The National World War I Museum - Kansas City

Published on 16 April 2023 at 00:39

On my recent visit to Kansas City, I made my third trip to the National WWI Museum.  I can't go to KC and not stop by, it's just one of those things you'll have to accept.  If you're like most people, the only things you probably remember learning about The Great War was some guy was assassinated and it was a trench war and they used poison gas.  When I ask people, these are usually all I get in response.  As time passes and the fact we have no living veterans any longer to learn from, means our history gets lost.  One of the reasons I became so fascinated with WWI was that the war was anything, but just a trench war and its reaches can still be felt today.  As the first global war, the sheer amount of change brought about by this conflict is staggering and, in my opinion, its significance outweighs that of WWII, if not only because the catastrophic failure of an unjust peace led directly to the next world war.  The brutal toll it took on the allies, in particular, led to an exhaustion that left them impotent and unprepared for the coming storm just a generation later.  The horrifying advancements in methods of  human slaughter also caught armies off guard.  Their tactics had not yet caught up with the incredible rates of fire of machine guns, the long range carnage, on both mind and body of artillery, gas warfare, the terror of tanks on the battlefield, aeroplanes in the sky and unrestricted submarine warfare on the seas.  In 1921, when the Liberty Memorial site in Kansas City was dedicated over 100,000 people came out for it.  It was the only time, please read the plaque in the pictures above, that five generals from the war, including Foch and Pershing were together in one place.  In 1926, when the memorial was dedicated, more than 150,000 people were on hand.  There is no way that would happen today as we are not one America like we were 100 years ago.  I have an English friend who emigrated here and he is struck by how little we know about the war and how differently the English treat the anniversaries of WWI.  There will be virtually no acknowledgement of anything from the Great War here, but across the pond there will be many as the Battle of the Somme and the significance of the poppy have not faded from memory.  We even neutered Armistice Day down to just Veterans Day, as if the importance of November 11th means nothing anymore and maybe it doesn't.   One day in 2016, after I had visited the museum for the first time, I was wearing a tshirt that I had bought there.  I was at the 9/11 Memorial site in Shanksville, PA and one of the National Parks rangers noticed my shirt that said the 100-year anniversary of the Great Wat 1914- to 1918.  She read my shirt and thanked me for reminding her that we were in the midst of the 100-year anniversary of the war.  It was a ray of hope, but just one tiny ray as she was in her 30's.  Now, if a teenager said that, I'd have fallen over and been impressed, but it was a start, nonetheless.

As horrifying as that war was, I think I was born too late.  It also seems to me that the chivalry of that era died with the war.  The respect that aviators had for their counterparts was something you will never see again and was only passingly observed by the rare few in WWII.  It was an interesting dichotomy of the upper crust, educated officers and the respect they had for one another and the complete lack of it in the mud and hell of the trenches where there was anything but humanity.   The bodies of fallen pilots would be returned if they could be and flowers and homage dropped over their airfields despite they were on opposite sides and down in the mud, bodies would lie in no man's land for eternity, eaten by rats as they bayonetted and gassed each other to death.  The scars of that war can still be seen today across a 400 miles stretch of Europe and though the passage of time has eroded our consciousness of the events to the point we barely teach it in school, the world was shaped by the conflict.  Countries, monarchies and ideologies fell and super-powers emerged.  

The exhibits at this museum are excellent and you will not find a larger array of artifacts in the country.  You will easily spend two to three hours here if you take advantage of it all.  Every time I've gone, I've learned something new, and I was happy to find out from talking to a volunteer that they are remodeling several sections that will have new stuff in it when finished.  I would recommend making the new section interactive using new technologies to get kids interested.  I'm personally into the kind of exhibits that get you thinking and are somber reminders of the hell we wreaked on each other, but kids today are far too sensitive for that.  There are some pretty interesting pieces in the museum that if you take the time to read the accompanying explanations, you might find fascinating.  The one on this trip that I had simply overlooked on my prior trips was that of a 4.7 inch naval gun they have on display.  In 1914 a British ship named the La Correntina was captured by the Germans off the coast of South America and with guns of this type being in short supply, the Germans took it and put it on their ship, the Kronprinz Wilhelm.  When we declared war on Germany, all German vessels in American ports were seized and we happened to grab this particular German ship.  We converted it to a transport ship and renamed her the USS Von Steuben.  Von Steuben just happened to be a Prussian general who helped train American soldiers in the Revolutionary War, so that piece of irony was not lost on me.  She survived the war and was sold for scrap in 1923.  How the gun ended up not being scrapped and found its way to the museum is probably another cool story in itself, but there it sits.  A French made Renault FT-17 light tank is on display, sporting a shell hole from a German 77mm gun.  It is one of the only FT-17's left in the world that actually saw action in the war.  Next to the tank is a case highlighting the actions of John Lewis Barkley, an American soldier from the 4th Infantry, who won the Medal of Honor in October of 1918 in action near Cunel, France.  I'm considering a separate post to tell his story, but his Medal of Honor is on display and he won the honor fighting mostly while concealed in a knocked-out Renault FT, like the one in the display.  Cunel saw a lot of action during the Meuse-Argonne offensive and another MOH winner, Samuel Woodfill, won his at about the same time in roughly the same area as Barkley.  So did Alvin York.  These stories and items just scratch the surface of what is on display and I highly recommend taking a tour.  The museum and memorial are right in the center of the city and easy to get to.  The tower on the memorial gives you a 360 degree, commanding view of the entire city and you don't have to climb the stairs as they have an elevator.  We are coming up on the 100-year anniversary of the memorial in a few years and Kansas City has been a great steward of the area, paying millions to renovate everything at least twice in its history.  It has been named as a National Historic Landmark.  The museum, which is fully underground, was opened in 2006 and the people of Kansas City are lucky to have such an amazing facility.

 

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