National Museum of the Pacific War (review)

No matter how gripping an oral history collection is, a flamethrower might overshadow it. But at the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas, the exhibit curators manage to incorporate both.

This six-acre museum complex includes exhibit galleries dedicated to major Pacific battles, an outdoor amphitheater where visitors can watch World War II reenactments, the world's only restored Japanese Rex float plane, and an oral history collection with 4,600 interviews. You might even see somebody meditating in the Japanese Garden of Peace, a gift from the people of Japan, built by Japanese craftsmen in 1976. It includes a replica of General Togo's garden meditation study.

The first question visitors always ask is: Why is the nation's only museum dedicated to the Pacific theater in World War II located in this landlocked town in the Texas Hill Country? Fredericksburg is the hometown of Admiral Chester Nimitz, leader of the Pacific Fleet. Long before the admiral's accomplishments made the Nimitz name famous, the Nimitz Hotel was known for being the last decent hotel until travelers reached El Paso, five hundred miles away.

Proud Fredericksburgers started dreaming of the museum in the 1960s. But Nimitz, a humble man more interested in horseshoes and pistol shooting than self-aggrandizement, did not want a museum. "He thought about it, and finally said, 'You can use my name but make it about the men and women who served,'" according to Brandon Vinyard, the museum's marketing director.

The museum opened in 1967. At first, it was a community museum with handwritten notes describing the exhibit. The museum had a complete overhaul in 2009. Today, it is huge, slick, high-tech, and impressive, the sort of museum that draws people from far away. As the only institution in the US dedicated exclusively to telling the story of the Pacific and Asiatic theaters in World War II, it was very popular with World War II vets, Vinyard said. Now that so many have passed on, the museum welcomes many children and grandchildren of veterans. About 130,000 people visit per year.

Each gallery provides an immersive audiovisual experience. For example, one room displays an enormous replica of the yellow Little Boy bomb, complete with loud plane sound effects and giant black-and-white photos of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, before and after the bomb. Another room is dedicated to the surrender/victory, depending on what side you were on. A huge screen displays Emperor Hirohito's surrender speech, juxtaposed with photos of Americans rejoicing on the home front.

With interview excerpts culled from the museum's enormous oral history collection, eight listening stations are each organized around a single topic: Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Texas in World War II, China-Burma-India, Peleliu, the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and the liberation of the Philippines and Iwo Jima/Okinawa. Visitors can choose from six snippets at each station, with evocative names like "Fighting with Malaria and Jungle Rot," or "We Buried Nearly 1,000 in One Hole." Press a button, and a black-and-white photo of the event or place pops up on the screen; you hear thirty seconds to a few minutes of somebody's oral history interview, complete with subtitles.

Chief archivist Reagan Grau said budgetary and content issues influenced which galleries got an oral history kiosk. Originally, organizers had planned to have ten or eleven. "When costs started getting added up and when we considered what the oral history collection actually contained, we had to cut a few," he told me in an e-mail interview. "For example, the original plan called for including a kiosk in the Japanese American internment gallery. After searching through the few interviews we have of Japanese American civilians that went to internment camps, we realized we did not have enough good content to justify putting a kiosk in that gallery. It was cut." They also decided to combine Iwo Jima and Okinawa, since the galleries are next to each other. "In the end, we settled...