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Chris Bergeron
Daily News Correspondent
Entering the American Heritage Museum, the first thing visitors see is the opening sentence of the Declaration of Independence, “When in the Course of human events .” on the Orientation Theatre wall.
Like soldiers rushing into combat, they will continue into an immersive World War I Trench Experience in which one of the few surviving M1917 6-ton tanks built in the U.S. leads an American-led force into battle.
Welcome to a history lesson about courage, freedom and the military s role in protecting democracy with 40-ton tanks as teaching aids.
Visitors will walk through a 67,000 square foot building in which gargantuan armored vehicles - and a captured Iraqi SCUD missile and other rare military artifacts – offer vital lessons about history too often misconstrued in the hot gas of political rhetoric.
The Few, the Proud â Iwo Jima
On 23 February 1945, six Marines, with Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, 5th Division, raised our American flag atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima. The flag on the 546-foot dormant volcanic cone at the southern tip of the island, could be seen for a great distance, and was an inspiration for our Marines and Sailors. Three of the six Marines pictured, Sergeant Michael Strank, Corporal Harlon Block, and Private First Class Franklin Sousley, were killed in action before the battle concluded on 26 March.
There were 6,871 Americans killed and 19,217 wounded on Iwo Jima. The Medal of Honor was awarded to 22 Marines and five Sailors, 14 of them posthumously (13 Marines, one Sailor). Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander of Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean Areas, noted of the Americans on Iwo, âuncommon valor was a common virtue.â