USS Kidd Veterans Museum

The USS Kidd was commissioned in 1943 and served in the Pacific theater of World War II, screening larger ships, escorting convoys, and taking part in the campaigns that pushed toward Japan. Destroyers like the Kidd were the fast, hardworking guardians of the fleet, handling submarine and air threats and standing on the dangerous outer picket lines where they were often the first to meet the enemy.

On one of those picket stations in 1945, the Kidd was struck by a kamikaze, a Japanese suicide aircraft, during the fierce fighting off Okinawa. The attack killed and wounded members of her crew and left the ship damaged, but she survived, was repaired, and returned to service, going on to serve in later years before eventually being preserved. Her wartime scars and story are central to the experience of visiting her today.

The ship honors Rear Admiral Isaac Campbell Kidd, a senior officer who died aboard the battleship Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor, the first American admiral killed in the war. But his surname invited an irresistible association with Captain William Kidd, the seventeenth-century privateer turned pirate whose name has echoed through legend for centuries.

The crew leaned into the connection with humor and pride, adopting the pirate as a mascot and flying the Jolly Roger, the skull-and-crossbones flag, a rare bit of officially tolerated swagger in the wartime Navy. The ship earned the nickname the Pirate of the Pacific, and today the Jolly Roger still flies from her, a distinctive touch that sets her apart from every other preserved warship.

Because the Kidd was restored to her World War II configuration rather than her later modernized form, a tour offers an unusually genuine sense of what shipboard life was like. Visitors climb through the ship from the guns and torpedo mounts on deck down into the tight berthing compartments, the mess, the galley, the engine spaces, and the bridge, moving through the same narrow passageways and steep ladders the crew used.

The experience makes plain how a few hundred sailors lived, worked, ate, and slept in close quarters for months at sea, and how demanding and dangerous their service was. It is a hands-on kind of history that photographs and film cannot match, best appreciated slowly, with attention to the details of daily life aboard a warship.

Ashore beside the ship stands the veterans museum, which broadens the story beyond the Kidd herself with exhibits on the wider war and on veterans of many conflicts. Aircraft, ship models, uniforms, weapons, and personal artifacts fill the galleries, and a memorial honors those who served and those who gave their lives.

The ship's berth on the Mississippi is part of the appeal, with the great river rolling past the downtown Baton Rouge waterfront and the levee walk close at hand. Fall, winter, and spring are the most comfortable seasons for a visit, while summer is hot and humid. The river itself changes through the year, running high in spring and lower later on, which subtly changes how the ship sits against the shore.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.