On April 9th, National Former POW Recognition Day, we remember the American men and women held captive during war. Over 120,000 Americans were held as POWs during WWII. 12,228 died in captivity. National Former POW Recognition Day, as designated by Congress, falls on the anniversary of the United States’ surrender on the Bataan Peninsula, beginning the Bataan Death March.
Pfc Jack W. Grady was captured in the Philippines and survived the Bataan Death March and captivity as a POW in Japan. The Museum recently received a collection of material from Grady’s daughter. This material includes over 60 postcards and letters send across North America to Grady’s parents after hearing a shortwave Radio Tokyo broadcast that Grady participated in while a prisoner. Also included are the short notes that Grady was allowed to send to his family, letting them know that he was still alive. In the postcard pictured above, Grady mentions not having received word from his family for over a year. This was all too common in the case of Pacific Theater POWs, whose average length of captivity was over three years.
We hope everyone is excited for this Saturday, April 9 and our Louisiana National History Day State Contest.
Upon arriving at the Museum, you may notice some growing pains as construction of our new “Founder’s Plaza” is taking place. Here’s how to get around during National History Day.
Firstly, Andrew Higgins Drive and the Museum main entrance will be closed to all traffic, both motorized and pedestrian, on the day of the contest. Students, depending on their projects, will enter the Museum and check-in through TWO separate entrances.
Through the temporary main entrance on Magazine Street on the corner of Andrew Higgins Drive for those students with DOCUMENTARY, PAPER & WEBSITE projects. This is just steps away from the Soda Shop entrance.
Through the Firehouse for those students with EXHIBITS & PERFORMANCE projects. The firehouse is located on Magazine Street just shy of Poeyfarre Street.
Secondly, Parking is available at one of four surface parking lots all within one block of the Museum. If you choose to park in a paid lot, make sure to follow directions clearly to avoid ticketing or booting of your car.
The Museum parking garage is not yet open or available for parking.
Thirdly, Student Check-In will begin at 9:00 a.m. on Saturday, April 9 inside one of the two Museum entrances listed above. Students needing directions should look for our Victory Corps youth volunteers who will be outside providing directions all along the Magazine Street sidewalks.
At Check-In, all students will be given a room & interview time assignment
DOCUMENTARY, PAPER & WEBSITE interviews will take place in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion
PERFORMANCES will be held in the Stage Door Canteen near the American Sector Restaurant
EXHIBITS will be set up in the U.S. Freedom Pavilion: The Boeing Center
For those students with PERFORMANCE & DOCUMENTARY projects, please ensure that you can set up and operate all of your props and technology yourself.
For those students with PAPER and WEBSITE projects, your projects have been submitted to the judges for pre-viewing
Finally, the Awards Ceremony will be held in the U.S. Freedom Pavilion: The Boeing Center and should begin at around 2:00 p.m.. All are welcome to attend.
We look forward to seeing everyone there, and thank you in advance for your patience while getting around. It’s going to be a great day at the Museum!
Thanks to all our supporters, we’ve just wrapped up a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to help launch PT-305! Now we can get to work on making the dream you contributed to a reality.
The first order of business will be getting PT-305 out of her current home, the John E. Kushner Restoration Pavilion, which will be an achievement in its own right. A wall of the building will have to be temporarily removed so the boat can be transferred to the proper transportation.
From there, she will undergo Coast Guard testing before venturing to her permanent home, the new, custom-built boathouse for permanent, interactive display that your support will also help make a reality.
We’ll send out surveys shortly to make sure fulfillment of rewards moves swiftly, as promised. We will also be posting updates on PT-305’s journey here as we get them, so stay tuned! And thank you again for all your support. We couldn’t have done it without you!
This month’s Calling All Teachers e-newsletter highlights a once-in-a-lifetime chance for your students to interact with Tuskegee Airmen, the first African American pilots during World War II.
During our FREE webinar from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. (CDT) on Thursday, April 21, you and your students will be able to learn alongside these aviation pioneers. The program is perfect for students in grades 5–12, but all audiences are welcome to view and participate. You’ll also receive curriculum materials related to the program upon registering, so sign up today!
The April Calling All Teachers e-newsletter also shares big news about Get in the Scrap!, a national service learning project inspired by World War II and all about recycling and energy conservation. We now have over 100 middle school classrooms and over 3,000 students from 32 states participating, and there’s still time to sign up your class before the project closes on May 31.
Finally, this month’s Calling All Teachers shines the spotlight on the Holocaust since April is Genocide Awareness Month. The Museum has several resources you can use to guide your examination of this important topic. In addition to a fact sheet about the Holocaust and a lesson plan examining personal and collective responsibility during the Holocaust, you and your students can search the Museum’s Digital Collections to find many relevant oral histories. These include an interview with Holocaust survivor Charlotte Weiss, who describes her experiences at Auschwitz and encounters with the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, as well as interviews with concentration camp liberators such as Karl Mann.
The day has finally come! We started this journey with a goal of $100,000, and you—our loyal Crew—blazed through that mark in just three days. Now with just 19 hours to go, we have met our second stretch goal and raised $200,631 to launch PT-305 and return the only restored and operational WWII combat-vet patrol-torpedo boat to her home waters. We are tremendously grateful.
That being said, we still need your help in the waning hours of this fundraiser—every dollar helps! Spread the word, and help us make the most in these final hours of our Kickstarter Campaign!
Help us welcome a very special group of WWII veterans from Los Angeles, CA and Phoenix, AZ flying down with Soaring Valorto New Orleans this April 13-14. The veterans visiting will represent all service branches, and for many of these men and women it will be their first time in New Orleans and their first time seeing our nation’s tribute to their sacrifices.
Come out to any of these three opportunities to welcome our nation’s WWII veterans:
Welcoming the Veterans at the Hyatt Regency on Wednesday, April 13 at 4:30 pm
Join us inside the lobby at the Hyatt Regency at 601 Loyola Avenue in Downtown New Orleans to welcome the veterans as they arrive to their hotel.
Welcoming the Veterans to The National WWII Museum in front of the The American Sector Restaurant + Bar on Wednesday, April 13 at 6:30 pm
Help us give these veterans a grand welcome as they step foot on the Museum grounds for the first time for a special dinner in their honor.
Welcome the Veterans for their day exploring the Museum on Thursday, April 14 at 8:20 am
Meet us outside of The American Sector Restaurant + Bar to get the veterans’ day started with excitement as they begin their day of touring the Museum’s tributes to their sacrifices during World War II.
Please feel free to show your support in welcoming these veterans with patriotic posters, signs, and your New Orleans spirit! We hope to see you there for these very special moments!
Learn more about The National WWII Museum’s partnership with the Gary Sinise Foundation, Soaring Valor, that brings WWII veterans to the Museum and records their stories for the Museum’s Oral History collection.
Home Front Friday is a regular series that highlights the can do spirit on the Home Front during World War II and illustrates how that spirit is still alive today!
Remember when everyone was up in arms about the SOPA and PIPA bills that were being considered a few years ago? If you don’t, the basic story is that the bills (the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act) were designed to limit freedom of expression on the Internet, which sent U.S. citizens into a frenzy. Famous websites like Wikipedia, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr, Craigslist, and even Google staged blackout campaigns in protest of the censorship the bills would bring about. Ultimately, the bills were rejected and Americans were and still are able to retain the same freedom of information as before!
During World War II, however, a different story unfolded. Censorship was extremely prevalent during the war years, both on the home front and abroad, designed to keep sensitive information out of enemy hands and to keep spirits high by hiding the true costs of battle. The United States waged a vicious war on the home front against careless talk, which could easily slip into the hands of spies. Information such as ship departures, unit names, and even simple rumors could be picked up by spies and sold to the Axis.
From the National Archives
From the National Archives
From the National Archives
From Wikimedia Commons
Letters home from the front were especially delicate, as the troops had access to information that was critical to keep secret. V-Mail (short for Victory Mail) was the main method of correspondence between soldiers abroad and their loved ones back in America. Every letter had to pass through a censor before being delivered! If secret information was encountered, the censors may not deliver the letter or would black out the offending lines. Could you imagine if someone read and edited every text message you sent?
An example of a censored letter. 2009.105.004. Letter from M.C. Phillips, Germany, to his wife in Clinton, Louisiana on 6 December 1944. Document From the service of M.C. “Mac” Phillips, 420th Armored Field Artillery Battalion Personal correspondence. M.C. Phillips, Germany, to wife, Clinton, Louisiana. Censored letter. Still off the front line; will be a changed man when he returns home from war. 6 December 1944
Thankfully, we don’t have to worry about censors going through everything we write. Instead, we can use censorship techniques to make something new! Keep reading to learn how to make poetry by using the blackout method:
What you need:
An article of text. It can be a page from an old book, a magazine or newspaper article, something you print out…the possibilities are really endless!
A black permanent marker
A pencil (optional)
Steps:
1. First, pick an article of text. I used this old, water-damaged copy of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.
2. Pick out a section of your text to make poetry out of by marking off words or phrases here and there. The goal is to only take a few words out of the longer text to convey a simpler idea. This step might take time as you look for the smaller sections you would like to use!
When you are deciding on what to narrow down, it helps to use a pencil to box off the words you would like to keep.
3. Once you have decided what to keep, use the marker to black everything else out, leaving just the words you chose:
Voila! You now have your own personalized poetry created from censorship! Feel free to do this with any article of text you come across – you never know when inspiration might strike!
Posted by Katie Atkins, Education Intern and Lauren Handley, Assistant Director of Education for Public Programs at The National WWII Museum.
Winning Students and Supporters from Helen Cox High School Spelling Out the School’s H.C. Initials
This past Saturday, March 19, The National WWII Museum hosted its Greater New Orleans National History Day regional contest. National History Day is a student research competition in which students, either as individuals or in groups, conduct research and construct a project on a historical topic of their choice. Projects in this year’s contest focused on the theme of “Exploration, Encounter & Exchange in History” with student-selected topics ranging from the disappearance of the Roanoke colony to the origins of cheerleading!
At this year’s regional contest, over 240 middle and high school students with over 130 projects in 18 different categories competed throughout the day for a chance to advance their work to the Louisiana State History Day contest which will be held at the Museum on Saturday, April 9 and will feature winning students across the state from the Lafayette, Monroe, Shreveport and Baton Rouge regional contests as well. The winners from the Louisiana State History Day competition will then travel on to represent the state of Louisiana at the National Contest in Washington D.C..
For these students, the regional contest was the result of many months of researching, writing and perfecting their work. Judging panels evaluated student projects in five different formats—exhibit, research paper, performance, documentary and website – with students placing in the top four of each category advancing to the State Contest.
Congratulations to all the winners and to all the students who participated!
This post by Collin Makamson, Student Programs Coordinator @ The National WWII Museum
Winning Students and Supporters from Helen Cox High School Spelling Out the School's H.C. Initials
In shipbuilding traditions, a ship’s life begins on the date its keel, the vessel’s foundation, is laid. On March 30, 1943, our vessel PT-305 came into existence and began her life at the City Park Plant of Higgins Industries in New Orleans with the laying of her keel.
View of a Higgins boat assembly line, sign above factory reads “The guy who relaxes helps the axis.” Louisiana in the 1940s. From the collection of The National WWII Museum.
Launched just two months later on May 27, 1943 and completed at the Industrial Canal Plant on December 8, 1943, PT-305 was assigned to Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 22 (Ron 22) to defend in the Mediterranean. Operating in the Mediterranean along the coast of Southern France and Northern Italy, with Ron 22, PT-305 participated in the Invasion of Elba on June 18, 1944 and Operation Dragoon, the invasion of Southern France on August 15, 1944.
During the 14 months that PT-305 was deployed in the Mediterranean, she conducted more than 77 offensive patrols and operations, fought in 11 separate actions and sank three German ships. More importantly, she was the home to 44 officers and enlisted men where she served as the backdrop for moving personal stories of war, including the trials of cramped quarters, the terrifying thrill of combat, and humorous tales of shore-leave escapades.
Following her wartime service, PT-305 served as a New York tour boat, a fishing charter, and an oyster boat, undergoing modifications along the way: new, less-costly engines; several new paint jobs; and a dramatic reduction in length by 13 feet.
Throughout the past decade, a dedicated crew of volunteers has been restoring PT-305 back to her wartime glory adding back the 13 feet to her keel and original Packard Engines. In October 2010, the volunteer crew laid the missing piece of PT-305’s keel, marking the start of her renewed life as the world’s only fully restored and operational combat veteran Patrol Torpedo boat.
Now at 73 years old, PT-305 is ready to hit the water once again. Help us return her to her home waters of Lake Pontchartrain, where she was originally tested for combat readiness by Higgins Industries more than 70 years ago.
View of a Higgins boat assembly line, sign above factory reads "The guy who relaxes helps the axis." Louisiana in the 1940s. From the collection of The National WWII Museum.
In 1988, after 41 years as a tour boat, scalloping boat, and fishing boat, PT-305 was sold again, this time to two oyster fishermen, who used the boat to seed oyster spat in the Chesapeake Bay. Notice here that 13 feet in length was removed from the stern .
The restoration crew at the Museum signed the 13 foot keel extension before installing it to PT-305. The signatures of the crew will now travel with PT-305 during her renewed life as the world's only combat veteran and fully operation Patrol Torpedo boat.
The 13 foot keel extension being installed on pieces PT-305's original keel putting the boat back to its intended length.
Crew members aboard PT-305. Gift of Joseph Brannan, from the collection of The National WWII Museum.
PT-305 today at The National WWII Museum.
The first crew of PT-305. Gift of Edric Costain, from the collection of The National WWII Museum.
PT-305 was named Sudden Jerk by her first crew, and remained her nickname for the duration of the war. The story goes they ran into the dock too hard, someone commented on the sudden jerk, and the name stuck.
The Contractors Plan to Higgins Industries that included the building of PT-305 in its commission.
View of a Higgins boat assembly line, sign above factory reads “The guy who relaxes helps the axis.” Louisiana in the 1940s. From the collection of The National WWII Museum.
Seventy one years ago, as the Allies advanced towards Berlin, the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the U.S. began. Experts from the U.S. scoured seized records and interrogated captured scientists beginning in the autumn of 1944. As the Soviets advanced from the east, their military did the same.
As far back as the Alsos Mission, which corresponded to the Allied invasion of Italy, the U.S. systematically captured documents and personnel involved in Axis technology. Physicists captured included Otto Hahn (co-discoverer of fission) and Werner Heisenberg. Kurt Blome, who developed biological weapons for the Nazis and tested Sarin and other agents on prisoners was acquitted at Nuremberg because of the assistance he gave the Allies. Eugen Haagen, who experimented with contagious diseases on prisoners was not treated quite as lightly but was also spared the gallows.
As the Germans began to lose the war on the eastern front, the Nazis recalled many scientists and engineers serving ordinary duties and set them to finding technological breakthroughs that might quickly turn the tide of the war. A list assembled by the head of the Military Research Association, Wernher Osenberg, was found by U.S. intelligence stuffed in a toilet at recently captured Bonn University in 1945. This list was used to target scientists for capture and interrogation. Wernher von Braun was at the head of the list. He had led development of rockets, based on the Baltic coast at Peenemunde. There he used slave labor to build the facility and the rockets, and thousands of prisoners died in the development and deployment of the V-1 and V-2 rockets.
In the end more than 1,500 Germans with scientific and technical expertise were brought to the U.S. for employment after the war. Many of them were housed at captured European resorts before being removed with their families across the Atlantic. President Truman’s order to approve of what came to be known as Operation Paperclip came in August of 1945. This order excluded anyone who was a member of the Nazi party and any more than a nominal supporter of its activities. This would have excluded nearly all the scientists and engineers on the intelligence recruitment lists, many of whom were earlier classified as threats to security of the Allied forces.
Wernher von Braun and many others (more than 100) with expertise in rocket science were brought to Fort Bliss in Texas. Von Braun was allowed to return to Germany in 1947 (when he was 46 years old) in order to meet, and marry, his 18 year old cousin, Maria. He eventually became an Evangelical Christian, complained about his research budget, and became a U.S. citizen in 1955.
Peenemunde, where the Germans developed and deployed long-range rockets on the Baltic coast. From Wikimedia Commons
von Braun giving a talk about space exploration at Disney studios. From NASA.
Peenemunde, where the Germans developed and deployed long-range rockets on the Baltic coast, after severe bombing. From Wikimedia Commons.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum.
