A (Blustery) Day at the Museum

So, There I was......* A blustery** Winter Friday in the Hill Country of Texas, the day before a Winter Storm is set to drop freezing rain and Ice and I'm Free!  No Work, no School, no Company and Mrs Juvat has relieved me from Honey-Do taskings.  Free at Last!  

What's the Plan of the Day?  I've been meaning to visit the National Museum of the Pacific War for quite a while.  I'd visited it when we'd first moved to the area, but they had completed a massive renovation and I hadn't been back.  Today was the day.

This is not the Main Entrance, but at 33 degrees and 25K+ Winds, I was going the shortest distance possible. Right center distant is the Fairweather of a Submarine, and the foreground center left is a stylized bow "surfacing" through foliage.  During the spring it really does look like sea water.
To our copyright troll: Bite Me! They're all my photos.

Ponied up my $10 admittance fee ($4 off for veterans) which gains me access to all three parts of the Museum.  This one, the Nimitz Museum, which was his families hotel and details his career and local history, and the Pacific Combat Zone where they hold live re-enactments and seminars.  Today I was content with being inside.

The first section of the museum dealt with the historical situations that led up to the start of the war, and while I was stationed in or focused at the Pacific for most of my career, I still learned a few things. WWII in the Pacific was inevitable long before December 7, 1941 or even 1937.  The Museum did an excellent job in explaining that.

One of the aspects of the exhibits that makes this Museum somewhat unique is their focus on ordinary individuals.  To be sure, it is called the Nimitz museum and there are the requisite exhibits about the stars, but since the Museum came into operation, they've had an on-going outreach program to WWII veterans.  If a veteran came into the Museum, first they didn't pay anything (they'd paid that long before).  Second, a historian would come and interview him about their experiences, where they had been, with what unit(s), what time frame, that kind of data.  Once they had gotten that data, the historian would start asking him about his stories and recorded them.  So, in every section of the Museum, there would be a station with pictures and push buttons that when pushed would have an actual participant's description of what they were doing at that point in time.  Given the relentless nature of time, most of these vignettes were from very low ranking officers and enlisted.  That, to me, made them even more impressive.

This one was in the section for Midway

I've managed to make it through the pre-war exhibits and the doors open into Pearl Harbor.  The room is extra dark to simulate pre-dawn and underwater.

They don't allow flash photography and I'm still figuring out my phone.  This is one of the Japanese Mini-Subs from the attack

I had seen one of these at the Arizona Memorial, but this one seemed more real.  It was pretty cool. Proceed further into this exhibit and got another example of how this Museum is different than most War Museums I've visited.

The top picture is the young Sailor's Posthumous Purple Heart and the Telegram is the notification to his parents.  The Ensign had been commissioned the previous summer and was on his first assignment.  Both were on Arizona.

Hatch from USS Arizona

When you visit the Arizona Memorial you know all those names on the wall at the Memorial were real people.  However, this exhibit somehow made the losses much more real to me.

Pressing through the to the next exhibit room, I turn a corner and I'm nose to wingtip with one of my favorite stories from the war.

The room is made up to be the deck of the Hornet, and the B-25 is quite literally right in your face.  Playing on screens is the familiar footage of the mission. But, again, they added a personal touch. Yamamoto's uniform. 

I've always been conflicted in thinking about the Raid and Yamamoto. Was the limited damage worth the risk to Carrier Forces?  Yamamoto was a brilliant tactician and strategist, almost clairvoyant in predicting outcome and timetable.  Followed his orders even knowing he'd ultimately fail. I did not realize that he'd tried to resign after the Doolittle Raid for failing to protect the Homeland.  That made me realize that perhaps the Raid was a proper use of military assets after all.

Next stop was the Midway exhibit.  Again, monitors playing the familiar films from the battle.  A lot of hardware to look at to include:

But the exhibit that caught my eye was this one.

This was the gear, Ensign George Gay was wearing when he and the rest of Torpedo 8 were shot down at the start of Admiral Nagumo's "Hero to Zero" Moment on 4 June 1942.  Ensign Gay was the sole survivor being picked up by a PBY a couple of days after the battle ended.

Around the corner were Guadalcanal and Buna exhibits.  Knew quite a bit about Guadalcanal, so I spent more time on the Buna part.  Below is a picture of a M-3 Stuart tank.  I was positive I took a picture from the front also, but ...

Directly above the main gun, you can see a TV Monitor, on it is an older Australian Gentleman detailing his experiences in Buna while riding in THIS tank.  Essentially, he came head to head with one of these 3 inch cannons.

You can see the damage just below the main gun on the right side of the tank.  To hear him talk about the incident was, well there seemed to be a bit of dust in the air around me.

I came upon another part of the exhibit and immediately thought of Old NFO for some reason

The Tarawa exhibit was next.  This next exhibit demonstrated an old saw that I've always stood by "I'd rather be lucky than good"

They guy in the picture is landing on Red Beach One on Tarawa and takes a machine gun round through his helmet (next to the photo).  All he gets is a scratch.  Someone yells at him to put his helmet on, he does and keeps it on for the rest of the battle.  The photo is post war, so lucky is better.  The gun but behind the helmet is a BAR.  I took a picture of that for Murph, but...still trying to figure out the camera thing.

So, I got a picture of these instead

Took this picture again for Old NFO, then stepped forward to look at it closer.  You definitely want to enlarge it.  It's signed by the three surviving Marines in Rosenthal's picture. Ira Hayes, John Bradley and Rene Gagnon.

I then came upon this letter (which you may have to blow up to read). It's the Captain of the USS Minneapolis reading the riot act to his crew.  Here is the wikipedia description of their record under his command, so I guess it must have worked

There was one other exhibit that interested in and that was the immediate post war activities.  

According to the graphic on the day the Bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan had 5.6 million troops deployed in the Pacific.  The Allies couldn't leave them in place, so they had to bring them home.  Regrettably, I had been in the Museum almost 5 hours and they were closing.  I guess I've got to go back.


*SJC (So much Easier!)
**Yesterday's High was 34.2 Today it's 63.  Gotta love Texas, but not its weather.