Why the Greatest War Museum in the World Is in New Orleans
When people hear that the National World War II Museum is located in New Orleans, the first question is always "why?" The answer is a man named Andrew Higgins and a flat-bottomed boat that won the war.
Andrew Jackson Higgins ran a boat-building company in New Orleans that specialized in shallow-draft vessels designed to navigate the swamps and bayous of Louisiana. When the U.S. military needed a landing craft that could carry troops from ship to shore and retract off a beach, Higgins had the answer. His company, Higgins Industries, produced over 20,000 landing craft during the war — the LCVP, or "Higgins boat" — at factories spread across New Orleans. Dwight Eisenhower himself said Higgins was "the man who won the war for us."
That connection is why historian Stephen Ambrose, who taught at the University of New Orleans, championed the idea of building a D-Day museum in the city. It opened on June 6, 2000 — the 56th anniversary of the Normandy invasion — as the National D-Day Museum. In 2003, Congress designated it the country's official National World War II Museum.
A Campus That Keeps Growing
What started as a single building on Magazine Street in the Warehouse District has grown into a sprawling six-acre campus that is now the top-rated museum in the United States and one of the highest-rated in the world. The museum tells the complete story of the American experience in World War II — from the home front to the European and Pacific theaters — through immersive exhibits, oral histories, restored aircraft and vehicles, and the kind of storytelling that makes history feel urgent and personal.
The Solomon Victory Theater shows "Beyond All Boundaries," a 4-D film experience produced by Tom Hanks. The US Freedom Pavilion houses a collection of restored wartime aircraft, including a B-17 bomber suspended from the ceiling. The Campaigns of Courage pavilion takes visitors through the road to Berlin and the island-hopping campaign across the Pacific with the intensity of a first-person experience.
More Than a Museum
The WWII Museum has become one of the most transformative institutions in modern New Orleans. It draws over a million visitors a year, anchors the Warehouse District as a cultural destination, and has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the local economy. Its expansion plans continue — a Liberation Pavilion is in development — and its oral history program has recorded thousands of interviews with veterans, preserving firsthand accounts that grow more precious as the Greatest Generation passes.
It's the kind of place that changes people. Visitors walk in expecting a museum and walk out shaken, grateful, and connected to something larger than themselves. And it exists because a New Orleans boat builder figured out how to get soldiers off a ship and onto a beach — a piece of local ingenuity that changed the course of human history.
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