45th Infantry Division Museum in OKC built to honor famed 'Thunderbirds'

A massive former armory, studded with reddish brick and sandstone and standing at 2145 NE 36 in Oklahoma City, has housed the 45th Infantry Division Museum for nearly 45 years.

Oklahoma's largest state-run military history facility, the museum was built in the mid-1970s to honor the famed "Thunderbirds" who fought on the front lines in World War II.

But museum curator Mike Gonzales said the consecutive crises of the pandemic and high inflation have severely impacted the once-steady flow of visitors to the site, jeopardizing its ability to keep the doors open.

"With the high cost of gasoline, our visitation has just plummeted," Gonzales said. "We used to get a considerable number of people from surrounding states, and they're gone now. We don't see them anymore. And those locals who come in are just trickling in, so it's really hard right now."

More: Historic Oklahoma armories give us today's memories while preserving the past

The 45th Infantry Division 'treated like kings' by the French

A longstanding fixture in Oklahoma City, the 45th Infantry Division Museum is named after the military unit that was part of the Oklahoma Army National Guard from 1920 to 1968. Nicknamed “the Thunderbirds,” they took part in the 1943 and 1944 operations of the World War II Italian campaign, where the Allied Powers liberated the country from the Axis Powers.

Most famously, the infantry guardsmen fought in battles that helped secure France from the Nazis in 1944 and were among the first to liberate the Dachau concentration camp near Munich in 1945.

“The people of southeastern France remember the 45th Division and the Thunderbirds very well,” Gonzales said. “There’s a little town down there called Epinal, a beautiful little town, and just on the outskirts of it is an American military cemetery. There are over 5,000 American soldiers buried there, many of them men from the 45th Infantry Division, and what the townspeople do is they adopt a grave. Every one of the 5,000 graves in that cemetery have been adopted by people in the city of the region.”

The Thunderbirds also saw combat during battles of attrition on the front lines of the Korean War in the early 1950s.

By the time the unit was deactivated in 1968, the 45th Infantry Division had been awarded 10 Medals of Honor, 12 campaign streamer flag decorations, the French Croix de Guerre decoration and the South Korean Presidential Unit Citation.

More: See photos from the 45th Infantry Division Museum's annual Memorial Day Ceremony

Gonzales said the Oklahoma City museum's existence is largely owed to the late Frederick Alvin Daugherty, a federal district judge who frequently advocated for formal recognition of the infantry guardsmen's service. In the mid-1960s, an act passed by state legislators created the museum, placing it under the supervision of The Adjutant General of Oklahoma, and in 1976 it officially opened.

Museum a time capsule of World War II, Civil War artifacts

While the museum is primarily dedicated to the memory of the 45th infantry Division, the facility boasts a wide array of historical artifacts, ranging from the Spanish exploration of the Americas and the Civil War of the 1860s to the Korean War of the 1950s and the Persian Gulf conflicts at the turn of the 21st century.

For example, Gonzales considers the "crown jewel" of the museum's collection a rare Civil War-era Confederate sharpshooter's rifle, created by English inventor Joseph Whitworth.

"Whitworth was kind of the Thomas Edison of Great Britain, and his rifle was literally state-of-the-art in 1863," Gonzales said. "The Confederates originally purchased 150 of them for $500 a piece in gold, but the one that we have in our collection is one of literally only five still left in existence."

Gonzales shares his enthusiasm for Civil War-era weaponry and memorabilia with the late Jordan B. Reaves, whose namesake Reaves Military Weapons Collection is on the display at the museum. Collected over the span of 30 years, the installation presents weapons from the American Revolution through the Vietnam War.

Another of the museum's major collections represents the work of Bill Mauldin, the cartoonist within the 45th Infantry Division whose syndicated World War II comic strip characters Willie and Joe resonated so deeply with men in combat that he eventually earned two Pulitzer Prizes.

"You don't have to spend an hour in uniform to appreciate the humor," Gonzales said. "But I have guys who'd come through the museum right after coming home from Afghanistan who'd see the panels we have here by Mauldin and they'd laugh, remembering what certain things were like for them. It's great, timeless stuff."

The museum is also home to a collection of items that once belonged to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, who died of suicide in 1945 as the Allied Forces were closing in on the German heartland.

"We even have the mirror that came from his private lavatory in the Berlin bunker, so you just have to know, when you see this thing, that this is the last place that Adolf Hitler saw his own reflection," Gonzales said. "It's a sobering thought to wonder if, in the last days of his life, Hitler stood in front of that mirror and saw what he had become, what he had done."

More volunteers, donations needed

The museum regularly hosts Veterans Day and Memorial Day events, but there will be no Fourth of July ceremony this year. The holiday falls on a Monday, and the museum is only open Tuesdays through Sundays.

Gonzales, who has worked at the museum for 35 years, said the museum's once-robust volunteer staff is dwindling. He hopes more residents, especially younger people, will step forward and commit to helping preserve the memory of the 45th Infantry Division.

"One thing our youth need to know is that they're growing up and they're enjoying our freedoms and they're enjoying opportunities, but every freedom we do in our country was purchased at an exceedingly high price in blood," Gonzales said. "And we owe every one of those guys that's pushing up a white cross right now our everything. They gave up their tomorrows for our todays."

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Oklahoma's 45th Infantry Museum in OKC honors Thunderbirds