D-Day Museum

Today we went to the D-Day Museum which is about eight blocks from the hotel. The museum was really impressive. The brochures recommend allowing at least two hours to see the museum. We spent over four hours. We had nothing else definite planned for today, so we did not hurry through any part of it.

When we arrived, a couple of school groups were just arriving. One of the volunteers recommended we wait a little bit before starting to go through the main exhibits. While we waited we chatted with a couple of WWII vets who were hanging out in the main entry hall. When you enter the museum, there is a large open area where a Higgins Boat reproduction, aircraft, an M4 Sherman tank, and other weapons used during the Normandy landings are on display. The best part was the two old vets. They were a joy to chat with. I believe they were there to talk to anyone who came through and to the school kids.

The museum also had a couple themed displays. One was about baseball during the war and contained a lot of memorabilia and pictures of baseball players who joined up as well as baseball teams at US military facilities all over the world. The other display was of a number of pictures that were taken inside an American POW camp in Germany. One of the Americans managed to bribe a guard to get a camera. The pictures he took are the only known pictures from inside a camp. These pictures were especially meaningful to Mary as her father was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge and spent the rest of the war as a POW.

By the time we finished those exhibits, the school kids had returned to the main hall, and we headed on in to the main exhibits. The exhibits were arranged so you would walk through sections that dealt with different time periods leading up to and during the war. The first part detailed the events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, then the changes that occurred on the home front when the war started, and so on. It is all set up in chronological order, but the two main theaters were presented separately with the European theater first starting with the preparations for the Normandy landing and on through to the German surrender. Then the Pacific theater was described starting with the Japanese expansion in the Pacific, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Pacific campaign through to the Japanese surrender. Besides all the items on display, there are a number of places where you can select to hear a short narrative of remembrances by the people who participated in the particular operations that are described. As you may know, one of the big efforts by the museum is to collect oral histories from the surviving veterans. It was really great to be able to hear them describe their personal experiences.

The bottom line on the museum was that it was well worth the time spent to visit it. It is one of those things that everyone who has a chance should do. We learned a lot of new information about the war, saw exhibits of things we had never seen before and gained an even greater appreciation for the sacrifices made by our parents' generation during that terrible conflict.

As I said, we spent over four hours in the museum, so by the time we left there it was about 2:00 PM. We walked down to the river front and caught the street car there back to the far end of the French Quarter. There were a couple of stores we wanted to revisit and T-Shirts to be bought. We decided to have a late lunch / early dinner down there at a restaurant called River's Edge. We had our last bit of Creole food and last bread pudding desert. Then we decided to walk back to the hotel meandering about in the Quarter. As we left the restaurant, I said I thought we had done our part to aid the economic recovery of New Orleans! I told all the store keepers that I came along to carry the back pack and the credit card. We managed to pack a lot into that back pack today.

On our round about way back to the hotel, we happened upon the Immaculate Conception church which is a Jesuit parish. It was closed up for the day by then, but we did happen to meet the parish priest who encouraged to come back in the morning. We took a number of pictures of the front the church including the massive bronze doors. The church has a very interesting history, and we may revisit it in the morning depending on how our time goes.

Now we are all packed up and ready to hit the road again. We have our reservation for Natchitoches for tomorrow and Thursday night. It is only about a 5 hour drive up there, so we will try to see some parts of Louisiana we have never visited before on the way.