On Saturday morning, Steve and Sally, who also live across the street from us, invited us to go to Fredericksburg for the day with them. We had never been and it was a place we had heard about and wanted to visit.
Fredericksburg, a community that was established in the mid-1800's by German immigrants, is located about 75 miles north of San Antonio. Because we were all hungry, we decided to eat lunch first at a German restaurant. The food was delicious. Chuck and I both had soup and shared stuffed cabbage rolls for lunch. And their bread rolls were amazing! Even better with lots of butter on top of them! :)
After we had sufficiently stuffed ourselves, we walked across the street to go to the National Museum of the Pacific World War. Admiral Chester Nimitz who was commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet during World War II was born and raised in Fredericksburg. His grandfather's hotel is now the Admiral Nimitz Museum.
We walked through the Nimitz museum and then out to the courtyard where hundreds of memorial plaques were displayed recognizing soldiers and various battleships from the war.
The weather was unusually cold freezing this water fountain.
There was also a Japanese garden outside.
As we walked looking over the hundreds of plaques,
pictures like this one remind you that someone's son or husband or brother or dear friend, sacrificed their life along with thousands of others in World War II.
There was also a plaque of the U.S.S. Nashville...
and the U.S.S. Tennessee...
... along with plaques honoring many other battleships that were in World War II. Look at the old ship prop on display in the garden. Can you imagine how big the ship must have been?
There were several old BIG guns on display that would have been on the ships...
...as well as a torpedo chamber.
With the cold temperatures, we were glad to finally go inside the Museum of the Pacific War. As you walk through the museum, you follow a timeline beginning with when the U.S. first entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor. They have an old Japanese submarine on display that was beached on the other side of Oahu during the attack and whose torpedoes were never launched.
But as we all know from history, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was extremely deadly killing over 2,400 including 68 civilians. Over 1,000 individuals were wounded. The biggest losses, of course, were to the U.S. Navy. Of the 2,400 killed, 2,008 were Navy. Four battleships were sunk, four battleships destroyed, 3 light cruisers damaged, 3 destroyers were sunk along with many planes that were destroyed or damaged. The first wave of attacks by the Japanese lasted only 40 minutes -- from 7:55 am to 8:35 am. Most of the damage occurred in that first surprise attack. There was a second wave of attacks at 8:54 damaging or destroying two other ships. A third wave that was scheduled to happen at 1 pm never occurred and the Japanese headed home. On December 8, the U.S. declared war on Japan and we entered World War II.
A door from the U.S.S. Arizona over which the Pearl Harbor Memorial is built in Hawaii is on display in the museum.
The black along the door is from the stains of leaking oil from the ship.
The museum continued the historical timeline of the war and numerous battles fought in the Pacific against Japan through to the end of the war. There were several displays of old planes, tanks and even an old Jeep.
We were in the museum for only a couple of hours but there was so much history there, a person could easily spend a couple of days there. It was a very interesting museum and much bigger than it appeared from the outside. We finished up our tour with pictures taken by the statue of Admiral Nimitz.
After leaving the museum, we drove a short distance down Main Street to get a quick look at Fredericksburg.
There are a lot of quaint shops and restaurants that would make it a nice place to visit again. :)
