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The National Prisoner of War Museum is dedicated to the men and women of this country who suffered captivity so that others may remain free. Their story is one of sacrifice and courage; their legacy, the gift of liberty.
The museum was officially opened and dedicated on April 9, 1999. The concept of a museum to honor all prisoners of war in American History goes back to the legislation passed by Congress in 1970 that made Andersonville a unit of the National Park Service. The law that created the National Historic Site specified that the park is preserved to tell the Andersonville story, the story of all Civil War POW camps (north and south) and the story of all POWs in American History. In the 1980's the park staff developed a partnership with the American Ex-Prisoners of War that led to a small temporary POW museum on the park grounds.
A visit to the National P.O.W. Museum can be an emotional experience. The architecture of the building, works of art, displays, and video presentations all work together to tell the story of the prisoner of war experience.
The museum is not divided by wars. Exhibits include prisoners of war from all wars together in one setting. Prisoners of war have faced the same hardships since the American Revolution. The story being told is not that of a single war, but that of all prisoners of war.
Half of the funds to establish the museum came from donations. The majority of these funds came from the sale of the Prisoner of War Commemorative Coin.
One of the few civil things about the Civil War were its gentlemanly prisoner exchanges; POWs of each side would be swapped for the other. That ended when the North realized that it was restocking the South's dwindling supply of soldiers, and led to the creation of giant POW camps in the North and South.
The worst was at Andersonville, Georgia. It was little more than an open field, surrounded by 15-foot-high walls made of tree trunks. Nearly 30 percent of its 45,000 Union prisoners died in only 14 months.
The Andersonville prison eventually became a National Historic Site, and its infamy made it a natural spot for the National POW Museum, which opened in 1998.
Visitors enter through a dark room, and suddenly hear the wail of sirens. Crazy-swirling spotlights appear, revealing dozens of rifle muzzles poking out of the walls, directly at you. You've been captured!
Sad music plays softly throughout the galleries. Plate steel display cases convey an institutional starkness, and POWs don't have many possessions to exhibit anyway. We saw sandals made of straw, socks knitted from string, a suit made of tent canvas. Some prisoners from the War of 1812 had the time to make a fully-rigged sailing ship model out of beef, mutton, and pork bones -- but the general impression is that most American POWs have had little time for hobbies or access to meat.
The museum's most elaborate presentation is about Americans captured in the Vietnam War. Peering through a slot in a wall reveals a dark chamber containing the dummy of a grim, barefoot POW sitting on a thin straw mat, manacled to a concrete slab. The sound of sickly coughing fills the cell, along with harsh commands barked over a loudspeaker ("On your feet! No talking!"), and the droning monotone of a prisoner reading antiwar statements at a staged North Vietnamese press conference. Next to the cell stands a life-size bamboo "tiger cage" (built for the museum by the U.S. military).
More recent artifacts in the museum include the flight suit worn by a woman Army surgeon who was shot down during the Gulf War, and a display titled "The First 21st Century American POWs," whose six members included a single mom, a Filipino- and a Mexican-American, and two soldiers over 30. Diversity, yay!