D Day Museum

D-Day Museum Honors World War II Heroes

They came from the blazing steel mills of Pennsylvania, the golden wheat fields of Kansas, the murky bayous of Louisiana, and the sunny beaches of California. They were the men and boys of the Greatest Generation, and they had a job to do. Madmen had taken over the world, and they had to be stopped. These were the soldiers, sailors, and Marines of World War II. Their stories are told at the National D-Day Museum , in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Opened on the anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 2000, the museum is housed in a 70,500 square foot four- story building that dates back to 1856 and once housed the Louisiana Brewery. Located in the growing arts and warehouse district in downtown New Orleans , the museum has become a mecca for World War II veterans, their families, and those who want to learn more about the struggle to wrest the world from the grip of tyranny.

Visitors to the D-Day Museum pass through ten galleries, each with state of the art interactive exhibits that intermix oral histories from veterans with artifacts, documents, and photographs. Each gallery explains a significant step in the pathway the world traveled from the early days when danger loomed over the horizon; through Europe’s darkest hours of Nazi occupation, preparation for the invasion that would begin the battle to free the continent, the daring invasion itself, the aftermath, the long struggle that remained to win victory in Europe, the war in the Pacific, and finally, peace. This is not a museum to walk through quickly and then go on to something else. Touring the D-Day Museum is an emotional experience that will effect everyone who visits.

War Clouds, the museum’s first gallery, recalls that Americans hoped to avoid becoming entangled in a European war, and the events that finally convinced us that we had to get involved. The gallery’s exhibits use graphics and models to show the huge imbalance of power that existed between the United States, Germany, and Japan in the late 1930s. While the latter two had been mobilizing for war for years, the small peacetime American army was greatly outnumbered in terms of men and equipment. By 1939 the Japanese military numbered 4,600,000 men and the Germans had 4,500,000 men in uniform, while the United States had a meager 635,000 men in military service.

Using photographs, newspapers, recruitment posters, oral histories and other artifacts, the America Goes To War gallery explains the mobilization effort required to get ready for war, once it became evident it could not be avoided. Oral histories of war production workers, air raid wardens and other civilians tell of their part to aid the war effort.

The primary task facing America was raising and training a credible military force. Concerned over the threat of war, Congress approved the first peacetime draft in September, 1940. By December of 1941, America’s military had grown to nearly 2.2 million soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen. At its wartime peak, American military forces numbered sixteen million men and women.

America’s armed forces consisted largely of “citizen soldiers” – men and women drawn from civilian life. They came from every corner of America and represented all economic and social classes.

Raising an armed forces was just part of America ’s war effort. All those soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines needed to be supplied with uniforms, weapons, tanks, ships, aircraft and all of the other equipment needed to fight, and they had to be fed and quartered. America had vast human and material resources, enough to supply not only our own military’s needs, but also the needs of our allies; but first the American economy had to be converted to wartime production.

The war production effort brought immense and lasting changes to American society. As millions of men and women entered the military or took jobs in factories, unemployment virtually disappeared. The unending demand for laborers opened doors that had long been closed to women and minorities. Millions of men and women left small towns to take jobs in factories that sprang up in and around cities. Economic output skyrocketed.

During World War II, America's armed forces were segregated by the same Jim Crow laws that pervaded the rest of our society. Ironically, the world’s greatest democracy would battle history’s greatest racist with a segregated military. African Americans who entered the service were assigned to segregated units, most relegated to supply and support jobs, because it was believed that they could not perform well in combat. Protests by civil rights groups and the demands of war eventually led to the use of black troops in combat, where many African Americans distinguished themselves in battle. Yet, with few exceptions, the military remained segregated. Even the blood in Red Cross blood banks was segregated by race.

Preparing For The Invasion, the museum’s third gallery, shows visitors the preparations needed for the D-Day invasion, and the German military’s response to the impending attack. Included here is a replica of a concrete German observation and command post on the Normandy coast. Looking through viewing slots, visitors see a panoramic view of the English Channel and the open beaches that would soon be assaulted.

Most of western Europe had been under Axis control since 1940. Hoping to eliminate the threat of an Allied invasion, Adolph Hitler began building the Atlantic Wall, an unbreakable barrier fortified with enough artillery and manpower to repel any invasion force. Plans called for 15,000 concrete bunkers ranging in size from small pillboxes to great fortresses. 300,000 troops would man these defenses. He recruited the Organization Todt, the elite Nazi construction force to build his defenses. The workforce was made up of over half a million men, many of them prisoners or civilians from German-occupied nations who were used as slave labor.

Even with forced labor, Organization Todt could not keep pace with Hitler’s grandiose construction plans and by January, 1944 the Atlantic Wall consisted of only a few large fortresses in strategic spots and thousands of smaller gun emplacements. Hitler appointed Field Marshal Rommel to take command of the project, and Rommel realized that Hitler’s plan was more dream than reality. He quickly reserved all available labor, including soldiers, to construct additional large batteries.

Rommel believed the place to stop an invasion was at the beach and wanted to place mobile reserve units near likely invasion sites. His superiors disagreed and held most of their reserves further inland, believing they would be needed to strike after an invasion moved inland.

The success of Operation Overlord, the D-Day invasion, depended heavily on preventing the Germans from learning the date and location of the invasion. If they had advance information, the enemy could deploy additional divisions to Normandy in time to stop the Allied assault. A plan was needed that would keep the Germans in the dark about invasion preparations.

The obvious place for an invasion was Calais, located on the narrowest part of the English Channel, only 22 miles from Great Britain. Hitler was convinced that the Allies would attack here, and they did everything they could to encourage his belief by means of an ingenious ruse. Throughout southeastern England they built phony armies, complete with dummy aircraft, ships, and tanks. With the help of American and British motion picture crews, they created entire military bases that looked authentic to German reconnaissance airplanes. All of this gave the impression of an elaborate buildup for an invasion at Calais. The trick worked – Hitler ordered a massive concentration of troops and artillery in the Pas-de-Calais region to repel the invader. In doing so, he left Normandy with fewer defenders and weakened the resistance at the real invasion site.

The sham was maintained right up to the very last minute. One of the most unusual deception operations involved hundreds of dummy paratroopers, known as Ruperts. Early on D-Day morning hundreds of the dummies were dropped east of the invasion zone in Normandy and in the Pas-de-Calais area. The dummies were dressed in paratrooper uniforms, complete with boots and helmets, to create the illusion of a large airborne assault. To further the illusion, recordings of gunfire and exploding artillery rounds were played from airborne speakers. Code named Titanic, the operation distracted and confused German forces while the main airborne forces landed further west.

Even as the real assault force set out for Normandy, a smaller diversionary force of airplanes and ships set out across the English Channel for Calais, distracting the Germans from the real target, the beaches of Normandy.

The fourth gallery, Air And Sea Assault, tells the story of the massive armada, 5,333 ships and landing craft, that would carry 175,000 troops across the 100 miles of the churning English Channel to assault Hitler’s Atlantic Wall at Normandy. Eleven thousand fighter planes, bombers, and gliders led the way, softening German defenses, dropping paratroopers behind enemy lines, and landing glider troops at key targets on the eastern and western flanks of the invasion.

The drone of engines from hundreds of fighter planes greets visitors as they enter a room-sized diorama of the huge air and sea operation that carried the invasion forward. Bombers softened targets while C-47 transport planes towed gliders filled with troops and equipment. Constructed of canvas and plywood, the gliders were aptly named flying coffins. Glider landings in the early morning hours of invasion day were extremely dangerous, and many broke into pieces when they crashed into hedgerows and walls. Many soldiers were killed or seriously injured in glider crashes before they ever had the opportunity to see combat. Some of the dead, including one general, were crushed by jeeps and other equipment in the crash landings.

All of this preparation, training, and danger led up to one event on a scale the world had never seen before – the assaults on the beaches of Normandy. D-Day: The Beaches is the high point of the museum’s galleries, putting human faces on one of the most momentous days in history. Here artifacts include a pocket Bible carried into combat, a watch worn on that fateful day, and a helmet that saved a soldier’s life by stopping a bullet.

It is impossible to listen to the oral histories of the men who participated in the invasion and not realize that each and every one was a true hero. You will hear men tell of watching their friends die around them and still slogging forward through the surf to reach the beach, knowing that at any second a sniper’s bullet or piece of shrapnel might cut them down. Still they moved forward and took the beaches, then moved inland.

Establishing a beachhead in Normandy was only the beginning of a long, hard road to victory. The Victory In Europe gallery recalls the tough struggle to defeat the enemy. Exhibits and oral histories tell of the fighting in the hedgerow country just off the beaches, some of the worst in the war. The joy of liberating Paris soon turned into the long terrible nightmare of the Bulge. Spring finally arrived and brought the crossing of the Rhine and the final thrust into Germany. An exhibit titled The Cost Of Victory allows visitors to ponder the terrible loses suffered by all sides in history’s most terrible global conflict.

The D-Day Remembered gallery is a 110 seat theater, where the movie D-Day Remembered combines film footage and photographs from American, British, and German archives with the voices of the people who took part in the planning and execution of the invasion to create a stunning and unforgettable portrait of the invasion, code named Operation Overlord.

Europe may have been freed, but there was still a long war to be waged against Japan. The D-Day Invasions In The Pacific gallery is dedicated to the many D-Days that took place in the Pacific Theater of Operations. This 5,000 square foot gallery includes photographs, videos, artifacts, maps, quotes, newspaper headlines, interactive displays, and oral histories. Starting with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the war in the Pacific is remembered, through the island hopping campaigns, the liberation of the Philippines, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and finally Japan’s surrender aboard the USS Missouri.

The 22,500 square foot Louisiana Memorial Pavilion is named in honor of all Louisiana veterans and citizens on the home front during World War II. The Pavilion serves as the museum’s formal entrance and displays a reproduction of a Landing Craft Vehicle Personnel (LCVP), the famous Higgins boat made right here in New Orleans and credited with being invaluable in helping to win the war. Other military equipment in this display includes Spitfire and Avenger airplanes, a Sherman tank, German staff cars, and a US Army halftrack.

General Eisenhower credited the Higgins boat with helping to win the war. Designed by Andrew Higgins, who operated a small boatyard before the war began, the shallow-draft boats were capable of shuttling men and equipment quickly and safely from ships to the beachhead. Without the Higgins boat, amphibious assaults would have been nearly impossible. Building Higgins boats became a major industry in New Orleans and it has been said that every street in the city was home to someone who worked in the boatyards or in support positions.

The final gallery is titled Artifacts, and was made possible by a generous donation by McDermott, Inc. to purchase an outstanding collection of artifacts from D-Day and subsequent campaigns from a French museum. Made up of some 3,500 items, the collection includes some of the most important artifacts from World War II found anywhere in the world.

By the time you finish your tour of the D-Day Museum, you will have a new-found understanding of the events that led up to and culminated in the D-Day invasion, and respect for the extraordinary bravery of the men who set personal fears aside to take on a job that had to be done.

The National D-Day Museum is located at 945 Magazine Street in New Orleans. Parking is very limited in this area for large vehicles. The pay parking lot next to the museum can accommodate passenger cars and pickup trucks, but a medium duty truck might have a problem finding a parking place, and RVs would be out of the question. Visitors will need to park in an RV park outside of the metro area and drive their tow vehicle or dingy to the museum.

The museum is open seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., except Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Mardi Gras. The museum is fully accessible to all visitors. Wheelchairs are provided for use in the museum.