As the United States prepared for war, military leaders had a long list of needs—guns, tanks, ships, and equipment of every kind. One of the things they needed most of all, however, was people. 

A new permanent exhibit celebrating Higgins Industries and its charismatic leader, Andrew Jackson Higgins.

Opened June 2017 in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion, The Arsenal of Democracy: The Herman and George R. Brown Salute to the Home Front tells the story of the road to war and the Home Front, drawing on personal narratives and evocative artifacts to highlight facets of WWII-era American life through an experiential narrative.

Voices from the Front is a new interactive experience at The National WWII Museum that helps visitors connect with the WWII generation in a high-tech yet personal way. By using cutting-edge technology to facilitate real-time interactions with more than a dozen veterans, Home Front workers, Holocaust survivors, and other witnesses to the war through interactive video displays, Voices from the Front puts real faces to history. Combining artificial intelligence technology and a repository of prerecorded answers to hundreds of questions, the experience provides visitors with authentic and unaltered answers in each interviewee’s own words and voice.

How soil from Mississippi, and subsequently all over the country, ended up spread across the globe during World War II.

Early on in World War II, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, one of Adolf Hitler’s top lieutenants, said that Americans could only make refrigerators and razor blades—they would never be able to produce the military equipment and supplies necessary to defeat Nazi Germany. Hitler took the same view in his public speeches, but privately he knew the clock was ticking. Germany would have to achieve victory fast, before American production had time to ramp up.