Museum exhibit looks at fight on home front
A rusted fragment of the battleship USS Arizona sunk at Pearl Harbor, a woman’s munitions plant uniform and ration books all tell the complex story of life on the home front in a new exhibit at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.
“Salute to the Home Front,” which opens Saturday, explores the bitter fight about entering the war, racial and gender prejudice, and the development of the atomic bomb.
Museum President and CEO Nick Mueller said most of the museum’s 6-acre campus shows how the war was won on the battlefield but the new permanent exhibit explains “why it was fought and how it was won on the home front.”
The 10,000-square-foot exhibit begins with the years after World War I. The peace treaty that ended the war in 1918 was “punitive and did not really solve the social and cultural ills” that led to the war, according Owen Glendening, the museum’s associate vice president for education and access.
“With democracy and capitalism under question, the rise of authoritarian regimes really shook the world,” he said.
Among the artifacts are British gas masks for children — one that might fit a 5-year-old and a much bigger one designed to hold an infant from head to waist. Gas had been a major weapon of World War I, and people feared that gas bombs might be dropped in civilian areas.
“Fortunately, it never happened, but the population was scared stiff,” Glendenning said.
Headlines and newsreels show the strident debate between U.S. isolationists and internationalists, which ended when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
Survivors’ accounts of that attack are among more than 50 videotaped oral histories interspersed throughout the exhibit.
“The signature of this museum is to engage people in personal stories . ... We hear from survivors of Pearl Harbor, people on Main Street USA . ... We hear first-hand stories about people who went into factories or into the service to fight,” Mueller said.