The National WWII Museum’s Veteran Archives Collection

NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) — Joey Balfour is the Assistant Director of Oral History at the National WWII Museum. The digital collections of the WWII Museum is vital to the memory and lessons of humanity.

The team responsible for collection and cataloging of WWII veteran interviews continues to collect interviews every year.

Balfour talks about what inspires his world. “Everybody saw the war differently and everybody’s got their own story. My grandfathers both served in World War II. My dad’s dad drove an aviation gasoline truck around England and probably never heard a shot fired. My mom’s dad was a combat engineer and on the other hand heard a lot of shots fired. Neither of them talked about what they did. They both died when I was pretty young.  Me wanting to know those stories is what got me into doing this,” explains Balfour.  

The oral history program at the museum began in the 1980’s with the audio cassettes of museum founder and historian, Stephen Ambrose.

Currently, there are over 13,000 interviews, including high definition videos. The interviews allow veterans to tell their individual stories and provide faces and personality to a war that effected everyone.

Interviews of the oral history project sometimes take veterans back in time mentally. Balfour remembers the interview of one particular veteran.

“While telling a story about a battle in north Africa in 1933, his eyes just glazed over and he’s just looking off camera. I gave him a few minutes and asked him where he was.  He replied that he was back there.”

The collection includes Rosie the Riveters, holocaust survivors and veterans.

One of the hallmarks of the museum’s experience, is that visitors can meet and sometimes be assisted through the museum’s collection by veterans. In the past, many of the veterans were WWII veterans.

By collecting and using interviews in the exhibits, the archived interview collection ensures that visitors will get to hear the voices of WWII veterans long after that generation passes on, into legend.

“I really enjoy what I do.  It’s an honor to do what I do.  I get to do something that the vast majority of people do not.  I get to preserve history.  I am part of it now. When I first started doing this job, there were somewhere around two million WWII veterans living.  The mortality rate was about 1,500 a day.  We are now down to fewer than 50 thousand.  There’s absolutely a sense of urgency,” explained Balfour.

The interviews are used in a variety of ways to drive exhibitions. A small number of them uniquely use artificial intelligence to allow visitors to ask questions, as the software goes into a collection of answers to find particular answers in real time, that are most appropriate for the visitor’s specific question.

Each method preserves the legacy of individuals through telling a personal account of WWII

If you know of someone who was part of WWII, please contact the National World War Two Museum at 504-528-1944 ext. 516 or email oral.histories@nationalww2museum.org if they are a military veteran who served between Dec. 7, 1941 and Dec. 31 1946 (regardless of branch of service or what they did).

We would also love to speak with anyone who worked in a defense industry (again, regardless of the job they performed). 

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