the weapons of man (the last museum part 2)

Location: Auckland War Memorial Museum
Gallery: War Memorial Displays

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when i first got here to the auckland war memorial museum i was wondering how much of a memorial this place would be compared to museum...

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it turns out they've mixed the two elements so well you can hardly tell one from the other.

auckland is by far the best display i've seen on new zealand's involvement in the world at wars. the whole top floor (third to precise) is about the last few really big fights between humans.

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the first thing i ran into was a war plane called a zero. having had a close encounter with war planes like this i don't know why you'd ever downplay them by calling them a zero. i can assure you any flying machine of death is scary, and definitely not something to be underestimating!

my favourite display was on new zealand's 28th division. they were a group of purely maori soldiers that did some pretty amazing, but scary things in world war 2...

i could spend all day typing it up, but i have tons more museum to cover. so just check out these links here, and this one.

they had lots of cool artifacts from the 28th.

they also had a lot of war weapons, just like the ones from the movies. unlike on TV though they're not fun or cool. these things were actually used to kill people...

apart from their use in films, i don't get why people need to use weapons to kill one another. now i'm not saying i'm against killing. as a carnivore i understand the need to kill things. just not unless you have too. in that case you use your teeth and claws... okay well i guess humans don't have those... but to use killing weapons on one another?

we tyrannosaurs occasionally fought with one or another, but not with the sole intent of killing one another. rather it was for things like food, territory, or girls (or boys i guess if you were a girl t-rex), but if during these fights one of us got killed it was an accident.

humans on the other hand seem to go out of their way to use their big brains to find new ones to snuff each other out... such a waste.

as though to reinforce the idea that humans often need enemies i found the zeroes nemesis on the other side of the third floor. a spitfire... though i think the name was a bit silly. it spat bullets, but not fire.

it was neat though that the museum had acquired these two enemies. keeping them together as per their historic function.

the whole floor wasn't about celebrating war though. it was about remembering the horror of it, and hopefully getting people to prevent it. i liked the museums premise of showing people that war was bad. hence the war memoir.

more of the galleries soon