Texas may seem an unlikely place for America’s only Pacific War museum, but landlocked Fredericksburg, Gillespie County, happens to be the birthplace of Rear Admiral Chester William Nimitz, Commander in Chief Pacific during World War II.
Chester Nimitz was born 25 February '885 in a limestone cottage on the town’s Main Street. His father died prior to his birth, and a short time later, his mother took the infant and moved one block down the street to the Nimitz Hotel, home of her husband’s parents. The Nimitz Hotel was built in the 1850s by the baby’s grandfather. Captain Charles Henry Nimitz; it was known as the Steamboat Hotel because of the crow’s nest the captain added to the building’s facade in the 1870s.
Threat of demolition of the hotel in the early 1960s sparked the idea for the Museum of the Pacific War. At a meeting in the fall of 1963, a group of about 20 citizens decided to try to preserve the hotel as a historical shrine.
When contacted about a war museum in his honor. Admiral Nimitz agreed, but requested it be dedicated to the two million men and women who served with him in the Pacific Theater. Opened in 1967, the Museum of the Pacific War, which is in the restored Nimitz Hotel, is part of the Admiral Nimitz State Historical Park. The museum motto is, “We inspire our youth by honoring our heroes.”
“The story of the war in the Pacific,” says museum park superintendent Bruce Smith, “needs to be remembered. Admiral Nimitz also believed that a study of the past was important in order to avoid repeating history’s errors. All of us involved with the museum and park are trying to fulfill this goal.”
The exhibition is arranged in chronological order, beginning on the first floor with the history of Fredericksburg (which was settled by German immigrants). Nimitz’s youth and his early years in the Navy are covered, and then World War II, and finally the postwar years preceding the admiral’s death on 20 February 1966.
A well-documented timeline on the walls of each of the museum’s three floors juxtaposes events in Nimitz’s life to worldwide developments. There are blown-up photo montages, wall-size maps showing the admiral’s area of command in the Pacific, Midshipman Nimitz’s drafting set, and Naval Academy report cards.
Some of the displays are outsized, for instance a 16-foot, 2,000-pound propeller from a B-29 bomber, which is suspended from the ceiling like an enormous revolving fan. Others are smaller in scale—there’s a wartime cartoon caricature of a sergeant firing a Japanese soldier out of a cannon. Many displays are hands-on: visitors can experience for themselves what it’s like to steer a submarine or turn on a ship’s searchlight.
A Pearl Harbor gallery rekindles World War II memories with its giant photos of the Japanese attack of 7 December 1941, which catapulted Nimitz to leadership of the world’s greatest military force. Also displayed is a vintage radio on which visitors can listen to President Roosevelt’s famous “Day of Infamy” speech.
At the head of the stairs on the second floor is a mini theater. One of the museum’s most popular displays, it features a condensed version of the war and victory in the Pacific, using a seven-minute fiber-optics map presentation. Pressing a button activates sound and color photos mounted on glass that dramatize the campaigns and events under the command of Admiral Nimitz.
Other displays include a pistol and flight jacket from Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle’s 1942 air raid over Tokyo, a sword captured on Corregidor. a flight suit from the Battle of Midway (2-6 June 1942), and an engine from a P-38 fighter plane.
Behind the museum is another part of the Admiral Nimitz State Historical Park—the Garden of Peace. This restful spot symbolizes friendship and peace between the United States and Japan today. The classic Oriental garden features a replicaof Admiral Heihachiro Togo’s study, built in Japan and brought to Fredericksburg and reassembled. The Japanese people, explains a museum guide, raised the money to build this memorial to Nimitz because they consider him to have been one of the world’s three greatest admirals, along with Lord Nelson and Admiral Togo.
A block from the museum is the Pacific History Walk, which features an international collection of rare military artifacts from the Pacific War, spanning the time from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay when Admiral Nimitz signed the document formally ending World War II.
The entrance to the history walk is flanked by two three-inch deck guns from the USS Hazard (AM-240) and USS Strategy (AM-308). Just beyond stand the bombed remains of a Japanese Val dive-bomber. This aircraft, one of two such planes remaining in the United States today, dropped the first bombs at Pearl Harbor.
Individual displays along the wall have been gathered from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Fiji, The Netherlands, Great Britain, and the branches of U. S. military service. A recent acquisition was a Navy torpedo bomber. The walk, dedicated on 6 May 1976, honors the fallen warriors of both sides.
As viewers stroll along the anchor chain-defined trail, they also pass military equipment from the Pacific Theater. Recalling the Battle of Midway is an SBD Dauntless dive-bomber, one of five such planes still surviving from a production of nearly 6,000. Nearby is a Japanese antitank gun used at Tarawa.
Submarine warfare is represented by the conning tower from the USS Pintado (SS-387), a relic that was saved from the cutting torch at a shipwrecking yard. The Pintado is credited with having sunk the Tonan Maru, Japan’s largest merchant ship.
Inside a re-created airplane hangar, visitors find a combat information center from the USS Frankford (DD-497) with a recorded presentation by Admiral Arleigh Burke, one of the most colorful destroyer commanders in the Pacific War. Here, too, is a Japanese fighter seaplane and a “Fat Man” bomb case, identical to that of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on 9 August 1945.
One item that visitors should not miss is located on the museum’s third floor along with mementos from Nimitz’s postwar years—the Nimitz family guest book. Among the many signatures in this nostalgic volume is that of Mitsuo Fuchida, Japanese squadron leader at Pearl Harbor, who wrote simply: “No more Pearl Harbor.” It is a fitting postscript to a memorial that honors Admiral Chester W. Nimitz and the men and women who fought so courageously to bring peace to the Pacific.