July 29, 2013 4:00pm by David Farrar

The National WWII Museum

New Orleans is also home to the National WWII Museum. It’s a huge complex, and takes a good three hours to get around. Around a 25 minute walk from the French quarter.

Highlights were an 11 minute reconstruction of the last hours of the USS Tang – the most successful sub.marine of WWII. You go on board the replica sub, and man specific stations, and are assigned the name of a specific officer. You then learn at the end who survived or not.

Also very good was the section on Eisenhower’s decision on whether to proceed with D Day, or delay it for two weeks. The course of the war depended on that decision, and it was his alone.

This isn’t the WWII Museum, but is just around the corner, and also an interesting visit. No photos allowed, sadly.

Photos not best quality due to the glass. I found this display interesting. We probably take for granted to a degree, the eventual victory of the Allies. But look at the relative military expenditures in 1939. Deciding to go into battle against Germany was a heroic decision.

This shows the relative military strengths of Japan, Germany and the US around 1941. Again, the result of WWII could have been very different if different decisions were taken. If Hitler had been saner, for one.

The section on D Day and the landings at Omaha Beach were gruesome. While D Day was a huge victory strategically, there was some awful scenes as soldiers were just mowed down as they landed.

However also a terrifying experience for the Germans. Some of them are quoted as saying that seeing thousands of ships coming towards you was a sight that was beyond belief – they could not imagine an armada of that size.

One of my favourite photos.

There were five Sullivan brothers, and they all died in WWII. Normally siblings were separated but they insisted on serving together. Sadly this resulted in them all dying when their ship was sunk, or in the ocean afterwards. Two destroyers have been named after them, in memory of their sacrifice. They enlisted after their sister’s fiancee was killed in Pearl Harbour.

This is the note from President Truman authorizing the use of nuclear weapons. That decision was controversial for some, but the cost of invading the Japanese home islands would have been enormous. Operation Downfall would have been more than twice as big as Operation Overlord and just invading the island of Kyūshū was predicted to result in a million or so Allied deaths and many time more Japanese deaths.

Operation Olympic, for the Kyūshū invasion, would have involved 42 carriers, 24 battleships and around 400 destroyers.