania when World War II began. So [we show the] preparation, the planning and [what lead up to] Normandy. McEvoy: Kind of following your book, D-Day? Ambrose: That's right. In all these places we've got the artifacts I've been given over the years — like Wally Parr's red beret and Dutch Schultz's knife, that he cut himself out of his risers with, and maps. [The veterans] gave me a lot of maps. We have a German section, a section on Utah Beach and Omaha Beach and the British and Canadian beaches and the hedge-row fighting. And in every one of these sections we've got people giving oral histories of what happened to them. McEvoy: As the World War II generation is getting older, are you confident other generations will be drawn to the museum? Ambrose: The conception and the essence and the spirit of this museum is a love song to democracy. The biggest collection of veterans since World War II [have come] here for this opening. More than 10,000 of them. I know they're going to love it. And their grandchildren are going to love it. What this museum is demonstrating is that democracy beats everything else. And it especially beats totalitarianism. When Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941 he made a bet that his young men brought up in a totalitarian state — members of the Nazi youth &#!51; would always outfight the soft, spoiled sons of democracy. Hitler lost that bet and what we demonstrate in this museum is how it happened that the Boy Scouts from America beat the Nazi youth. Because they would take initiative. They would accept responsibility. They could make up their own minds. They knew what they were fighting for and they went out and they did it. And that's what we're demonstrating. And we want to pass on through the 21st Century and on through the Millennium this lesson — you've always got to be ready to fight for democracy. McEvoy: So it seems that the lesson of D-Day can still be learned even though this type of war, this type of battle, will probably never be fought again? Ambrose: Yes. That's absolutely right. There's never going to be a big war like this one again. There will never be a big war fought with these kind of weapons again. That's right. But is democracy going to be challenged? That's going to happen. It's happening. It's always going to be happening and you've got to be willing to stand up and fight for democracy. I get asked this a lot: Do I think these kids of today could possibly do a D-Day again? Absolutely. These kids are the children of democracy just like their grandparents were in the 1940s. And if democracy is under threat, they're going to go out and defend it. And they will pay whatever price has to be paid because they want to live in a world where they can worship as they please, and work at what they find satisfying, and [speak] their own minds, and vote for whomever they want to vote for, and be free. And they know how critical that is to their lives and they'll fight for it. You're goddamn right they will. McEvoy: You've had many successes in your life, as a writer and a historian. Where do you rank the museum among your accomplishments? Ambrose: First. Absolutely. McEvoy: Because it's more of a legacy? Ambrose: Because it reaches so many more people. I write best-selling books. It used to be I wrote good books, now I write best-selling books. And that's very nice. I'm a teacher and I spent my life teaching. And you reach people when you're a teacher, but the museum reaches a much bigger audience and it teaches a lesson. People are now coming through the museum. And when they're coming out of it they're crying, they're stunned, and it's just a wonderful thing to see. We're expecting, nobody really knows, but more than a million a year. You take that by ten years and then you take that by a century, and you just think about how many people. This is by far the thing I'm most proud of. |
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oday marks the 56th anniversary of D-Day — the Allied penetration
of Hitler's Atlantic Wall, and a battle fought by the citizen soldiers
who come to life in the best-selling histories of Stephen Ambrose. 
