National D-Day Museum

By Angela Wibking

At the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, history is as individual as a bullet hole in a worn helmet and as personal as a soldier’s letter home to the sweetheart he would never live to make a bride. This monument to one of the greatest events of the 20^th century has thousands of stories to tell and it treats each one personally.

"Usually in museums you see a whole wall of rifles and hundreds of artifacts on display without much explanation," says noted historian and author Stephen Ambrose, who is also the founder of the National D-Day Museum. "In this museum each artifact has its own biography."

The $21 million museum, which opened June 6 on the 56^th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy by the Allies in World War II, is housed in a 70,000-square-foot pre-Civil War building in the heart of New Orleans’ revitalized Warehouse Arts District.

It traces the history of D-Day and America’s role in World War II through a chronological sequence of exhibits spread over three levels of the completely restored and renovated building.

Visitors enter through the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion, a dramatic glass-fronted structure that soars four open stories high inside and houses vintage aircraft, tanks and a reproduction of the boats used by troops to storm the beaches at Normandy and around the world during the war. Called Higgins Boats, these amphibious landing craft are the reason the museum is located in New Orleans. Andrew Jackson Higgins, a New Orleans native, designed the boats and also manufactured them in New Orleans.

Back in 1964, no less an authority than Eisenhower himself told Ambrose that Higgins was "the man who won the war" because his boats made the D-Day landing possible.

Those words stuck in Ambrose’s mind for decades and inspired him to establish the museum in New Orleans. "I had been thinking ever since I left Eisenhower’s office that we’ve got to do something in New Orleans," recalls Ambrose. "Then I started getting artifacts from veterans I’d been interviewing (for Ambrose’s books on World War II) and I thought, there’s got to be a museum for these. By the mid-1980s, I decided we were going to have to build it."

Raising the money for the museum, however, was no easy task. "The most surprising thing to me about this whole museum process was that I learned modern corporate America has no interest in the past," Ambrose says bluntly. "I called on CEOs at Ford Motor Company, which built B-24s in the war, and McDonald-Douglas, which built DC3s. They all said ‘this is a great idea’ -- then they told me to go see someone else." Ambrose did just that and secured funding through a variety of means, including private donations, corporate contributions and federal and state money. "I’m delighted at the number of individuals who have contributed to the museum but it sure took a lot longer," he says wryly.

Visitors will see evidence of some of those individual contributions as they walk through the museum’s Hall of Heroes. The hall is lined with 7,500 bricks, each bearing a name of someone who served abroad or on the homefront during the war. Individuals purchased the commemorative bricks for $100 each in honor of a loved one. Some 4,500 more memorial bricks are installed near the entrance to the pavilion. The money raised by the brick campaign is just one of many examples of private donations to the museum. Major private contributions also came from director Steven Spielberg and actor Tom Hanks, whose film Saving Private Ryan presents a gripping account of D-Day and its aftermath. Both Spielberg and Hanks were on hand for the grand opening of the museum in June. Ambrose himself and Tim Forbes also made substantial financial contributions to the project. A hefty corporate contribution from McDermott, Inc., enabled the museum to purchase an important collection of D-Day artifacts from a French museum.

The museum itself is divided into four interactive galleries that profile America’s role in the war. In the first exhibit, hundreds of model soldiers, aircraft and warships square off against each other in a very lopsided encounter. It is clear the odds are stacked overwhelmingly in favor of one side. The surprisingly thing is that the winning side is not America – it is Germany and Japan. Prior to the war, the exhibit shows, America ranked 18^th in the world in terms of military strength – right behind the tiny east European country of Rumania.

America’s transformation from a military mite to a military might is illustrated through photographs, newspapers, recruitment posters, letters and personal mementos in exhibits devoted to the drafting, training and outfitting of an American fighting force. At the first of nine oral history stations spread throughout the museum, visitors can press a button for videotaped accounts from Americans who worked in wartime factories, served as air raid wardens or otherwise participated in the war effort at home.

Ambrose was in the second grade when the war began but he still recalls his own involvement in the war effort. "I did the same things everyone did – collected tin foil, grew a Victory Garden. My father served in the Pacific and my mother worked in a wartime factory. I felt a part of the war as did everybody else," he says.

After visitors learn of America’s mobilization efforts, they enter a gallery that details the preparations for D-Day itself – or Operation Overlord as it was officially called. To understand the magnitude of the challenge facing the Allies in the invasion of Normandy, visitors can climb inside the recreation of a concrete German observation/command post exactly like the ones that lined the French coast and created what was known as The Atlantic Wall. Peering through the viewing slots of the command post, one sees a panoramic view of the English Channel – and the exposed beaches upon which the Allied troops would have to land. As part of this exhibit, too, visitors can pick up and try on various pieces of equipment to get a feel for the gear a regular soldier would have carried with him into battle on D-Day.

The complex details of the air and sea elements of the invasion are illustrated in a room-sized diorama. Eleven thousand fighter planes, bombers and gliders led the invasion, dropping paratroopers behind enemy lines and sending glider troops to attack key targets on the eastern and western flanks of the invasion. By sea, the largest armada in history (5,333 ships and landing craft) made its way across 100 miles of the turbulent English Channel carrying 175,000 troops ready to knock down Hitler’s Atlantic Wall.

The climax of the museum is the Beaches Gallery, which highlights the individual experiences and sacrifices of the D-Day troops at Normandy. Here visitors can learn of soldiers like Leo Scheer, whose landing craft was sunk by enemy fire at Omaha Beach, forcing the Navy corpsman to swim ashore. In the process the bandages Sheer carried on his G.I. web belt were ruined and he had to scramble to collect replacements off the bodies of his fallen comrades so he could move on to treat the surviving wounded. Over 50 years later, Scheer says he can still see the face of every G.I. he took bandages from that day. It is personal anecdotes like these and artifacts like Scheer’s tattered web belt that have an almost overwhelming emotional impact on museum visitors. They also have a way of initiating a long overdue dialogue among the generations.

"The sight that pleases me most at the museum is seeing a grandfather point out something to his grandson and say, ‘that’s what I did in the war,’" says Ambrose, himself a father of five children. "Vets tell me now they can talk to their children and grandchildren for the first time about the war. Before they felt they couldn’t because the generation born after the war and their children grew up opposed to war. They really had zero interest in heroics and sacrifice and, in fact, there was a feeling that if you made a sacrifice in war you were a fool because there was always a way of getting out of serving. That’s changed 180 degrees and young people today want to know about the war and the people who fought it."

As an author who has chronicled so many military conflicts in his long distinguished career, Ambrose abides by one rule. "Never try to write about a battle until you have walked the ground," he says. "I first went to Normandy 20 years ago and I’ve been back every year since. My reaction is always the same – how did they do it?"

The National D-Day Museum also asks visitors to ponder that question – and the more important question of why they did it. "We had a saying during the war -- ‘we’re all in this together,’" says Ambrose simply. There may be no better explanation than that for why the men and women of World War II sacrificed so much for their country and the world. And there may be no better phrase for Americans to embrace today. To walk through the National D-Day Museum is to understand that we are still in this together.

The National D-Day Museum is at 945 Magazine St. Hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily except Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day and Mardi Gras Day. Admission is $7 adults, $6 seniors and $5 students. Museum admission includes viewing of D-Day Remembered,  the Oscar-nominated documentary, which screens continuously in the museum’s theater. The museum also houses a gift shop and a café. For more information, call 504-527-6012 or visit the web site at www.ddaymuseum.org.