D-Day Remembered Museum Dedicated To Epic Landing On Normandy Beaches Opens Today

When the doors open today, the National D-Day Museum will honor a generation of men and women whose courage secured an Allied victory in World War II.

Some of those wartime veterans will take part in the grand-opening ceremonies.

On June 6, 1944, the largest Allied invasion of Europe unfolded. The heroism of the individuals who stormed the beaches of the Normandy region of France - as well as in other theaters of war - is the emphasis behind the D-Day Museum in the trendy Arts and Warehouse District of New Orleans.

Why New Orleans?

Because it was here that the Higgins boats, the landing crafts used in the invasion of Normandy, were manufactured. And it is the home, too, of museum founder Stephen Ambrose, the historian and author of “Citizen Soldiers” and “D-Day: The Climactic Battle of World War II.”

New Orleans “is a city that doesn’t brag on itself,” Ambrose said. “You brag on the food and the jazz and Mardi Gras. But in World War II this city built all the landing craft that won the war for us. Nearly every American who went ashore in World War II did so in a boat built in New Orleans.”

Ambrose conceived the idea in the mid-1980s and established the museum in 1992. The director of the Eisenhower Center in New Orleans, Ambrose also is the author of a two-volume biography of Dwight Eisenhower.

It was during a meeting with Eisenhower in the 1960s when the former president asked Ambrose if he had ever met industrialist Andrew Jackson Higgins. Eisenhower, who was the supreme Allied commander in Europe, called Higgins “the man who won the war for us.”

The D-Day Museum is housed in the former Louisiana Brewery, not the actual site of Higgins manufacturing on Lake Pontchartrain as Ambrose originally envisioned.

Ambrose said he argued for two years about putting the museum on the lake, but was at last swayed by the museum’s board. “They finally convinced me,” he said with a laugh. “`Steve, this is not a case of `if you build it they will come.’ We have to be close to the quarter.”’

The D-Day Museum is nine blocks from the French Quarter, one block from the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, which opens in 2001, near the Confederate Museum and blocks from the New Orleans Convention Center.

Today’s unveiling of the $25 million museum will cap a weekend of events including a United Service Organizations swing dance, a World War II re-enactment at City Park and a military parade in New Orleans.

Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, the star and the director of “Saving Private Ryan,” are on the guest list. Tom Brokaw, the NBC news anchor and author of “The Greatest Generation” about World War II veterans and the Depression area, is the event’s master of ceremonies.

The 70,500-square-foot D-Day Museum contains a collection of artifacts, oral histories, re-creations of equipment (gliders tanks, and Higgins boats), films, maps, photomurals, uniforms and text panels.

The 16,000-square-foot gallery is divided into four interactive exhibits that take visitors through the weeks and days leading up to the invasions of World War II. Other air and sea assaults of the war, including battles in North Africa, Sicily and the Pacific are covered.

Ambrose said that the surge of interest in World War II, through books and movies, has brought generations together. “Young people are aware that the privileged life they lead didn’t come out of nowhere, it had to be paid for. We’re not talking Audie Murphy here, it came from all of America.”

The D-Day Museum will emphasize not only the efforts of fighting men, but the people at home, “Rosie the Riveter and the home-front workers,” he said.