But it's not a ship; it's the refurbished 19th century Steamboat Hotel, which houses the Admiral Nimitz Museum, now part of a larger museum complex: The National Museum of the Pacific War. The Nimitz Museum houses treasures from the war against the Japanese that sprawled across more than 35 million square miles of ocean and an intimidating amount of the Asian continent.

The museum is under administrative control of the Texas Historical Commission. The Texas legislature recently passed a bill to fund $9 million for an additional 40,000 square feet. The museum director, Joe Cavanaugh, noted, “We are no longer a small historic site.”

A block away from the Nimitz Museum is the newer National Museum of the Pacific War, a cavernous enclosure that tells the story of one savage island campaign after another that cost the lives of more than 100,000 Americans.

The museum is a graphic time machine that takes you back to stark reminders of a bloody no-quarter struggle that lasted for 1,060 days before the enemy surrendered in Tokyo Bay. There is no other museum like it.

Shortly after the Japanese wrecked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor on that infamous Sunday in late 1941, ADM Chester W. Nimitz was catapulted over 28 other admirals and appointed Commander in Chief of the Pacific fleet. He would command 2.3 million men and women, 500 ships and 20,000 aircraft to crush the Japanese Empire and its grandiose dreams of a “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.”

With Japan in ruins, ADM Nimitz returned to the States to become Chief of Naval Operations. In 1966, Fredericksburg citizens approached him (he was born just up the street from the Steamboat Hotel) and said they wanted to create a museum in his honor. The admiral agreed, but only if the museum would tell the story of all the men and women under his command who helped vanquish a bitter enemy.

The Nimitz Museum opened in 1969 and for 30 years was confined to the refurbished hotel and adjoining outdoor displays. In 1999, former Navy torpedo-plane pilot (and U.S. President) George H. W. Bush opened another overhauled building, an immense former grocery store that houses an astonishing collection of wartime artifacts.

The museum complex spreads across nine acres and encompasses more than 34,000 square feet of exhibit space. It is a national park with the mission of educating Americans in the most realistic way possible about the war in the Pacific while paying tribute to those who served there from 1941 through 1945.

As the war unfolded in the Pacific, strange names were imprinted on the American conscience: Tassafaronga, Gavutu, Finschafen, Betio, Eniwetok, Myitkina, Saipan, Suribachi, Cabanatuan, Kyushu. These names now seem as strange to most Americans as the war seems distant.

The museum's mission is to make these names and hundreds more familiar. Staff members guide students through the seemingly endless collection and take the educational show to schools throughout the state. Volunteers are on hand to answer questions.

The museum courtyard is fronted with secondary batteries that once were part of ships' antiaircraft defenses. Barrels point into the Texas sky as though tracking incoming kamikazes.

The vast interior is filled with more than 15,000 land, sea and aerial weapons and other artifacts gathered throughout the Pacific: Nambu pistols, seamen's jumpers, a pristine U.S. Navy TBM torpedo bomber, a rusted hatch cover from the underwater grave of USS Arizona (BB-39), M-1 carbines, samurai swords and a 1940s mustard-colored Marine flannel shirt.

Other items include a Japanese floatplane called Rex; a gun sight from USS Ward (DD-139), the destroyer that first fired on a Japanese submarine at Pearl Harbor; a Val dive bomber untangled from the undergrowth on Rabaul; and enemy field guns, a few of which look small enough to have been designed for artillerymen in Jonathan Swift's fictional land of Lilliput.

The savagery of the Pacific war is told graphically. A legend on the wall reminds visitors that war involves killing on a grand scale. Stark black-and-white photographs show images such as Japanese corpses sprawled inside a shellhole, American prisoners of war starved to skeletal frames and five Marines carrying a stretcher loaded with a poncho-covered dead comrade.

Exploring the compartmented interior yields impressive surprises.

A twin-engine North American B-25 Mitchell bomber warms up on a carrier deck, replicating the scene aboard USS Hornet (CVA-12) on April 18, 1942, when then-Lieutenant Colonel James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle, U.S. Army Air Corps led the first American air strike against the Japanese homeland.

In another area of the museum, visitors come face to face with a long, black steel tube, a midget enemy submarine that came to grief at Pearl Harbor. It seems ready to detach itself from its mother sub for a rendezvous with history.

The Saga of HA-19

Sublieutenant Kaduo Sakamaki believed he was bound for glory when he crawled inside the 74-foot black metal cigar on the night of Dec. 6, 1941, just outside the entrance to Pearl Harbor. The cramped mini-sub was armed with two torpedoes.

Sakamaki hoped to sink an American carrier, or a battleship, or a cruiser at the very least. His small submersible was one of five launched from mother ships, none of which was expected to survive the attack.

Lurking at the harbor entrance, he bobbed to the surface to see where he was and if a carrier or battleship was within range. He was greeted by depth charges and frantically submerged.

Sakamaki's sub popped up and down like a cork. Aground for the 10th time, the groggy Japanese sailor popped the hatch and abandoned ship. Sakamaki thought he was swimming for Lanai, but he staggered ashore on Oahu and collapsed.

Sakamaki became the first Japanese prisoner of war. He begged to be allowed to “die an honorable death,” a request that drew guffaws from his American captors.

The black steel cigar was hauled off the reef, shipped back to the States and put on public display during War Bond drives. This was the first solid evidence of an American triumph over Japanese arms at a time when the war was a disaster all across the Pacific.

Salvaging a Battlefield

Relics from distant Pacific battlefields have their own stories to tell. The museum's M3 Stuart light tank with a ragged hole gaping in the front glacis is a witness of vicious close-in fighting in a place now largely forgotten.

In the summer of 1942 the Japanese poured thousands of infantry into New Guinea in a drive to Port Moresby, within medium-bomber range of the Australian continent.

Armor and infantry of the 18th Australian Brigade and men of the U.S. 32nd (Red Arrow) Infantry Division waded ashore at Buna to pry the Japanese from pillboxes and treetops throughout the steamy jungle.

On the sweltering Christmas Eve of 1942, Sergeant Jack Lattimore, tank commander with the Australian 2/6 Armoured Regiment, was making his way under heavy fire when his tank bellied on a coconut log. Lattimore's tank got going again and faced a Japanese gun emplacement head-on. A 76 mm round slammed through the Stuart's thin 37 mm armor, killed the driver and took off Lattimore's leg.

The fighting around Buna ended on Jan. 22, 1943. The battle cost 1,954 American and 863 Australian casualties. Lattimore's shot-up tank rusted in peace for nearly 30 years until an American named Doug Hubbell Jr. and some Australians crashed through the undergrowth aboard rented bulldozers, seeking relics from their fathers' war. They uncovered a trio of damaged Stuarts. One M3 was loaded aboard a freighter bound for Long Beach, Calif., and trucked to Texas, where it sits as a part of the museum and as a reminder of that long-ago campaign.

Yearly symposia hosted by The National Museum of the Pacific War probe the conduct of the Pacific war at strategic and tactical levels. The public mingles with historians, combat commanders, authors and journalists. The gatherings are swelled by the men and women who made history during the war.

Helen MacDonald, assistant director and daughter of a Marine who fought on Iwo Jima, said, “It's the personal stories that bring the war alive. Our mission is to gain a better understanding of that war and to put a personal face on it.”

In previous symposiums, guests have stood next to heroes and legends such as David Lee “Tex” Hill, a Flying Tiger ace of the American Volunteer Group, as well as Marine ace-of-aces Joe Foss. A farm boy from South Dakota, Foss arrived on Guadalcanal, shot down 26 enemy aircraft and was awarded the Medal of Honor.

The Tarawa symposium gathered Marine and Navy combat veterans, including actor Eddie Albert, whose Navy comrades knew him as the small-boat officer decorated for pulling wounded Marines off the hotly contested reef.

Another symposium recognized the 1942 original members of the Navajo Code Talkers whose combat accomplishments with all six Marine divisions were kept hidden until years after the war.

The Combat Zone

A two-block hike east of the museum brings visitors to an enclosed three-acre site that re-creates a chunk of enemy territory. A Japanese pillbox, reconstructed after one of hundreds on Iwo Jima, bakes in the sun, waiting for an assault by volunteers authentically uniformed and armed as Marines of 1944.

Parked next to the entrance of a large corrugated building is a yellow bomb casing immediately recognizable as a relative of “Fat Man,” the atomic bomb that laid waste to Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.

This huge piece of ordnance was the third in the series of bombs and would have been dropped had not the first two done their jobs.

Veterans pause before this awesome relic, reflecting on the price that would have been paid by those who were destined to storm ashore on 35 Japanese homeland beaches on Nov. 1, 1945, with the launching of Operation Olympic.

Inside a full-scale Quonset hut outfitted for medical care in the field, visitors listen to ghostly voices from the past, an unseen surgical team discussing how best to save the lives of wounded men lying helpless on stretchers.

Walk through a door and find yourself back in 1943 standing on a wooden dock where a PT boat seems ready to get underway for an evening patrol in the Slot, that deadly stretch of water off the Solomon Islands. The boat is a Cinderella with a riches-to-rags-to-riches history behind her.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Wayne Barber was a wartime commander of PT-309. A few weeks after he took over, he and his crew found themselves in a shooting war in the Mediterranean.

By the time the war in Europe ended, PT-309 had completed 75 missions, sunk five enemy vessels and had been under enemy fire 20 times. She was returned to the States to be rigged to fire rockets against the Japanese homeland. When the war ended, she was demoted to a charter fishing boat. In 1991 she was purchased by the Nimitz Foundation and turned over to teams of restorers.

Volunteers swarmed over the carcass and removed every vestige of civilian ownership. Her mahogany hull was blasted with walnut shells and taken down to bare wood. More than 50 corporations pitched in with money, tools and parts. Seabee and Coast Guard Reserve units bore a hand in getting her ready for permanent display. Private citizens contributed 8,060 hours of work during the seven-year period it took to make her shipshape again. She was installed inside a climate-controlled building and opened to the public on Dec. 7, 2001.

Iwo: D+60

During the winter of 2004, Nimitz volunteers looked for the right hill across Texas ranch land. They found it 30 miles northwest of Fredericksburg near Doss, Texas. For months, chainsaws and machetes churned and slashed to clear the slopes of cedar and mesquite. The museum's chief curator, Jeff Hunt, oversaw pillbox construction, stringing barbed wire and foxhole digging. When it was finished, a replica of Mount Suribachi rose more than 250 feet above the landscape, ready for a re-creation of the battle that raged 60 years earlier.

In February 2005, more than $10,000 in pyrotechnics accompanied the reenactment of the assault on Iwo Jima by several hundred volunteers wearing 1945-era Marine Corps herringbone utilities and camouflaged helmet covers. Hunt estimated they went through nearly 10,000 rounds of blank ammunition during two assault reenactments.

Jeeps, half-tracs and an old Sherman tank rolled forward, followed by a volunteer wielding a flamethrower that whooshed out bright-orange flames into concrete pillboxes. Aircraft roared overhead.

After 90 minutes, six reenactors raised the flag atop the Texas hill while some 5,000 watchers cheered. Among them was the Marine Corps Commandant, Gen Michael W. Hagee, who was born in Fredericksburg, Texas, and some 300 Marine survivors of the 1945 battle that claimed the lives of 6,821 Americans and wounded nearly 22,000 more. The re-creation of this epic Pacific battle was the largest of its kind ever staged.

To former Marine Corporal Herschel Williams, it was a case of déjà vu. Williams knocked out seven machine guns at the base of the infamous mountain and was awarded the Medal of Honor.

Always Remember

At 1225 every Dec. 7, people gather outdoors on museum grounds to mark the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The time coincides with the hour the first Japanese planes appeared over Pearl to sow paths of destruction.

The ceremony always includes veteran Marines, sailors, soldiers and airmen who survived the aerial assault that killed 2,335 servicemen and 68 civilians and wounded another 1,178. Pearl Harbor veterans are recognized the world over by the distinctive white covers they alone are entitled to wear. The museum remains dynamic throughout the year. National holidays are marked by parades and showing of the colors. Every Memorial Day, people gather in the courtyard behind the Steamboat Hotel to pay tribute to those who served in the Pacific, many of whom fell in battle.

A dedication plaque is inscribed with words spoken by ADM Chester Nimitz on the day he signed the surrender document in Tokyo Bay: “They fought together as brothers in arms. They died together, and now they sleep side by side. To them we have a solemn obligation -- the obligation to insure that their sacrifice will make this a better world in which to live.”

Editor's note: The Admiral Nimitz Foundation, under the direction of Rear Admiral Chuck Grojean, USN (Ret), is managing a dedicated fund for future exhibits about the U.S. Marine Corps. Those interested in donating or bequeathing money to this fund or to the museum itself can contact the Foundation directly at (830) 997-8600.

Mr. Mason served with Marine detachments aboard USS New York, USS Midway and USS Franklin D. Roosevelt during and after WWII. He is the author of numerous books dealing with military and aviation history.

Read more about the museum complex at the Web site: www.nimitz-museum.org .