WWII vets are experts on recovery

on August 29, 2008 at 1:23 AM, updated August 29, 2008 at 1:33 AM

As he drafted plans for the National D-Day Museum in the early 1990s, the war historian Stephen Ambrose cited one potent reason for building it in New Orleans: It was here that Andrew Higgins made the boats that made all those daring amphibious landings possible, the ones given credit for bringing a terrible conflict to an end.

But Hurricane Katrina, coming five years after Ambrose's brainchild opened its doors, also makes it oddly appropriate that the complex now called the National World War II Museum is located in this city. Veterans of the 1939-45 war, those still alive and not permanently displaced by Katrina, have insights and memories, a sense of things, to pass along to thousands soldiering on in this wounded landscape.

They know all about seeing their world upside down, about early shock and fury giving way to prolonged tension and uncertainty; they know about pulling together and rebuilding lives, about slogging forward, awash in troubling news, until things get better. They know about planting and tending a Victory Garden.

For Katrina survivors, the writings of Ernie Pyle, a newspaper columnist who tagged along with foot soldiers as they fought their way across North Africa and Italy and the Pacific, might seem eerily relevant to the present.

"Our men can't make this change from normal civilians into warriors and remain the same people, " Pyle, who was killed by a Japanese machine-gunner in April 1945, wrote in one dispatch. "The abnormal world they have been plunged into, the new philosophies they have had to assume or perish inwardly, the horrors and delights . . . they are bound to be different people from those you sent away. They are rougher than when you knew them."

I never went to war, never wore Uncle Sam's uniform. But like most Americans of my age I've been steeped in family stories from World War II. My mother-in-law lived in constant anxiety about what might happen to her husband, called up in the Arkansas Guard, as he served with artillery units in the Pacific. My grandfather, a Mississippi Delta merchant, was the man handed the job of shutting off electric power to the entire town -- in the event of an enemy air raid.

There was fear and uncertainty and determination then; the same things have been in play in the storm zone since Katrina swept through.

The World War II museum's president, Nick Mueller, a former colleague of Ambrose's at the University of New Orleans, sees common threads in the different historic episodes.

"Pearl Harbor, compare that to Katrina, " Mueller said. "It's a tremendous shock, and panic, and anxiety, all of those things . . . uncertainty about the future, even about the next day or the next month. You look at how you're going to survive when it looks like everything is going to be lost that surrounded you, socially, in the community, career-wise, everything."

Then, as time passes, citizens pull together, Mueller said. The spirit of volunteerism picks up. Women and men make sacrifices and take on new roles. The charitable house-gutting and grassroots activism seen after Katrina are reminiscent of the can-do sentiments exhibited on the home front during the war years, Mueller said, as citizens adjusted to the rationing of gas, meat and other materials.

"The whole paradigm has shifted, and it was the same in World War II, " the historian said. "Everybody said, 'We're all in this together.' "

For Thomas Blakey, a retired oil company executive in his late 80s who was an Army paratrooper during the D-Day invasion of France, that experience helped prepare him for the trauma of losing all his possessions in Katrina. After taking refuge for months at his daughter's home in Georgia, he returned to New Orleans, and, during my visit to the downtown museum, was serving as an interpretive guide.

"I had to completely refit my whole life, clothes, living . . . When I was in Savannah, I had to get over the loss of those things, money and the whole bit. But all of those things can be replaced, " he said.

"You can't depend on somebody else to solve your problems. You have to solve them yourself. That's what I came back from the war with."

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Coleman Warner is an assistant city editor . He can be reached at or at 504.826.3341.