Congress has designated the National WWII Museum the official World War II museum of the United States, an institution that has grown from a single building into a multi-pavilion campus, among the most visited museums in the country and widely considered the finest WWII museum in the world. The museum was founded in 2000 by historian Stephen Ambrose, who chose New Orleans because the Higgins boat — the flat-bottomed landing craft that made the amphibious assaults at Normandy and across the Pacific possible — was designed and built here by Andrew Higgins and his Higgins Industries workforce. Eisenhower said Higgins won the war for the Allies; without the Higgins boat, which could land troops directly on beaches without requiring a dock, the D-Day landings would have been impossible.
New Orleans built more than twenty thousand of them. The museum now covers every theater of World War II through a combination of artifacts, personal testimony, film presentations, and immersive experiences that convey both the strategic scale of the conflict and the individual human experience of fighting it. The 4D film Beyond All Boundaries, narrated by Tom Hanks, is screened in the Solomon Victory Theater.
The permanent galleries include a full-scale replica of a Higgins boat, aircraft suspended from the ceiling, and thousands of personal testimonies from veterans. Plan at least three hours; most visitors wish they had more.