Local Museum Designer Pays Homage to POWs

You enter through a pair of heavy iron gates. A narrow path meanders through jagged rocks into a darkened room where a gruff voice commands you to halt.

The lights come up and you are surrounded by soldiers, their rifles aimed straight at you.

It’s not exactly the kind of experience one would expect in a museum, but that kind of unorthodoxy is exactly what Thousand Oaks POW activist William Maple intended when he drafted plans six years ago for a national museum dedicated to America’s prisoners of war.

“It’s an experience that is so moving and I thought could be best told if visitors could in some way share it,” he said.

The National Prisoner of War Museum, built by the National Park Service with federal money and private contributions, was dedicated April 9 in Andersonville, Ga., next to the site of an infamous Civil War camp where the Confederacy held Union prisoners. It is the nation’s first museum devoted to the experience of an estimated 800,000 Americans who were held captive during times of war.

For Maple, principal designer of the museum’s permanent exhibits, the work is his “proudest project,” capping years of research and work. It gave him a perspective that few have on a nightmarish and largely overlooked aspect of war.

“It’s not a topic that was ever discussed very much then or even now,” he said. “But it’s an important part of our history, and such a passionate part as well, that it deserves to be told.”

It also is a story that Maple is well qualified to tell. A museum exhibit designer by profession, he also has been a POW activist for years.

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As an exhibit designer, Maple has designed displays for dozens of museums and other clients, ranging from the National Park Service to Sunkist. He is now busy designing a marine center for the city of Redondo Beach.

As a POW activist, Maple convinced the city of Thousand Oaks to take better care of its memorial freedom trees and urged the city to commission a sculpture in memory of prisoners of war.

Both his stature in the profession and his passion for the POW cause helped him get the job, Maple said.

Although he has long been dedicated to the cause, the museum project deepened his understanding of those forgotten heroes.

“I know [the museum] was a success because during the opening I saw POWs point to a picture or something and say, ‘That was it,’ ” Maple said. “I’m thankful that I was able to do this and open up something that’s been hidden for so long.”

The National Prisoner of War Museum is not so much a museum as it is an interactive exhibit designed to pull visitors in and give them an inkling of what it was like to be a prisoner of war.

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It revolves around a core of themes, each of which is illustrated in different rooms, which Maple found common to all prisoner-of-war experiences whether they be from the war in the Persian Gulf, Vietnam or the American Revolution.

The first, illustrated by the circle of soldiers with rifles aimed at entering visitors, is capture.

Another theme is the forced march, demonstrated with pictures illustrating the Bataan Death March, endured by thousands of U.S. Marines after their capture by the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II.

The exhibit, which is housed in a 10,000-square-foot building, details the brutality suffered by the captured as they were forced to march to camp.

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From there, visitors have the opportunity to experience what living in a camp was like, with video presentations, historical photographs and artifacts from old camps.

Among the most important aspects of camp life, Maple said, was the mail.

“News from home was their lifeline. That’s what kept many of them going,” he said.

The exhibit also examines the lives of POW family members, some of whom are still waiting today to learn the fates of loved ones taken prisoner in Vietnam, and the toll it took on their lives.

“For them the entire experience was heart-wrenching,” he said. “They had to ask themselves whether to remarry or plan a funeral when they didn’t know if their husband or father was alive or ever coming back.”

The exhibits explore the privation suffered by prisoners of war, providing replicas of the dank gray rooms inside the Hanoi Hilton--the ultimate destination for many of the 766 American servicemen taken captive during the Vietnam War.

“It’s a very powerful experience sitting in there,” Maple said. “I saw many people who found that exhibit the most moving.”

The museum then goes on to illustrate how prisoners kept up their morale and the relationships they forged during their time in captivity.

One section details how some tried to escape, and another illustrates the return to freedom and how former POWs readjusted to life at home.

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While Maple’s attention is now focused on his next project, he considers the POW museum his masterpiece, and doubts he’ll ever be commissioned to create something with which he has such an emotional connection.

“I’m most proud of that museum because it has given a voice to a group of people who haven’t had one before,” he said. “I was blessed to be part of making that happen.”