New Orleans’s National WWII Museum Is a Tutorial on Gratitude

The museum shows and teaches much about courage, sacrifice, and American ingenuity, but it also covers equivocation, bluster, and naïveté.

T he National WWII Museum in New Orleans tells the story of the American experience in the war that made our world today but, strange to say, isn’t much dissected or weighed in history classes, at least as young people learn history. The Second World War is the stuff of buffs, lovers of military history, students of the Holocaust, and geezers — or, now, the children of geezers, and we ourselves are the geezers. The museum is New Orleans’s biggest cultural attraction, it says, though that’s in measurable numbers. Mardi Gras and jazz define the city’s cultural draw and impact, but that’s hard to quantify. Still, the museum is big and well done. I sometimes write about history museums, and this one’s always timely.

In interpreting the Second World War, the museum emphasizes dedication to freedom, courage, optimism, teamwork, determination, sacrifice, volunteerism, and generosity. These themes are invisible and irrelevant in the vengeful, twisted woke history that’s pushed in our schools, faddish among our scholars in colleges and universities, and popular among many journalists. So, the museum is a tonic. It’s fact-based but also driven by constant, universal human values. The war was like no other, more violent, toxic, pervasive, consequential, and, of course, avoidable, and it’s still alive. It’s not the Crusades, the Napoleonic Wars, or the Civil War but the stuff of today’s world. It made the way we live now, so it’s essential now, not boutique history or snippet history for little minds.

The entrance atrium feels industrial, as it should since we learn that war, and this particular war, are the stuff of strategy, courage, and sacrifice but also technology. A big German Flak 37 88-mm dual-purpose gun is suitably scary. Bombers hang overhead. “In the Mood” plays in the background. A big screen shows women working in munitions factories. The famous “Rosie the Riveter” poster hangs nearby.

There’s a faux-train gimmick I don’t like. Visitors leave the atrium and enter the museum through a fake train car where you briefly sit, hear chug-chug, and get card-key access to the story of one serviceman or -woman whose story we can follow in special stations as we move through the museum. I think there’s a narrow selection of stories, and I wanted someone from Vermont, but I got a Pima Native American from Tucson who joined the Marines. Fine, I thought, but as I moved through the museum, I forgot about him since the audio wands at the various special stations were dismantled because of COVID, and, anyway, the displays on the war’s slow simmer in the 1930s are too engrossing. I’d ditch this component.

The graphics, a mix of text, image, and some audio and video, are well done. No one except a dope wakes up and thinks, “Oh, we’re at war.” A small space considers the end of World War I, but the museum’s story starts in the 1930s with stealthy and altogether obvious dangers. There’s the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Hitler’s election as chancellor, the Rhineland remilitarization, and the “merchants of death” Senate hearings in Washington in 1935, revealing fake atrocity propaganda in 1916 and 1917 and the connivance of munitions makers, banks, and the war party in Woodrow Wilson’s circle. These hearings helped harden America’s natural isolationism and know-nothingism.

Bit by bit, Franklin Roosevelt chipped away as he saw America’s entry into the war as inevitable. There’s the start of the U.S. defense buildup, the extraordinary introduction of a peacetime draft in 1940, Roosevelt’s reelection, the oil embargo and asset freeze aimed at Japan, the “Four Freedoms” and “Arsenal of Democracy” speeches, and Lend-Lease. The Munich appeasement affair in 1938 isn’t a factor, though Kristallnacht is, as far as Americans were concerned.

American isolationists are tinged with anti-Semitism. Wall graphics show the results of Gallup surveys in 1939, when war seemed unthinkable and most repugnant, to summer 1941, when Gallup reported that 67 percent of American adults wanted war against Japan and wanted it now. Roosevelt was nothing if not a master manipulator. He understood the essential need for a case to be built, and build it he did.

In the museum display, December 7, 1941, seems anti-climactic. Roosevelt moved the Pacific fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor to project American power and to intimidate the Japanese, but this left the Navy one big sitting duck.

The next section is uneven. There are two galleries, each devoted to American home life during the war: One is a kitchen from 1942 that looks like mine in 2021 — save for my Nespresso and fancy dishwasher — and a living room that looks like my grandparents’, which means not much is happening. There’s an excellent, and large, gallery on the unprecedented, awesome American military buildup in 1942 and 1943. Visitors are introduced to a range of figures, not just the heads of state, but generals and admirals and the dollar-a-year men who left corporate corner suites for government service.

An entire pavilion is dedicated to the American war in Europe and in the Pacific. The war liberating Europe begins in North Africa, thought to be a good testing ground for inexperienced American troops, but also the place where the Germans were most extended and their coastal defenses weakest. I think the museum is at its best in treating in engrossing detail the Kasserine Pass debacle and the invasion of Sicily, neither well known to Americans but both vignettes on how military disasters happen and the cost and difficulty of beating an entrenched enemy. Sicily, Anzio, Normandy, and the Ardennes Forest weren’t places on a map, they were fortresses the Germans spent years developing and strengthening.

Here, there’s a good emphasis on light equipment such as the Jeep that made the slog possible, as well as on individual heroes, many of them Medal of Honor winners. Good lighting and, for the Battle of the Bulge, a simulated, snow-covered forest also help create a “You are there” feel. Additionally, the galleries on the Pacific War make sense of the abundance of island sieges.

The 45-minute introductory film is essential. It’s well done and delivers key context. The theater is big-city comfortable. Tom Hanks narrates. He’s become a pious Hollywood bore, but after a few minutes I forgot he was speaking. The film starts with the master-race theories which propelled the Germans and the Japanese starting in the 1930s and justified, to them, the war’s appalling violence. Both believed Americans were sybaritic and wouldn’t fight. Special effects such as shaking seats made on-screen air raids seem not only real but persuasive.

Clips showing a billboard reading “The Man Who Relaxes Is Helping the Axis” and narrations from Ernie Pyle’s battle-scene reporting enrich the story, but a few specific moments stayed with me. One soldier wrote, “At the end, there won’t be winners and losers but the living and the dead.” Another reflects on the Japanese suicide bombers on Saipan. “How far will we have to go?” he asks, about the land invasion of Japan everyone thought was inevitable. There’s the “currency of grief,” the Western Union telegram sent to parents or wives, the Battle of the Bulge stall in the American offensive, and the 250,000 body bags bought by the Army as we prepared to move toward Japan. “First minute, I was afraid I’d die,” one soldier said, “next minute, I wished I would.” Another wrote, “No one can go to war and come back normal.” Morale began to sag.

Having failed to break Japan’s war bureaucracy, the firebombing of Japanese cities, as devastating as they were, left a single Ace before a mass land, sea, and air invasion. The film establishes an intellectual and emotional case for the August atom-bomb attacks. These attacks, along with the discovery of the death camps in Germany and Poland, are, together, the denouement of the museum’s story. They’re also effective in informing and chastening visitors. The museum is educational and puts us in a place where we can go to the galleries and absorb specifics.

I can’t say I love the building complex, but it’s good enough. Voorsanger Architects in New York designed the entire complex except for the very first building, so at least it has a united aesthetic vision and a functional logic. That’s great. What can I say? It’s a set of bland glass and metal boxes that, here and there, evoke a battleship and a plane. There’s no grand entrance, though an atrium leading to the very nice theater and another atrium leading to the museum are vast and welcoming. The outdoor sculpture is middlebrow and uninspiring. I’d send it to the smelter and start over.

It’s not a traditional museum. It’s got a collection of artifacts, an important oral-history mission, and enough military hardware to knock off a modest Caribbean despotism. As much as I enjoyed my visit and recommend it, though, I couldn’t stop seeing it as a touristy operation with a very strong marketing function. The late historian Stephen Ambrose, who taught at the University of New Orleans, initially promoted the idea of a comprehensive museum on World War II that would expand the D-Day Museum already in New Orleans. It became a mostly local initiative funded by Louisiana donors and using Ambrose’s connections made from writing about the war and advising Hollywood moviemakers. Tom Hanks and Tom Brokaw added star appeal to the museum’s promotion then and now.

The museum has a national profile and, judging from its annual report, donors everywhere. Congress decreed it the country’s official World War II museum. It also collaborates with the Smithsonian. Still, it’s very much of New Orleans. Higgins Industries in New Orleans produced the ubiquitous amphibious landing craft used during many World War II invasions but made famous on D-Day. It also made PT boats and lifeboats. Andrew Higgins, the founder, came to New Orleans from landlocked Nebraska and had a small business making shallow-draft swamp boats. Right place, right time, right man, and Higgins transitioned to landing craft, moving from 50 to 20,000 workers and operating a racially integrated force. During the war, his company produced thousands of boats. Higgins and his business have a place of pride in the entrance atrium. His company and boats anchored, so to speak, the D-Day Museum that the National WWII Museum springs from.

I don’t think I picked the best time to visit the museum, but that only means I need to see it again. The COVID crisis hobbled it last year — which marked the 75th anniversary of the Japanese and German surrender and its own 20th anniversary — including the premiere of a focused exhibition on the Eichmann trial. The museum closed for nearly three months and went virtual the best it could. The year before, about 800,000 people visited. I think some serious scholarship comes from the museum, but it seems strongly oriented toward tourists. A big part of its financial plan depends on income from a new hotel next to it, plus conferences, events, and sales of merchandise.

I’m not sure how the museum is strategizing for a generational shift. The ranks of the World War II generation are thinning quickly. Post-1970 types have an entirely different view of the American military and, of course, in the last few years and months the military, once among America’s most respected institutions, seems to have gone, at least at the top, political, careerist, and soft. American history is taught in most schools in a spirit of spite, preening ignorance, and gross negligence. Over time, these things have to affect the museum’s audience.

It’s nearing the end of a $400 million capital campaign, a huge deal for New Orleans, and a chunk of the campus is a construction site. This is by no means a distraction to visitors, but the addition, set to open in 2023, will vastly enrich the museum’s story. It’s a new wing called the Liberation Pavilion, which will focus on the Holocaust, the end of the war in 1945, the immediate and chaotic post-war years, and the tips of the war’s tentacles reaching us today. Now, interpretation is intense and detailed of issues leading to the unconditional surrenders in 1945. These big issues are treated well, but I think there’s a sense of anticipation building. “I want to know more” and “I can’t wait to come back” aren’t bad feelings to take from a museum visit.

The Holocaust, the Potsdam Conference, and the birth of the Iron Curtain are immense and complex concepts, events, and issues making, I should think, the 1619 Project’s quibbles the realm of grudge addicts and outrage pimps.

True to its mission, the museum shows and teaches much about courage, sacrifice, and American ingenuity, but it also covers equivocation, bluster, and naïveté. The war pushed humanity to the edge. Smarts and luck saved us. A visit to the museum is, more than anything, a tutorial on gratitude.