New National WWII Museum exhibit looks at fight on homefront
NEW ORLEANS — 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 homefront 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 homefront.”
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.