Welcome to my post about the National World War II Museum in New Orleans! All the pictures are taken and edited by me and this will be an an ongoing series for anyone that wants to follow it...Enjoy!
My father and I took in the sights in The Big Easy over the weekend. Went to see the Saints play the Patriots (for all you NFL fans, that will be my next post in this series). We also took a riverboat cruise and toured the French Quarter and a Bourbon St. Jazz club.
This museum was the biggest surprise of the trip! Four huge buildings of airplanes, boats, uniforms, videos and so much more. My dad and I were in awe at the exhibits. You start out on a train seeing a video about all the boys going to bootcamp. Tour through a home from that era and see what it was like back in the late 30's and 40's, along with the lead up to the war.
You walk across the platform to the second building where the top floor is a timeline tour for the Battle for the Pacific. It begins with the day that'll live in infamy, moves through to the Battle for Guadalcanal. From there it follows Douglas MacArthur and his campaign of island hopping until they the Battle of Midway. It all culminates after taking Okinawa and inevitably the Americans dropping the Atomic Bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
The bottom floor of the second building brings you onto the other front of the war. Battling the Third Reich, Mussolini and the USSR. It was also a walkthrough timeline with some of the most interesting weapons I had ever seen. Learned a lot about the way the war unfolded with Adolf Hitler double crossing the Stalin and the Gothic Line during the invasion of Italy.
The third and final building for our tour (because we spent 4 hours already and they closed before we could go see the boats in the last building... but we saw them through the window when we left). I don't know how in the world they got that B24 Bomber in that building or if they built that building around it but woah was that thing huge! It was the same type of plane that Louie Zamperini, the olympic runner that got shot down in the Pacific and spent years as a POW in Japan.
