In March 2024 I visited the National Museum of the US Navy in Washington, DC, where a young Marine docent told me the museum was sending many of its artifacts back to the Navy’s storage facility in preparation for an eventual move to a larger, more accessible, national museum. The Navy maintains ten museums around the country, but the huge number of historical objects in its collection requires a central storage hub.
“You know that warehouse in Indiana Jones?” he said. “There are actually three giant warehouses there like that, filled with stuff.”
Who could resist? I asked the Navy if I could visit and was invited to a Defense Logistics Agency base near Richmond in June to have a look at the Naval History and Heritage Command’s (NHHC) central artifact collection, a warehouse with three bays that total 300,000 square feet—soon to be 540,000. And while the facility holds plenty of mysterious crates, a whole lot more goes on there.
• • •
We tend to think of the armed services for their main mission: “warfighting” (and preparing for it). On the face of it, remembering seems to come more slowly.
President John Adams did order, in 1800, the Secretary of the Navy to prepare a catalog of books for a library for the Navy Department, and NHHC points to this as their start. In WWI a Historical Section was established under the Chief of Naval Operations and collected operational reports, war diaries, photographs, and other historical records.
In the 1920s and ’30s, Captain Dudley Knox, named head of the Office of Naval Records and Library, became the “driving force” of the Navy’s historical program and began plans for a display of naval heritage in Washington, DC. During WWII he “began a campaign to gather and arrange operation plans, action reports, and war diaries into a well-controlled archive staffed by professional historians who came on board as naval reservists.” When FDR commissioned Harvard history professor Samuel Eliot Morison to write the fifteen-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Morison relied in part on Knox’s records.
A Naval History Division was formed in 1952, and its constituent parts—records, library, history—coalesced through the ’60s and ’70s in the Washington Navy Yard. The US Naval Historical Display Center opened there in 1961 as a precursor to a national navy museum.
(“[T]he first comprehensive and truly national museum” of the US Army, our oldest branch, opened only at the end of 2020, 245 years after its founding.)
Together in the 1980s these branches became the Naval Historical Center, which absorbed the Navy’s art collection and aviation history division. In 1996 an Underwater Archaeology Branch was established “to manage the more than 2,500 Navy shipwrecks and 14,000 aircraft wrecks dispersed globally.” Navy museums came into the fold in the early 2000s.
NHHC was formed in 2008 as a high-level command that reports directly to the Chief of Naval Operations and the Secretary of the Navy. It comprises divisions for Collection Management; History and Archives; Museum Operations; Historic Ship and Aircraft Maintenance; Support; and Communication and Outreach.
“The Naval History and Heritage Command [NHHC] serves as the Navy’s institutional memory by preserving, acquiring, producing, and disseminating history and heritage products and resources through Navy historical, archival, museum, curatorial, art, and underwater archaeological programs,” the command’s literature says.
Its mission is to support policy development and combat readiness with examples from the past, to build esprit de corps, and to explain to the American public how the Navy protects basic freedoms as well as maritime commerce. It collects and preserves physical objects, documents, photos, and art, and does research to provide context for what citizens will see of them long into the future.
Of course the Navy’s various commands, depots, and other government buildings always held historical objects, and the Navy used to have a historical-objects storage facility at the Cheatham Annex, near Williamsburg, Virginia. But the warehouses near Richmond—officially, the Naval History and Heritage Command Collection Management Facility—are a massive national treasure house, and its curators and conservators world-class.
• • •
Jeff Bowdoin, head of NHHC’s Curator Branch; Dave Krop, head of Conservation Branch; NHHC Deputy Director Pat Burns, USNR, retired; and other staff escorted me through the Collection Management Facility (CMF).
Pat Burns referred to Congress’ request in 2005 that the Navy consolidate its history and heritage assets under one command for accounting purposes. “This experiment has paid off in spades,” he said. “If you don’t know what’s in your collection, you can’t design a new museum,” and the CMF “is a core foundation for all the other museums.” (Only the Navy’s airplane collection is held elsewhere—in Pensacola at the National Naval Aviation Museum).
“The Navy has spent years finding this facility, upgrading this facility, going through its collections, finding exactly what’s in the collection, [and] getting things up to speed,” he said.
September will be the CMF’s 10th anniversary. It is the home of the Curator Branch and the Conservation Branch.
“This is the…backbone of the whole thing that most people never get to see,” Burns said.
Each of the warehouse’s three bays is the size of two football fields.
“This experiment has paid off in spades,” said NHHC Deputy Director Pat Burns, USNR, retired. “If you don’t know what’s in your collection, you can’t design a new museum,” and the CMF “is a core foundation for all the other museums.”
“A” Bay is not climatized and is used for larger and dirtier objects coming in for processing through private donations or decommissioning ships. I saw a heavy metal apparatus from a ship being worked on when I was there that looked like a tracking system with a spotlight on it, but the bay holds items as various as a circa-1890s fire pumper from the US Naval Academy that was pulled by cadets; Japanese suicide subs from WWII; and a cut-glass chandelier.
“B” Bay stores crates and pallets, mostly from the Cheatham Annex, which are still being opened to see what is in them. I was shown a life-sized fiberglass lion there, mascot of strike fighter squadron VFA-15, who had sponsored a real lion named Pop at the Jacksonville Zoo. The artifact arrived at the facility six months late, causing some anxiety, because another squadron stole him as a prank.
“He is beloved, we love him,” Robyn Filonczuk, Assistant Collection Manager, said.
A few feet away were two toboggans used in the ill-fated Greeley Expedition to the Arctic, which faced suspicions of cannibalism. The sleds had been separated in the past, and no one knew they were associated with each other until curators looked into their registration issues. By their detective work, written documentation was found that proved they were both used specifically for that expedition.
“History wins the day,” I said, and staff members laughed.
“This is the stuff we live for,” Filonczuk said.
“C” Bay provides more open floor space and was intended for “macro-objects,” such as long periscopes from submarines; an enormous anchor from the Navy’s first ship of the line, USS Independence, circa 1814; a deck gun from USS Maine; and an old landing craft. But “we have macro-objects everywhere,” Bowdoin said.
A deck gun from the ill-fated USS Maine. (Photo by John Griswold)
C Bay also temporarily houses objects that might get used again, such as those from USS Enterprise (CVN-65), the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. When construction is complete on the new Enterprise (CVN-80), objects from the older ship will be requested to help give her crew a sense of tradition. One of CVN-65’s anchors already left C Bay for use on another active-duty ship.
Bowdoin told me they once had an object in C Bay that had not yet been catalogued, so no one knew exactly what it was. “[T]hey had a tour for a gentleman [who] stopped dead in his tracks and…said, ‘We’ve been looking for one of these for a long time. […] Can we have that back? We want to outfit it and maybe put it back in service.’
“If the Navy needs something, and we’re able to support it, I really don’t have a problem with that,” Bowdoin said. “To directly support the warfighter…I think that is great.”
CMF also has a high-tech laboratory, climate-controlled archives, a machine shop, and chemical storage lockers. Floor space is maximized with efficient packaging (such as high-strength, polymer Orbis crates, and purpose-built containers for Tomahawk missiles that make great storage) and shelving that rises 30 feet from the floor. Historical objects can be spaced on the work floor for best access.
“If you have too much material lumped together, you get that Indiana Jones kind of style,” Bowdoin said. Still, with returns from the National Museum, they have “had to do a little bit of Tetris for the time being.”
The warehouses are rented for a million dollars a year from the Defense Logistics Agency, which manages the supply chain of our armed services. The head of DLA, a vice admiral at the time, was happy with an NHHC loan of a reproduction cannon for one of his facilities and helped make the deal possible.
“[A] good expenditure of taxpayers’ dollars if there ever was one,” Deputy Director Burns said, as it might have taken $130 million to build from scratch.
The CMF employs twelve full-time federal employees, as well as contractors who work for the Curator Branch on an ongoing “inventory reconciliation project.” The holdings have never had 100 percent inventory, Bowdoin said—“a very long time for an artifact collection”—and the process, the assembled staff agreed, was “long overdue.”
Contractors work steadily, “as resources become available,” to open old boxes, take everything out, photograph the objects, clean them, and process them to twenty-first-century, museum-professional standards. Everything is catalogued and re-boxed for storage or made available for “one of…1600 borrowing organizations across the planet,” Bowdoin said. These include museums, veteran groups, state and local municipalities, historical societies, naval ships and shore commands.
I saw a heavy metal apparatus from a ship being worked on when I was there that looked like a tracking system with a spotlight on it, but the bay holds items as various as a circa-1890s fire pumper from the US Naval Academy that was pulled by cadets; Japanese suicide subs from WWII; and a cut-glass chandelier.
Some of the crates have not been opened for decades, some since being boxed. But if objects do not get into the database, “All you see is boxes,” a staff member told me.
Filonczuk and her team also get to go through incoming crates. “We love it,” she said. “And they find magnificent things in these boxes.”
Years ago, a box was opened that read, simply, “Uniforms.” Inside was Lord Horatio Nelson’s uniform. NHHC did not know they had it or where it had come from. Filonczuk said the reason it was there was “something one would hope accession files would say. Those [files] are our bread and butter of ‘why is this in the collection, and what is it?’”
Bowdoin said the curator who found the uniform, Julie Kowalsky, now Deputy Director, National Museum of the US Navy, is Welsh, “and kind of freaked out…it really touched her.” This emotional power is central to historical curation.
• • •
Stories are how we understand things; making “good” stories is difficult.
Jeff Bowdoin said NHHC has 300,000 artifacts, so it is hard to pick favorites. “It’s like saying, ‘Your father had 300,000 kids, which is his favorite kid?’” He laughed. But though there are “many fantastic stories we can tell with this collection…everyone has one or two they talk about.”
His is a small boat sitting in a cradle on wheels in A Bay.
The boat is the captain’s gig from USS Saginaw, a Navy side-wheeler of Civil War vintage. She wrecked on Kure Atoll, in the Pacific, in 1870, coincidentally looking for shipwrecked sailors. Five men, including two civilian deep-sea divers sworn in to the navy for the task, rowed and sailed the gig 1,500 miles to Hawaii to get help. It took them a month. As they approached the shore of Kauai at last, the gig rolled in the breakers and killed all but one. The man told his tale, and two ships were sent to rescue the men on Kure, who all survived.
Captain’s gig from USS Saginaw in ‘A’ Bay. Aft hatch shows the scratched names of the men who sailed the gig to Hawaii. (Photos by John Griswold)
Bowdoin said the detail of the boat as an artifact “that really tears at your heartstrings is that all five guys, while they were on board, inscribed their names in this aft-most hatch opening.” He pointed to the wooden frame, and I saw the names.
“[O]ne of the reasons I like…this object so much is: honor, duty, sacrifice,” he said. “You can tell this story and interpret it across any spectrum of time in the Navy’s history. It’s not tied to a specific war or any specific battle, and in fact it’s in the interwar period, 1870. [T]hat these men gave their lives for their shipmates…and everyone else was saved…it’s one of the ones that really gets to me.”
Choices would have to be made about how to exhibit the gig in the new national museum. We discussed them in terms of translation—literalness versus the spirit of the story.
“You want it on display,” he said. “Great. But to convey what message?”
He pointed to alterations the crew had made before sailing to Hawaii—hard-decking, more freeboard, steps for masts—then at other things “not authentic to that story,” according to what conservators had seen and read.
“If you look up here,” Dave Krop, Conservation Branch head, said, “this is just quarter-round molding from Lowe’s or Home Depot, right? That’s not made on an island in the 1800s. [O]ur goal would be to identify what we believe to be original material and…remove things that are not, and potentially try to work back towards a certain time period or image.”
The gig had been painted multiple times. Which was the layer at the time of shipwreck? Krop said the Conservation Lab has a capability that is “almost bar-second-to-none, quite impressive.” Krop showed me analysis they did of a paint chip that had been “adjacent to the hull” of the gig. Microscopy at 100 microns revealed twelve layers of paint, each of which they matched with photographic, illustrational, and textual evidence from the historical record.
Using new equipment, he said, they can analyze “layer by layer by layer and determine what are the modern paints and what signatures they have, versus what’s older.” They can then “guestimate” which are the original layers, what the original color was, remove other paints layer-by-layer to get there, or they can replicate the original color with new paint.
“So we’re able to now use scientific data, rather than just history—merge the two—and to have better interpretation of what it is that the American public will see,” he said. They also want to do surface cleaning of the gig, but “our goal would not be to restore it.”
“Do we remove [the graffiti] or do we maintain it?” Bowdoin asked. “It was done by someone who did not enjoy their time in the Navy, shall we say, or who was not very appreciative of the Navy.”
“We don’t want everything to look new,” Bowdoin said. The goal in a museum exhibit, he said, is to use a mix of artifacts, reproductions, artwork, photographs, and interpretive signage “to convey a message about that time.”
Bowdoin said choices about how to present the artifact would be a “discussion” among leadership in Curator Branch, as well as Krop and his conservation team, and navy museum curators and leadership. If questions remained, “Ultimately of course the director of our command [a retired rear admiral] is the Curator for the Navy.”
Bowdoin told me about artifacts for a Vietnam War exhibit that had graffiti on them.
Dave Krop, Conservation Branch head, and staff with an interpretive piece of USS Arizona. (Photo by John Griswold)
“Do we remove [the graffiti] or do we maintain it?” he said. “It was done by someone who did not enjoy their time in the Navy, shall we say, or who was not very appreciative of the Navy.” We all laughed. “So, yes, we could remove it. Krop and his team could have treated it in such a way that…you could bring back the original. Or we could leave the graffiti and talk about it…in conjunction with how a lot of people felt about Vietnam. It makes it more complicated for the docents and the team working at the museum, but ultimately that’s what they chose to do, and I’m glad they did.”
Krop said, “You’re gonna hear us say, ‘It depends,’ a lot.”
“It does. There’s no, ‘If this, then always that,’” Bowdoin said.
• • •
Filonczuk told me that not everything gets saved, such as old signal flags, in poor condition, used as packing material when items were put in crates in the field. I saw a ship’s door with some in-joke message on it in one of the bays that had been labeled “not keeping.”
“Part of deaccessioning is the most proper way to remove an artifact from a collection,” Filonczuk said. Ensigns, flags, and pennants that cannot be in the collection, for instance, are respectfully burned.
“We bring it to our collection committee, so it’s not just one person deciding,” Filonczuk said. “We track all that information down to the individual item…and it goes up to our chief of staff. So there’s a lot of eyes on it. We’re completely transparent. But not every collection can hold everything. [I]n the 1960s, a lot of times the curator was asking for tens of things, and now we ask for three.”
But what about the dozens or hundreds of ships’ bells that come in? I asked.
“Oh, we keep the bells,” she said in a funny voice.
“All the bells?”
“We keep all the bells. We will show you the bells,” she said and laughed. “Anything that’s significant to a ship, the culture, the ship’s history, we want to keep all those things. Do we need 20 battle lanterns? No, they’re all the same.”
Years ago, a box was opened that read, simply, “Uniforms.” Inside was Lord Horatio Nelson’s uniform. NHHC did not know they had it or where it had come from.
Some objects are kept because they are specific, such as two of the 11″ cannons from the Civil War sloop USS Kearsarge, which sank the CSS Alabama off Cherbourg, France, in 1864. Those guns were desirable historically specifically because they had greater range and accuracy. Another example is the stern plate from USS John Hancock, which got special permission from the Navy not to use block lettering, but Hancock’s swirling signature instead. The plate is 8,000 pounds of steel that now sits on massive I-beam supports and wheels in the warehouse.
Other objects are more representative, to show larger historical events or the progress of technologies, such as a homemade hand grenade, made from an RC Cola can by the NLF in Vietnam, which I saw in the US Navy’s Hampton Road Naval Museum last week.
But: “It’s not an encyclopedia collection. We just don’t have the resources for that,” Bowdoin said.
• • •
Maggie Bearden, the newest conservator at CMF, came from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
Bearden’s background is a mix of chemistry, arts, and studio arts, and she has a master of science from the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. There are only a handful of these programs in the United States, but, she said, “[T]he profession’s really developed from…apprenticeship-type [learning] to a really chemistry-heavy and more organized area of study.”
“With that,” she said, “we’ve also transitioned from a lot of very heavy restoration and sometimes over-treating [of] objects in the past [to] a more conservative approach and really taking into account what we’re trying to show [with] these artifacts.”
“What is the goal of this loan?” she said. “Where is it going? […] Sometimes there are requests for objects to go back on ships, and we have to recognize they’re going to be in a challenging environment. They’re not going to be in museum conditions.” In the case of a bell going to a museum, a decision might be made to give it a wax coating that is easily maintained yet prevents rapid tarnishing or corrosion. Other borrowers may not have ideal conditions and need low-maintenance solutions, such as a synthetic resin coating.
The main thing, she said, was the importance of the objects being seen. But every collection is a little different, and since NHHC’s mission is to share the history of the Navy, they want to make sure artifacts reflect a period, ship, or event, but are also respected.
“[T]hey represent, sometimes, a tragic moment in history or a wonderful moment in history,” she said. “We don’t want to erase that evidence from the artifact.”
“[W]e try to preserve the patinas and signs of use as best we can. [W]e just sent a bell out that had a gorgeous patina, but it had signs of rust…from people touching it, and you could see the fingerprints…. [R]ather than polishing the whole bell, we were able to locally clean areas and get a more even patina…that still captured the fact that this was a bell that was in service, and has since aged 60 years, and it’s not meant to be bright and shiny anymore.”
“We get bells that have had all kinds of crazy stuff done to them here—painted ones, steel, chrome, the weirdest things….” She showed me one that had been chromed, but only on its exterior; the exposed copper was corroding. On others, the residue of old polish was hygroscopic and encouraged corrosion. These would have to be made stable before they could go on loan, and how that happened could be tricky.
Object conservators, who deal with metal, wood, ceramics, glass, plastics, and rubber, probably use more chemicals than disciplines that conserve paintings, books, paper, or textiles, said Maggie Bearden, CMF conservator.
She said they often use air abrasion blasting on metal objects to get access to areas small tools cannot reach. In the past they often used silicates, which can be hazardous for technicians. A colleague in the Conservation Lab has been looking for safer blast mediums with fewer health risks. Potato starch was a great find, it turned out, because it had a “good granular size [and] the right Mohs hardness.”
They also use “endless” chemicals and compounds. “We’re always looking for the magic bullet that is safe for us and great for the object,” she said. Object conservators, who deal with metal, wood, ceramics, glass, plastics, and rubber, probably use more chemicals than disciplines that conserve paintings, books, paper, or textiles, she said. “Greener” chemicals, meaning better for the earth, may not be safer for humans. The objects themselves can contain lead paint, radiographic material, asbestos, mercury, and other hazards. CMF conservators use hood trunks, full-face and half-mask respirators, full PPE, Tyvek suits, etc.
Hundreds of ships’ bells in ‘B’ Bay. Many objects at the Collection Management Facility (CMF) are hugely heavy. (Photos by John Griswold)
Regulations are “extremely tight on the base, where things are tightly controlled,” she said.
“Favorite chemical?” I said.
She laughed. “Ethanol. EDTA.”
• • •
The staff of the CMF’s Conservation Lab had just moved back into their space after a two-year HVAC-envelope project. We walked in over sticky mats that collected grit from shoes. Senior Conservator Yoonjo Lee said the space was “a university [chemistry] lab, basically” that was open-concept, with everything on casters to rearrange the room because objects they work on can be small (a pen Harry Truman used to sign into existence the Army/Navy Nurse Corps), or very large (the flag from USS Maine). Wood, textiles, and other porous materials are worked on here.
Lee showed me an antique bomber jacket that came into the collection in 1989. Whatever it had been treated with had degraded and gotten sticky, and the shearling collar was falling apart. Staff use analytical equipment to help them discover what materials are “before we even start to think about treatment,” such as Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) and a Keyence microscope, which can be used for elemental analysis at the 10-micron level.
(The lab staff had pulled up the digital-microscopy image of an ordinary penny that had been air-abraded with different blasting mediums—potassium carbonate, sodium, calcium bicarbonate—as a test. With the naked eye, all areas looked equal. At high magnification, and by moving light around, I could see great differences in surface texture, and one area looked badly damaged. Pitting and surface disruption create more spaces for moisture and other things to collect and cause more degradation.)
Lee had been working on a cape from a WWI women’s uniform and was told it had plastic buttons, but there was “no way,” she said. Under the microscope the buttons showed Schrager stress lines, and Lee thought maybe they were ivory, or a wood product. Using FTIR and her own research, she confirmed they were made of Tagua nuts, which the army had used to make “vegetable ivory” for uniform buttons. Natural materials like this, or the wool of a smaller, tattered Maine pennant that I saw, can be damaged by insects—one reason they need a climatized envelope.
I asked Bearden, who had been taking apart the presentation box for the Truman pen with miniature tools in the lab, what percent of the time they accidentally caused damage to an object, which then had to be repaired too.
Artifacts are “under our control and purview,” said Dave Krop, Conservation Branch head. But, “If things stay in our warehouse forever, we’re doing the wrong thing.”
“Surprisingly little, considering how many artifacts we work on,” she said. “Most conservators are trained from a…fine arts background, so once you start branching into things like military collections, we have a lot of strange things here like ordnance, guns, parts of mechanical systems of ships, things you’re not really trained on [in school]. And sometimes they’re very unusual materials…different alloys of metals, not what a bronze sculpture of the fifth century might have been. Considering how unusual the materials are, I’m surprised there’s not more things that go wrong, quite honestly.”
Krop, head of the lab, said they all grew up going to museums and understand that curiosity is part of human nature. People like to touch historical artifacts.
“The majority of what is done [in this lab] is with gloves, or hands off,” he said, “[but] there is room for exception… If we become gatekeepers with just a lock, we’re not providing access, and that can become a problem.”
He said, there was “an interesting opportunity for us [when] the former head of the Pacific Fleet said, ‘You know what, we have all this remainder material…from the USS Arizona that’s piled up on shore. We want to see if there’s a way we can get that material on to active-duty ships of the fleet.’
“Obviously there are a lot of parties involved—who has control of the materials, how it’s utilized—but we were posed with [a challenge]” that involved stabilizing pieces of Arizona that were “rotting on shore, literally just rusting to pieces,” and “get them on display for the spirit of the warfighter, to inspire people.”
Nicholas McGraw, museum specialist, whose great-grandfather was on the Arizona at the time this Christmas menu was used. (Photos by John Griswold)
They were sent a couple of large, “corroded, wrought-iron fragments” from salvage operations that “otherwise literally would have stayed there another fifty years and then disappeared in the dust.” After trying various off-the-shelf compounds to “stabilize the artifact without doing a traditional treatment,” they cut pieces of the waste material with a bandsaw in A Bay and mounted pieces for distribution to the fleet, and others for the Education Director to let school kids pass them around. He handed me one of these to hold.
Artifacts are “under our control and purview,” Krop said. But, “If things stay in our warehouse forever, we’re doing the wrong thing.”
• • •
Filonczuk led me through the climate-controlled archival spaces where textiles, paper documents, and other sensitive objects are stored. I saw, in oversized flat drawers, a promotion order signed by President Lincoln, and the 1918 Christmas menu from USS Arizona.
In a large frame was the hand-painted bedsheet reading “We Stand by You” that hung in solidarity from the German destroyer FGS Lutjens, after 9-11, when she came alongside USS Winston Churchill on September 14, 2001.
There were personal connections just within the room: Navy Press Liaison Monica McCoy’s husband was a Navy photographer on the Churchill and took the photo of the banner that we all remember from that day.
Robyn Filonczuk, assistant collection manager, Curator Branch, with a famous 9-11 artifact. (Photo by John Griswold)
Nicholas McGraw, the Museum Specialist who showed me the Arizona menu, had a great-grandfather, Ted Baxter, who was a Fireman 1st Class on the ship in that period. Monica pointed out that especially in the all-volunteer era of the armed services, when fewer people have served, museums provide opportunities for them to discover their own emotional connections to historical military objects such as these.
Nearby, within the new HVAC envelope, were rows upon rows of rolling archive shelves. For two years these parts of the collection had to be relocated to other climate-controlled spaces, and for the last seven months the main task has been inventorying every box coming back into the room, remediating issues of objects not originally packed correctly, and solving location issues and cataloguing questions.
“So: once [something] couldn’t be found, now it can be found. Which is a really big deal,” Filonczuk said.
I asked about conversion of paper records to digital.
“They both still co-exist,” Bowdoin said. The CMF uses an off-the-shelf, standard museum collection database, Emu, from the company Axiell. Accession files on paper have been moved to DC. Records have been digitized up to 2014 and are updated daily. A box originally labeled “one flag,” may now have an accession record that reflects which ship it came from, when it got to the NHHC, and other pertinent details.
• • •
Bowdoin told me, “We are very unique within the Navy. There’s no other command in the Navy that does what we do. [W]e are not putting rounds downrange, we are not fixing ships, we are not getting planes off the deck. So we are competing for those kinds of priorities, which are national and global priorities.
“[We try] to get [people] to understand the importance of History and Heritage, and the intense amount of time it takes to properly conserve and treat an object, which can literally take people weeks upon weeks for just a single object, if you’re doing it correctly…. It’s hard for [budget-makers] sometimes to justify that.”
“We have been very, very fortunate with a series of Chiefs of Naval Operations and Secretaries of the Navy who find the value in history and heritage,” Bowdoin told me. And NHHC is “always trying to find ways” to help people understand what they do, “always trying to get the word out,” he said. This includes attending commemoration events on Capitol Hill, and embedding some of the command’s sixty-one PhDs in history in the Pentagon.
This provides “honest-to-god operational value, with applied history,” he said. “When they speak, audiences become bigger and bigger, and higher-ranking and higher-ranking….”
The Collection Management staff is already in conversations with the staff of the new Navy museum about what they would like to display. They also work closely with the Marine Corps (formally in the Department of the Navy) and have been asked to consult with Army and Air Force curators. They got a call from Space Force a few months ago, and after the requisite joke about what a new military branch might have to put in a museum, agreed to help.
They also provide other, more unexpected services.
When a ship decommissions, they try to get “one if not a team of people out there” to help determine which objects will tell its story. Last year this was six ships, but with shore installations there might be as many as forty sites.
Conservation Branch also provides NHHC’s warfighter training, Dave Krop said, which means “train[ing] Marine Corps [as well as sailors and Coast Guard personnel] how to rapidly and accurately identify cultural heritage in disaster environments.”
“The goal is not to turn Marines into conservators or collection managers,” Krop said, “but…if they’re ever in a situation in the field where there’s heritage at risk, and they’re the ones who happen to be there,” they can be trained to know what to do. They have trained 600 people to date. Recently CMF staff went to Quantico to simulate a tsunami-ravaged museum in the Pacific.
“We ran fifty-odd Marines through that scenario, where they had to execute the training they received from us and then rapidly and hopefully accurately survey what was there. So that’s another way we can take the skills that we have [and] support the greater Navy family directly….”
Krop said he was paraphrasing a Marine in the class who said, “‘Wait, you expect me to blow stuff up and then turn around and document and protect it?’
“Yeah, hundred percent…it’s also about how to communicate with others and change mindsets and perceptions. It’s part of what we’re doing.”
Author’s note: Special thanks to Captain Patrick C. Burns, U.S. Navy (Retired), Deputy Director of the Naval History and Heritage Command. In addition to a highly-decorated, 30-year naval career and a 17-year civil service career, he was awarded a Master of Arts degree in Leadership and Public Policy from Washington University in St. Louis / Brookings Institution.
