COVID-19 puts National WWII Museum 20th anniversary online

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the National WWII Museum in New Orleans was planning on a 20th anniversary crowd of thousands. Now it's working to avoid crowds by selling a limited number of scheduled tickets and holding all anniversary commemorations - including an annual D-Day morning ceremony - online.

The museum opened June 6, 2000, as the National D-Day Museum and was designated the national World War II museum a few years later. Last June 6, the landing's 75th anniversary, it logged 3,200 visitors.

With the date falling on a Saturday this year, “we could have had as many as 5,000 visitors,” president and CEO Stephen Watson said Tuesday.

The museum closed because of the pandemic on March 14 and reopened on Memorial Day to the lowest attendance since Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, spokesman Keith Darcey said.

Daily anniversary events started Monday, with about 4,000 people logging in to watch a one-hour presentation by historian Ben Brands of the American Battle Monuments Commission. He spoke about the Normandy American Cemetery at Omaha Beach - a landing zone that accounted for nearly half of the 2,500 U.S. troops who died on D-Day.

One of Brand's stories told how a high school student’s research project helped identify a World War II radio operator whose remains were found in a salvaged Navy ship. Julius Pieper, originally buried elsewhere as unknown, was reburied at Normandy in 2018 next to his twin brother, Ludwig Pieper, Brand said.

Brands noted that the cemetery was reopening Tuesday after COVID-19 closings, though reservations are needed to visit it and indoor spaces including the visitors center are closed.

In addition to the D-Day commemoration ceremony, Saturday’s events include an afternoon session about the museum’s...