The war’s brutality is not merely implied; it’s shockingly, appallingly explicit. Photos of burnt and battered corpses are plentiful. There are shots of Japanese soldiers using live Chinese prisoners for bayonet practice and the charred dead left in the rubble of the German city of Dresden after a massive Allied firebombing raid. Mountains of starved, gassed victims of Nazi concentration camps are underlined with the simple words of an American paratrooper who found them: “Now I know why I am here.”

A few sections of the museum are posted with warnings that they may be inappropriate for children, but the truth is that there’s hardly any part of it that doesn’t contain disturbing material. Practically nobody gets through it without some tears, Nick Mueller, the former University of New Orleans historian who’s the museum’s president and CEO, makes no apologies for its blunt approach.

“It was a brutal war,” he says. “People need to remember that this was a war that was a fight to the finish — for our nation, our democracy, for civilization itself. … Sixty-five million people died in that war, and two-thirds were civilians. That’s a big number, a horrific loss of life. Over 400,000 Americans died, many more were maimed and wounded. We don’t want to glorify that. War isn’t pretty.”

But the museum is not without its lighter moments, some ruefully so. A bombardier who flew on Gen. Jimmy Doolittle’s famous 1942 air raid on Tokyo — the first American attack on Japanese soil of the war, after a long string of military catastrophes — recounts bailing out of his shot-up plane over China, only to land in a rice paddy generously fertilized with human excrement. “It sounds funny now,” he indignantly declares, “but it ain’t funny out there, I can tell you.”

A newspaper comic strip published at the end of the war helpfully offers tips to Americans on how to tell apart their Chinese allies and their Japanese enemies: “Make them say lalapalooza.” A woman smiles wryly as she remembers her soldier husband’s vexed reaction at learning she had liberated herself from keeping house to work in a military factory. The gear their commanders issued soldiers before the D-Day invasion, including packages of Ultrex Platinum condoms (“troops found these useful in keeping sand and water out of rifle barrels,” an information panel observes with a straight face) and a tourism booklet titled Pocket Guide To France. A Rupert, one of the large dolls dressed like paratroopers and armed with firecrackers dropped into France in an attempt to confuse the German troops about the direction of the Allied attack. And the message to his girlfriend one American soldier painted on his empty tent in a British meadow before heading to his Normandy-bound ship: Sorry Jean Had To Go. Johnny.

The vast collection of material on D-Day even extends into what might termed alternative history — a handwritten speech that Allied commander Dwight Eisenhower carried in his pocket in case the Normandy invasion was thrown back into the sea: “If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.” Fortunately, it never had to be delivered.

The enormous amount of D-Day content is a remnant of the museum’s origins. It was founded by the late University of New Orleans historian Stephen Ambrose, who while researching a book on the invasion learned that the thousands of landing craft that carried troops and tanks ashore that day had been designed and constructed by New Orleans shipbuilder Andrew Higgins. (Laten, when Eisenhower was president, he declared that “Higgins is the man who won the war for us.”)