WALLA WALLA, Wash. – The Fort Walla Walla Museum is moving forward in time with its living history event. The weekend event that normally displays artifacts and stories from earlier eras held boots and tracks on the ground with help from World War II Reenactors like Wesley Doyle.
The event displayed the types of weapons and vehicles used during the war, something Doyle said makes it easier to understand the literal weight soldiers had to carry from battlefield to battlefield.
“It’s easy to say, ‘Oh this is heavy.’ it’s a lot different when you hand it to someone and then you realize how heavy it really is,” Doyle said.
To help prepare themselves for the event Doyle said the reenactors do a lot of research and talk to as many veterans as possible to get a first-hand account of what it was like. He said the ability to talk to living veterans gets more challenging as the years go on.
“They’re not here forever, and those stories- 600,000 people came back with stories, and they weren’t all told. That’s our heritage. That’s America,” he said.
Doyle said next year more people have signed up to help reenact and they might even be able to show what deployment looked like.
The museum doesn’t have any WWII exhibits up at the moment, but it does have some stories and pictures in its archives.
As for local history, Doyle said troops passed through Walla Walla Itself where a transfer camp and POW camp were as a part of Camp Lewis which later became a part of the joint base Lewis-McChord.
