Top Photo: A few months after closing due to Hurricane Katrina, the Museum held a block party on Veterans Day 2005 and announced the institution would reopen the following month, helping spur the city's tourism recovery.

Twenty years ago today, and just five years after The National D-Day Museum opened its doors, Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast. All of us here in New Orleans are remembering the lives lost and communities affected, but also, the incredible resilience and commitment as people came together to rebuild.

It's strange to think back to the Friday before Katrina hit. August 26 was a perfectly ordinary day, with activities underway at the Museum and throughout the city. However, by that night, our world turned upside down as the hurricane intensified and its track shifted toward New Orleans and surrounding areas. In the days that followed, many of us evacuated while others made preparations to ride out the storm, all of us unsure of what lay ahead. But after Katrina struck on August 29, breaking levees throughout the city, we were left to pick up the pieces, knowing our community was forever changed.

A Museum employee surveys the damage from Hurricane Katrina.

In the days and weeks ahead, our most important concern at the Museum was accounting for our people. With cell phones not as mainstream then, this was no easy task. Thankfully, after two weeks, we were able to confirm every staff member’s well-being, though we all wondered if and when we would all be together again.

But through all the uncertainty, we saw signs of hope, and one thing became abundantly clear: The Museum had even more widespread support than we realized.

At the time, we were in the early phases of a national campaign that saw our Charter Membership program grow from a few thousand to 70,000 members by August 2005. After Katrina, having those 70,000 supporters who largely lived in areas outside the Gulf Coast became a major lifeline for us, as we could count on them when our local community was focused on its own recovery. It was incredibly humbling and inspiring to see donations pouring in from men and women throughout the country and watch everyday citizens rally together, united under a common purpose, contributing what they could to our Museum and so many other institutions in our community—much like America during World War II.

Through this groundswell of support, we realized that public interest in World War II far exceeded our visitation. For our Founding President & CEO Emeritus Nick Mueller, who had previously overseen the University of New Orleans’s distance learning program as its Vice Chancellor, a light bulb went off: If people can’t come to the Museum, we’ll go to them. Distance learning was a great opportunity to innovate and broaden our educational impact, and Hurricane Katrina gave us the impetus we needed to make it a top priority.

In the months and years that followed, recovering from Katrina tested our resolve, demanded our creativity, and shaped our future.

Since 2005, our Charter Members, Patriots Circle Members, and other donors have continued to serve as an important source of support for our educational programming. We remain grateful for this national network of steadfast supporters who have been with us over the years.

Significantly, we also completed the buildout of our campus—a feat that, to many, seemed impossible at the time. Prior to Katrina, we were following an ambitious Master Plan that envisioned a seven-acre, seven-pavilion campus, but there were concerns after the storm about New Orleans’s long-term recovery outlook and whether these plans were still viable. Nonetheless, when our Board of Trustees met in November 2005, they recommitted to staying the course and fulfilling our bold vision for the future. With that decision, the Board offered hope that we would expand into the world-class institution we are now.

This post-Katrina rendering of The National WWII Museum's campus shows the relocation of Solomon Victory Theater to the corner of Magazine Street and Andrew Higgins Boulevard. The theater would be the first major construction after the storm.

And from our Electronic Field Trips to an online master’s degree in World War II Studies, we've come a long way over the past 20 years in our efforts to reach students, teachers, and lifelong learners wherever they are with the important history and lessons of World War II. Hurricane Katrina forced us to place more of a focus on our educational outreach, fueled in part by our distance-learning initiatives. We knew we needed to invest more in historians, educators, curators, and technology—much of which would be concentrated in our Hall of Democracy pavilion. Today, the pavilion houses the WWII Media Center, the production hub for our podcasts, documentaries, and online learning programs; and our Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy, a community of scholars that inspire civic engagement through research, higher education, publications, and public programming.

The Museum responded to Katrina with the same innovative, entrepreneurial spirit that characterized our founding and emerged from it stronger than before. As we pursue our Victory’s Promise campaign over the next decade, we will only continue to build on these decisions and dramatically expand our educational impact.

To quote Nick’s latest book, Preserving the Legacy: Creating The National WWII Museum: “We were coming back and counterpunching above our weight class in a city looking for signs of life ... We were in the vanguard of the city’s tourism rebound at a time when recovery still seemed years away.”

I’m proud of what we’ve built since then, and I look forward to seeing where our passion for our mission will take us next.

Stephen J. Watson
President & CEO