World War One Museum

[Major Loss]

From the Chicago Tribune:

WWI's `rightful place'
The organizers of a new museum in Kansas City hope to show how World War I marked a turning point in American history and set in motion waves of turmoil and transformation still felt today

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- It was the war to end all wars. It was supposed to make the world safe for democracy. American soldiers were called doughboys, not GI Joes.

For Americans, World War I is the second-place world war. Although the conflict's death and devastation are never far from the minds of Europeans, the Great War has long been overshadowed in the U.S. by its successor.

The recent focus in books and movies on the "Greatest Generation," the men and women who fought and served in World War II, has pushed the earlier conflict even further into the shadows, despite the fact that it resulted in 9 million war deaths.

The organizers of a new museum that opens Dec. 2 hope to redress that imbalance by showing how World War I marked one of the most significant turning points in American history and set in motion waves of turmoil and transformation still being felt today.

"You talk about America stepping onto the world stage and not getting off, this is where it began," said museum director Stephen Berkheiser, a retired Marine general.

Housed in a refurbished war memorial overlooking downtown Kansas City, the National World War I Museum will display the arms and armaments the warring nations used against each other. It also aims to make visitors experience some of the hellish life of trench warfare on the Western Front with reconstructions of French, English and German trenches and a 100-foot recreation of no man's land, the blasted terrain between the trenches.

"Looking at World War I was a long overdue and essential enterprise," said Ralph Appelbaum, who designed the museum's exhibits. "It needed to take its rightful place in the public memory."


The $26.5 million museum boasts some hefty credentials. Billed as the first American museum dedicated to the conflict that engulfed the world from 1914 to 1918, it carries a congressional designation as the country's official World War I museum. And in selecting Appelbaum to plan and lay out the exhibits, the museum enlisted the designer responsible for such high-profile projects as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

One of the leaders in making museums more engaging, Appelbaum aims to grab a visitor's imagination from the start by placing a field of 9,000 red silk poppies underneath a glass bridge at the entrance to the 30,000-square-foot museum.

Each poppy stands for 1,000 combatants of all nations killed in the war.

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, 53,402 U.S. soldiers died in action. That means fewer than 54 of those poppies represent American troops, a measure of the challenge that museum officials faced in figuring out how to attract visitors.

"In this country, World War II eclipsed it totally," Berkheiser said. The American death toll in World War II was nearly 292,000.

"There wasn't an American household that wasn't affected by World War II," he said. "It's not surprising that World War I got eclipsed, but that's part of the story."

The museum is the outgrowth of a $76 million renovation project to shore up Kansas City's 217-foot Liberty Memorial, dedicated by President Calvin Coolidge in 1926 to honor American servicemen who fought in the war. Among those on hand at the ceremony was a former U.S. artillery officer and future president, Harry Truman, whose views of the post-World War II world were partly shaped by the failures of earlier leaders to solve the problems left after World War I.

Excavating around the memorial to repair the foundation created an opportunity to build a museum for the memorial's collection of World War I artifacts. Previously, only about 3 percent of the more than 49,000 artifacts had been displayed. Thousands of items were stored in climate-controlled limestone caverns in the Kansas City area.

Appelbaum rates the memorial's World War I collection as second only to that of the Imperial War Museum in London. And because the artifacts have been stored carefully, many are in excellent condition.

"You get this sense of immediacy that you don't get from the scratchy old speeded-up film footage," he said.

The museum's introductory area tells how a prosperous Europe plunged into war after the killing of Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serb. After a German offensive through Belgium and northern France bogged down in autumn 1914, both sides dug in.

The reconstructed trenches allow visitors to sense the muddy misery of warfare on the Western Front, with recordings of soldiers' recollections playing in the background.

Halfway through, the diorama of no man's land, with a few soldiers tramping across a pock-marked landscape littered with shattered equipment, shows what America was getting into when Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917.

By then, France and Britain had lost millions of troops. A final German offensive in early 1918 aimed to knock them out of the war before U.S. troops arrived in force. They held on, and by the summer of 1918, American troops were arriving at the rate of 300,000 a month.

"They fought bravely and suffered terrible casualties, but they weren't really the decisive part of the front," said University of Florida historian Robert Zieger, author of "America's Great War."

And yet America played a decisive role in ending the war.

"Once they saw the sheer numbers of troops that were coming over, the game was up," said Zieger, referring to German commanders. "It's the Brits and the French who won the war, and the prospect of an endless supply of American troops."

The museum ends with the lengthy negotiations over a peace treaty in 1919.

World War I had arguably greater consequences than World War II, setting in motion the events that led to World War II, the Cold War and beyond.

Empires and ruling houses came crashing down in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey. Revolution in Russia resulted in the world's first communist government. German anger at losing the war led to dark charges that the country had been "stabbed in the back." That helped prepare the ground for the rise of Adolf Hitler.

And one of the results of the Treaty of Versailles was the creation of several cobbled-together countries in the Middle East in territories that had been ruled by the Ottoman Empire. One of those countries was Iraq.

"We thought we'd get people thinking and talking," Appelbaum said. "Clearly, the war represented the birth pangs of an internationalist America, and that's why it has the resonance that it has today."

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By the numbers

- Nearly 5 million Americans served in World War I.

There are fewer than 25 living U.S. veterans of the war.

- About 9 million soldiers of all nationalities died as a result of the war--far more than had died in all the wars during the previous 100 years.