By Jim Morris, Warrior Vice President, News
As the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy, it’s worth pointing out the battle’s unlikeliest hero.
He was a maverick defense contractor who was booted out of high school for brawling, loved to drink bourbon on the job and went broke a time or two during the course of his career. But Andrew Jackson Higgins was also, according to Dwight Eisenhower, “the man who won the war for us.”
“If Higgins had not designed and built those LCVPs, we never could have landed over an open beach,” the Supreme Commander told historian Stephen Ambrose in an interview Ambrose quoted in his book D-Day. “The whole strategy of the war would have been different.”
The Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel were better known as Higgins boats. They carried thousands of troops, 36 of them at a time, to the invasion beaches on June 6, 1944. The boats had their beginnings almost two decades before, when Higgins – who was in both lumber and boat-building businesses -designed a shallow-draft craft that could be used by oil drillers and trappers along the lower Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.
Higgins called his design the Eureka boat. In the late 1930’s, it drew the attention of the Navy and Marines, who were trying to find a way to land troops on the beach. Exercises showed the boat had one major flaw – to disembark, troops had to climb over the sides, making them vulnerable to enemy fire.
No problem, said Higgins, who had his chief engineer come up with a bow ramp. By 1939, the US military had successfully tested the revamped landing craft on Louisiana’s Lake Ponchartrain, not far from Higgins’ main factory in New Orleans.
Higgins eventually built more than 23,000 LCVPs. But that wasn’t all. The company also built PT boats, smoke generators, gun turrets and more. At one time, Higgins employed 85,000 workers and had $350,000,000 in government contracts – making him one of the world’s biggest defense contractors.
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And the tale about Higgins and bourbon? A 1943 story in Life magazine quoted him as saying he only drank when he was working. “Since he works most of the time, he keeps several bottles of Old Taylor in a cabinet by his desk,” Life reported.
The post-war era was tough on Higgins. He won fewer government contracts, and his workers unionized and staged a number of strikes. Higgins ended up selling most of his factories. He died in 1952.
But he hasn’t been forgotten. The National World War II Museum in New Orleans – once known as the National D-Day Museum – is located on Andrew Higgins Drive. A new permanent exhibit in the museum is called “Bayou to Battlefield: Higgins Industries During World War II.”
{link to the museum if you want: Bayou to Battlefield: Higgins Industries during World War II | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans (nationalww2museum.org)}
