WW II Re-enactment

On Memorial Day, a museum on Main Street in Fredericksburg, Texas, draws a big crowd as lives lost in war are commemorated. Dignitaries lay 50 wreaths, each honoring a unit or ship that served in World War II.

IT STARTS WITH ADMIRAL NIMITZ

The only national museum dedicated solely to the WWII war in the Pacific, The National Museum of the Pacific War stands on Main Street of the lovely small town of Fredericksburg Texas. If at first it seems to be an odd place for a world-class museum, take a look at their website. You can learn there how it evolved, starting when 5-Star Admiral Chester Nimitz, who grew up in that Texas town, said he would only agree to a museum if it honored EVERYONE who served—not just him.

The first time I visited, the George H. W. Bush Gallery was not yet complete, but I visited the Admiral Nimitz Museum, in the restored Nimitz Hotel on Main Street. It takes about 30 minutes to see the displays of Nimitz’ life from his childhood in Fredericksburg, to his stirring role in the Pacific during World War II.

THE COURTYARD AND GARDENS

Between the Nimitz and the Bush Galleries, you can wander through a Memorial Courtyard (where the Memorial Day wreaths will lie), a Japanese Garden of Peace, and a Plaza of Presidents, that honors all the Presidents involved in some way in World War II.

George H.W. Bush Gallery

A PRESIDENT WAR HERO IN WW II

The second time I visited, the enormous and impressive George H.W. Bush Gallery had been completed, and I shuffled into the entry hall that explains the history of enmity between Japan and the West. An enormous crowd packed the entry hall. As I walked further, the space opened up, the crowd thinned, and it was possible to have private moments to ponder the events and players that interested me most.

I’ll date myself here, but as a very small child, I remember people pouring into the street to celebrate the victory over Japan. I also have some ration books to remind me of the civilian sacrifice during the war. Finally, as I wrote last year on Veteran’s Day, I had three relatives who were Navy Seabees in the Pacific.

I was moved by the letters from sailors, and the photographs and mother’s voice of a family of brothers all killed in the Pacific. I was terrified by the re-enactment of standing on a boat in the harbor when the Japanese attacked Hawaii. But I came close to tears when I came upon a couple looking at a display and remembering how it related to their own life. A woman wheeling her husband in a wheelchair. A couple recalling her veteran father’s stories. People the war had touched.

My feet, my back, and my brain all became overwhelmed after a couple of hours, and I had not seen everything. That is why they sell 48 hour tickets, so people can come back the next day and start fresh. Great idea.

COMBAT ZONE

A major part of the museum that I did not get to visit, The Pacific Combat Zone, occupies about three acres two blocks east of the main campus.  It definitely gives me a good reason to go back to Fredericksburg (besides wonderful art galleries, shopping, restaurants and vineyards, that is).

Tom Vortman, Marketing Director, tells me, “We offer guided one-hour tours (of the Combat Zone) daily.  Some of the major artifacts to see are the PBM Avenger, the last WWII combat PT boat (PT-309), and a MASH-style field hospital in a Quonset hut.  All three of these artifacts are indoors.  Outdoors we have two tanks, a landing craft, several guns and a mock battle field.  We use this in the World War II re-enactments presented seven weekends a year (six 75-minute shows each weekend).” Visitors feel the vibrations as a tank rumbles by, hear the sounds of actual weapons from WW II, and if they get too close, may feel the heat of the only operational flame-thrower in Texas.

A BOOK FOR THE TIME TRAVELER

I particularly like the closing event at today’s Memorial Day Service at the National Museum of the Pacific War. An Author’s Forum on in the afternoon features Bruce Gamble, author of Fortress Rabaul:  The Battle for the Southwest Pacific, January 1942-April 1943.  This is the story of Japan invading the Southwest Pacific island of New Britain the beginning of 1942.  Rabaul, on the northern tip of New Britain Island became a major military complex, the mightiest Japanese base in the Southwest Pacific.

So I leave you with a book and a reminder that A Traveler’s Library has remembered war veterans in previous articles. Naples in World War II, Apocalypse Now and Good Morning Vietnam in Vietnam,the resistance in France.

Just so you know, my second trip to Fredericksburg was hosted by the Fredericksburg Convention and Visitor’s Bureau. The pictures for this article are used with the permission of the National Pacific War Museum.

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Pacific Islands Coral Atoll

Destination: Marshall Islands, Pacific

Book: Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island by Peter Rudiak-Gould (Released November 3)

Do you have a secret wish to travel to a remote Pacific coral island–palm trees, deep blue lagoons, friendly natives, an endless supply of fruit and fish? Then perhaps you should read this as a cautionary travel book. If you were smitten with island in Tom Hank’s movie, Castaway, and still think that a remote island contains Paradise, you may need this book before you travel.

In [amazonify]1402766645::text::::Surviving Paradise[/amazonify], Peter Rudiak-Gould goes looking for Paradise and finds on the tiny island of Ujae–not Hell–but a very difficult existence.  Barely twenty-one, ill prepared for his job of teaching English and full of the confidence of a young American man that he can figure out how to deal with anything, his introduction to the island is not auspicious. Instead of the joyous celebratory welcome he had imagined, he sees frozen stares from the children and indifference from the adults.

I stood next to the plane, holding my scant luggage, and wondered if I could pretend there had been some sort of mix-up. “Sorry, this isn’t the Ujae I was looking for,” I would say–which was the truth–and fly back home.

The next day when he sets out to travel around his new home, he finds, “I had circumnavigated the world before lunch.” The island is 1/3 of a square mile large.This tiny world may not consist of a huge amount of land, but it does hold huge surprises for the explorer of cultures.

At first Rudiak-Gould finds the interplay between his expectations and island reality amusing, later it becomes tedious, and then oppressive.  The book’s style follows suit. I was laughing out loud on every page in the first few chapters, but found the continuous whining about his difficulties tedious in the middle. I do not dismiss this as a useful book for travelers, however. After all, I don’t like the churlishness of Paul Theroux either, but plenty of people lap up his travel literature.

In the end, this author realizes that although he can analyze and classify the behaviors on this island, he still cannot understand them. The Marshallese still live in a subsistence society, despite the fact that they watch videos that teach the kids gang signs which they flash without knowing their meaning. He says:

What looked like paradise was actually one of the hardest places on earth to live.

and:

I talked the talk and walked the walk–but I did not value the values and believe the beliefs. For all my differences, for all the aspects of their culture I still rejected, did the people of Ujae still, somehow, accept me as their own?

In the end, Rudiak-Gould goes on to graduate school and a project about the Marshallese attitude toward global warming and the rise of the oceans.  He returns to the island three years after his first stay to do his anthropological studies.  But the first part of the book also has an anthropological feel and frequently not the detached, scientific air of information gatherer, but judgmental comparer of societies.  I wished for the conclusion of Adam Gopnik in Paris To The Moon, that neither society is better than the other, they are just different.

The author is appalled at the attitude of the Marshall Islanders at global warming, for example. The book’s subtitle and promotional materials tout the unfortunate future of these islands as ocean levels rise and low-lying coral islands are washed away.  However this strikes me as possibly a newsworthy add-on to a book that meant to be about the survival of a subsistence culture both invaded and sometimes improved by American t-shirts, T.V.s, and motor boats.

In the end, although Paradise does not live up to his expectations, Rudiak-Gould declares himself still a romantic, still a traveler who will seek out the impossible remote places.  For us, as armchair travelers to remote atolls, the book will be more a cold bath of realism (about a place where cold baths do not exist) than the lure of travel literature.

Sterling Publishers kindly supplied a review copy of this book, and I got the photo from Flickr. You can click on the photo and see more about the photographer.

Is a coral atoll in the Pacific your idea of Paradise? Or have you been there, done that, and bought the made-in-America souvenirs? Or perhaps you’ve been to some of the more touristed islands like Fiji? Please tell us about it in the comment section below.

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