Great War

Started: 2026-02-02 20:22:21

Submitted: 2026-02-02 22:21:49

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Seeing the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City

On our first full day in Kansas City, we went to Bethany's apartment for breakfast, then caught the free streetcar to the World War I museum just south of downtown.

Kiesa, Julian, and Calvin walk into the WWI Museum

The storm that rolled through the day before, bringing wind and blowing snow, had passed; leaving in its wake bright sun and bitter cold. The forecast high was 25 degrees, so I wore a winter hat (a beanie from Apple from about four years ago, which I never wear back home because we don't have real seasons) as I tried to convince my kids to bundle up against the cold.

Tower at the WWI Museum

The museum was originally built in the 1920s, in the immediate aftermath of the war, while the memory of the war was still fresh and returning veterans wanted to a museum to memorialize it. The museum is built on top of a grassy hill forming a park in the city, overlooking the train station. The building descends underground at the top of the hill, as if it were a fortified bunker, with a long trench dug into the top of the hill forming the access to the main entrance. The plaza on the top of the building, and the Art Deco tower at the center of the plaza, were closed for our visit due to the cold.

British 5-inch heavy field gun, Mark I

Inside the museum a bridge led over a field of poppies to the galleries. The galleries were laid out in two big sections, forming a U: Before 1917 on the left (before the United States entered the war), and after 1917 on the right. Most of the historical context was placed in a big wall of text along the inner walls, describing the chronology of the war in detail. I found this hard to read and mostly skipped it; there was so much text to read and so many people trying to read it all at once that I gave up on reading it. Instead I looked at the artifacts in the display cases opposite: field guns (the explanatory text said this one was originally intended to be pulled by horse, but that proved unwieldy in the muddy French battlefields so they converted it to be pulled by a tractor), guns, trench knives, mess kits, "hate belts" where soldiers collected trinkets from enemy uniforms, and other relics of industrialized war. The artifacts were interesting, and were described in detail; but they were museum-grade artifacts removed from their context and it was difficult to feel the scope of a global war and the cost in human life and suffering that it imposed. The only exhibit that got close to depicting the miserable conditions in the trenches on the Western Front was a diorama depicting a French trench, with a mannequin wearing a French uniform charging to defend his trench against an enemy attack. Somehow the static display felt cold and wet and slimy; I thought I could feel the gooey mud underfoot and the sense of dread oozing down the walls of the trench.

Recreation of a French trench

One of the artifacts was a set of German plate trench armor, which I immediately recognized from a Halloween costume I helped Calvin make a year or two ago. (We used EVA foam for the costume, rather than plate steel, which made it much lighter and easier to wear.)

German trench armor

The second gallery covered the war after 1917, when the United States entered the war after being pulled out of its isolationism. The first exhibits covered American manufacturing of war material: every soldier needed to be equipped with a uniform and all their equipment, the sort of thing an emerging industrial power could do if it put its mind to it. There was a display case filled with jackets worn by veterans who brought their uniforms home.

Visitors in the galleries at the WWI Museum

The gallery opened up with more space to show more artifacts: more guns and mortars on the floor; more uniforms and rifles and machine guns and knives in display cases. There was an exhibit that recreated the effect of walking into a 20-foot crater formed by a large explosive shell hitting the remains of a farmhouse. And finally an example of the super-weapon that turned the tide of war after years of brutal trench warfare resulting in effective stalemate: the tank, depicted here by a tiny French model with a crew of two, which served in both the French army as well as the American Expeditionary Forces.

French Renault FT17 tank

The museum closed with a short video discussing the armistice that ended the war; but also foreshadowing the next war twenty years later.

I left the main galleries and nipped downstairs to the open archives where the museum keeps more of its collection that it doesn't have room for on display. There were stacks of rifles and pistols; uniforms and bayonettes; and elaborate pieces of art carved out of spent casing for large shells. Nothing was labeled, but it began to give me the impression of the sheer volume of artifacts in this particular museum's collection, which represent a fraction of the total amount of equipment produced for the war.

Open archives at the WWI Museum

I dropped by the gift shop on my way out, still worried about the capacity of my luggage to handle any additional artifacts for the week remaining in my trip. I picked up a copy of The Guns of August, because this seemed like the ideal place to buy it; and because I wanted to learn more about the events leading up to the war.

Kiesa, Julian, and Calvin walk towards Kansas City Union Station

We spent most of the afternoon at the museum; we emerged, slightly dazed by everything we had seen, into the bright chilly late afternoon sun. We headed down the hill to Union Station in search of a snack and found a coffee shop with a reasonable selection of pastries. Properly fortified we looked around the station, which was still decorated for Christmas, along with a couple of permanent displays including service china from the passenger rail lines that traveled through Kansas City in the last century.

Inside Kansas City Union Station

We thought that we should try to get Julian a winter scarf, which he might wear more readily than a hat, so we crossed the enclosed sky bridge to the Westin across the street (complete with a large atrium with a waterfall and tropical plants) and then to the adjoining mall, which was packed with people but didn't seem to have anything we actually wanted to buy. We headed back across the sky bridge to the streetcar back to Bethany's apartment for supper, then returned to our hotel for the night.