Walking through New Orleans’s National WW II Museum, you could be forgiven for thinking the Axis powers were defeated single-handedly by Uncle Sam. Likewise, the conflict in the Pacific Theatre appears to have been fought solely between the US and Japan. Did any other countries lift a finger to help? You’d have thought, for instance, that the Brits might have picked up a few rifles and fired some shots at the Germans who were threatening to invade them, but apparently not.
I’m over-egging it, of course, but the overwhelming American bias is hard to ignore at this colossal museum, which spans three blocks of the city’s Warehouse District and is ranked by TripAdvisor as the No.1 attraction in New Orleans. The curators make no apologies for presenting World War II through a purely American lens, and the museum itself could be seen as a personification of the American stereotype: big, brash, loud, self-obsessed and over the top. Also, utterly compelling.
I wouldn’t want to say it’s like a war zone in there, but it’s certainly a visceral experience. Theatre seats vibrate, props move across the floor, snow falls from the rafters, and the hellfire of the Luftwaffe appears to explode out of the screen during the “4D” film, Beyond all Boundaries (narrated by who else but Tom Hanks). Inside the US Freedom Pavilion, replica war planes are suspended from the ceiling as if frozen mid-dogfight, with elevated catwalks that give visitors a cloud’s-eye view of the action.
The museum deserves a full day, but if you have just half of that there are a couple of must-see exhibits. “Arsenal of Democracy” addresses why America took so long to enter the war, and includes a moving exhibit on life in the Japanese internment camps, where any American with Japanese ancestry was incarcerated. “Road to Tokyo” takes visitors on a journey through the jungles of Guadalcanal, on to a recreated bridge of the USS Enterprise, culminating in quiet, reverent reflection on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, which marked the war’s end.
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