US Marine Corps Women’s Reserve Sgt. and Museum family member Bernice Williams turns 100 years old on March 1, 2021. She says that her 1943-1945 service as a Marine made her a “better person.”

In the four years of war, Americans on the home front were asked to do their part and to go without certain items for the sake of the war effort. For residents of New Orleans, World War II also meant going without Mardi Gras.

Sgt. Thomas Sweeney, 71st Infantry Division, was one of the many American medics and liberators who found themselves woefully underprepared in rendering aid to survivors of Nazi atrocities. At the Gunskirchen Concentration Camp in May 1945, they found thousands of individuals barely clinging to life.

During World War II and in the decades following, Bob Hope visited American troops for the holidays. His performances for those serving around the world brought them a bit of home. And year after year, his televised Christmas specials brought the faces of those troops into American living rooms.

Interpreters and translators were the unspoken heroes of the Nuremberg Trials. Their work at Nuremberg was a groundbreaking development in simultaneous interpretation.

The courtroom of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg hosted nearly 400 visitors each day, including 250 members of the international press. The Museum’s collection contains items from some of these visitors, American service members who wanted to sit in on one of the most significant trials in history.

The Hollywood Canteen, which had been in operation since October 1942, closed its doors after one last hurrah on Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 1945. In all, more than 3,000 volunteers, many famous stars among them, had welcomed and entertained nearly four million servicemen and women.

Even while held as POWs by the Germans in the POW camp Stalag Luft IV, American servicemen exercised their civic duty and made their voices heard, at least to each other, when they held a straw vote for the 1944 presidential election.

Mexican American US Army medic Corporal Anthony Acevedo suffered unimaginable horrors as a POW of the Germans. He survived Stalag IXB and then the Berga slave labor camp as well as the trauma and stigma of having been a prisoner of war.

International Translation Day is an opportunity to pay tribute to the work of language professionals and their role in bringing about peace. Roughly 6,000 Japanese Americans served as translators and interpreters with the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) in the Pacific, using the language of their parents and grandparents to shorten the war and save lives.