April 4, 2024 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Eisenhower said D-Day never would have happened without this man's boat that came out of the swamps of Louisiana. Here's the story of Andrew Higgins, the brash and bold Irishman whose boat building plants employed 1 out of every 5 Louisianans during the war and helped seal the fate of the Third Reich and Imperial Japan.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Before World War Two,
the idea of a beach landing wasn't something on the
radar of most militaries. We didn't have the right technology,
nor did most nations want or foresee a need for
the right technology. This mindset would quickly change after the
(00:30):
fall of France and later the attack on Pearl Harbor,
and one man from the swamps of Louisiana had a solution.
Here to tell the story of Andrew Higgins is Nancy
Rust and Carol Stubbs. You'll also hear from Stephen Ambrose
and segments from Louisiana's four WWL TV. Let's get into
(00:52):
the story first with Stephen Ambrose.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
The first time I ever met in General Eisenhower was
in nineteen sixty four. He had asked me to come
to his office and get Hissburg, Pennsylvania to talk about
being the editor of his papers. And we talked through
the day, and at the end of the day he
leaned back in his chair and he said, I see
that you come from New Orleans. Did you ever know
Andrew Higgins? I said, no, sir, mister Higgins died the
(01:18):
year before I moved to New Orleans, so I never knew.
And Eisnarer said, well, that's too bad. You know, he's
the man who won the war for us.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
We interrupt this broadcast to bring to this important bulletin
from the United Press.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
This country is at war with Jimminy Hill.
Speaker 5 (01:37):
You'll never surrender, Ladie Washington.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
A White House announced this Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
If it hadn't been for Andy Higgins, we would have
had to change the whole strategy of the war. We
couldn't have gone in over an open peak.
Speaker 6 (01:55):
Higgins was born in Nebraska. I think the fact that
he was born there probably he has a lot to
do with the development of his personality. He was born
in eighteen eighty six, which was at the height of
settlers coming in. You had to be pretty tough and resilient.
Speaker 5 (02:16):
He was a family of ten, and his mother was Irish,
and they came from Chicago, and his dad was an
attorney and a newspaper man.
Speaker 6 (02:28):
So I think he started life with being around people
who were hardworking, energetic, vibrant people who were trying to
make a better life for themselves get a slice of
the American dream, so to speak.
Speaker 5 (02:47):
When Andrew Higgins was seven. The father died in an accident,
and so the mother moved them to Omaha and they
lived near a lake, and so that's where he became
interested in boats and timber and the things that kind
of set the course of his life. So when he
(03:07):
saw a wrecked sailboat on the side of a lake,
he pulled it out and built it back. But he
named it Patients because he needed a lot of patients
to get it built, and so he put it out
on the water. He was so excited, but Patience was
really too slow. Andrew really liked speed. He liked doing things.
He was not a person to sit still, and so
(03:30):
he wanted to go on and do other kinds of boats.
So he tried developing a boat out of a bob slid.
That was also too slow for him. So he went
on to a faster kind of boat. He looked at
the ice boats that were out on the rivers in
the winter, and so he built that boat. And he
built it in the basement of his home. But the
(03:52):
problem was when he got it finished, he couldn't get
it out of the door. And so he recruited friends
and he managed to talk them into coming and helping
him take a part the wall of the basement. Now
he did this when his mother had gone to do shopping,
so she wasn't at home. He took a part some
of the wall, took the boat out, had managed to
(04:14):
put the wall back together and get a lot of
the bricks relayed before she actually got home. But the
boat was a success. He took it out on the
lake and it went about sixty miles per hour, which
is huge. So he had his speed and that kind
of set his course for being a boat builder and
a kid and a man that knows how to get
(04:36):
things done.
Speaker 6 (04:36):
But actually even before that, he had shown how much
he was able to get things done. When he was
nine years old, he started his first business, mowing lawns
for people. And the way that he had to do
it then was with a side or a sickle. He
(04:56):
kept on with that and the push mow came out.
He ended up buying seventeen push moowers and hiring other
people to do the work. He continued on into business.
At age twelve, he started the newspaper delivery business. He
organized the routes, he sold subscriptions, he collected the payments,
(05:22):
He hired others, and that netted him one hundred dollars
a month, which in today's money is about three thousand dollars.
And he sold the business after a year for seventeen
hundred dollars, which is almost fifty thousand dollars. So he
(05:43):
was even before he built that first boat, he was
showing a lot of ingenuity. And he went to three
high schools. He stayed until the end of his junior year,
and then he stopped a lot of ways. He was
already so much of a man compared to what we
(06:04):
think of seventeen year old boys as being. I mean,
he had been working and having businesses since he was
nine years old.
Speaker 5 (06:14):
So when he left Nebraska, he went to Alabama, but
there was a hurricane and it destroyed everything.
Speaker 6 (06:24):
He and his wife, who was pregnant with their first child.
They had sixteen dollars and a mandolin before he took
the job that brought into New Orleans. When he moved
to New Orleans, he worked for five years for a
company called phil Adam, which was a lumber export business,
(06:48):
and then when the Lusitania was sank and nineteen fifteen,
he cut ties with the company and started his own business.
Aj Higgins Lumber an export company, and he bought timberland.
He got the timberland really cheap because there was no
(07:10):
way to get the wood out.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
You had to have a way to float it out,
and the average boat could not pull the logs out.
It couldn't go in the shallow.
Speaker 5 (07:18):
Water in the swamps and the bayous and the rivers. There.
They were facing issues of logs and obstacles in the water,
things that they would have to maneuver around.
Speaker 6 (07:32):
It was too difficult. So he decided that he would
make boats step could bring the timber out.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
He came up with a very shallow draft boat that
could go into the swamps that could haul the timber out.
It was a matter of necessity.
Speaker 6 (07:49):
He studied the whale, He studied everything he could to
try to get as much maneuverability as he could.
Speaker 5 (07:59):
Most boats have pointed bow, and he changed it to
make it a rounded bow that was made out of
one piece of wood that was kind of the spoonbill
shape that you had that went forward. Then he used
a tunnel system underneath the boat, a tunnel so that
the propeller and the rudder were protected, and that was
(08:20):
amazing help. They kind of slowed the boats down, but
he kept working with that, and that's when he looked
at the blue whale to see how it moved so
that it didn't slow the boat down.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
He had the most amazing imagination and also foresight. Many
times he would come into the draft in room and say,
I had a dream last night, and I want you
to make a sketch of it.
Speaker 5 (08:45):
Then what ended up happening was the boat would be
able to roll over these logs and roll through all
the hyacinths and seaweed and stuff and not slow down
because it would send the water in the air back
and then out from the boat, and so the objects
were sent away from the boat.
Speaker 6 (09:03):
So he just kept working and working to get faster.
That was his main focus, I think, to have it
sturdy enough and fast enough, until he had Eureka.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
The Eureka landing boat give us all the things that
were going to be needed in the future for landing craft.
Landing boats and when they hit the beach had to
be able to pull up on the beach, had to
be able to retract the propellers, couldn't be damaged. The
boats had to be able to jump the sandbars. They
had to be able to go over obstacles in the water.
And this is the same type of thing that they
took from the Louisiana swamps to the beaches at Normandy.
Speaker 5 (09:35):
So he was developing this boat, but he wasn't yet
developing it for the military.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
And you've been listening to the story of Andrew Higgins,
and what a story you're hearing about his inventiveness is
entrepreneurial nature. When we come back more of the story
of Andrew Higgins here on our American stories. And we
(10:09):
returned to our American stories, and our story on Andrew
Higgins telling the story is Nancy Rust and Carol Stubbs.
They are the authors of Andrew Higgins and the boats
that landed victory in World War Two. We're also hearing
from historian Stephen Ambrose an audio from four WWLTV in Louisiana.
(10:30):
When we last left off, Andrew Higgins, seeking to find
a way to move logs out of the Louisiana swamps
more easily developed his own boat called the Eureka Boat.
Soon he tried to sell it to the military. Let's
return to the story.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
They were built in New Orleans, Louisiana by the Andrew
Higgins and five different locations in his boatyards. The design
evolved out of boats that Higgins had been building for
the exploration of Louisiana's swamps in nineteen.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Piggin's first contacted the US Navy in nineteen thirty four.
Speaker 6 (11:05):
They didn't want anything to do with him. He kept
on because he was a very persistent person. Two years
later he told the Bureau of Construction and Repair he
knew it was the right boat for the right time,
but they didn't pay any attention to him.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
The Bureau of Ships assumed that they had the best
designers in the world. They assumed that their people were
training the best military academies in the world, that their
people knew what the Navy was going to need.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
There was a gang of people in the Navy department
who thought they could design boats, and they couldn't. The
Navy has never yet designed a good small boat. They
just didn't like the idea that here this boat builder
was telling them what to do. They wanted their vote,
their design. And he was so rough that he didn't
(12:02):
hold his tongue, and he made enemies eyes these people.
Speaker 6 (12:09):
He was loud, he cursed a lot, He drank a lot.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
He was an irishman. He was boisterous, He never took
no for an answer. He tended to knock down doors
that got in his way. He was arrogant, he was brash,
and in many ways it was his own worst enemy.
And he tended to tell people what he thought, which
tended them to isolating from certain people, especially the military
brass and admirals in Washington. The South was a place
that you didn't look for a military designer. Higgins was
(12:35):
a little boat builder that had a plan on Saint
Charles Avenue that wasn't on water.
Speaker 5 (12:40):
He never took no for an answer, and so they
would always kind of deflect him and say, well, we're
going to use this boat, We're going to use that boat.
But then he would invite them to come down to
New Orleans to go on Lake punch a train and
ride in the boat and see how it operated himself.
And in that sense, everybody that did that was a prey.
Speaker 6 (13:02):
And then finally in nineteen thirty eight, they gave him
a little bit over five thousand dollars to build an
experimental thirty foot landing boat that ended up costing him
more than twelve thousand dollars to build, and then he
had to get it to Norfolk and pay to have
it unloaded there. So really he was risking a whole
(13:26):
lot because right before that his company's net earnings had
been two hundred and fifty dollars, so it was quite
a risk that he took in nineteen thirty eight, and
of all the experimental boats that were tested there, Andrew
Higgins boat was found to be far the best. And
(13:47):
then finally in nineteen forty he got three hundred thirty
five contracts for three hundred thirty five Eurekas.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
It took the Marine Corps and the Army to say, listen,
we want our guys to land in the best possible
boats and have the best possible fighting chains. And those
boats of the Higgins boats are not the boats designed
by the Bureaushift.
Speaker 6 (14:10):
Just to recap like, until after nineteen thirty seven, Andrew
Higgins had no maybe contracts.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Which is to say, when World War Two began, the
United States not a not only didn't have any landing
fract didn't even have any plans for one, didn't have
design for one.
Speaker 5 (14:25):
I don't think they were even concerned about or the
Navy for sure wasn't concerned about amphibious landings before the war, because,
for one, they thought that they would go to a port,
they would go to a port, they would land there
and then they would go. Well, that proved disastrous. But
they also thought when the war came about that France
would protect the beaches and that we wouldn't even be involved.
(14:47):
You know, we weren't even we weren't even tracking that
kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
In nineteen thirty nine, the US military had a total
of only eighteen landing boats and its fleet. They weren't
thinking they were going to need amphibious craft. Had the
war not come, Higgins would have been a very successful
small boat builder in the South, but because the Japanese
bomb Pearl Harbor, Higgins became an international figure.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Higgins converted his oil exploration Eureka boat into what became
the LCVP or, as it was known to the GI's
the Higgins Boat. The Higgins Boat was thirty two feet long.
It was made of keep plywood except for a steel
front ramp.
Speaker 5 (15:31):
He had saw that the Japanese were using this drop
where they could drop the ramp and the soldiers and
the equip that could be taken out that way.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
So they modified an existing boat off the production line
and cut the bow off and rebuilt it lamp on it.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Now we can debark with men in equipment from this boat,
and not only can we carry men, but we can
carry small vehicles such as e cheap.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
It could carry a tournament thirty two fighting men. Dropped
the ramp and you would have thirty two men pouring
out of this landing craft, ready to fire, ready to
go to work. Carried fifty cow machine guns in the back,
flat bottom boat as you can see, so they could
go right on into the shop and then drop the ramp.
(16:16):
Everybody rushes out, and then you wait for the tide
to come and lift it and take it off.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
He was more important nineteen forty four to the state
of Louisiana than the combined rice and sugar cane crops,
and one out of every five people employed manufacturing in
Louisiana was employed by Higgins Industries. In the nineteen thirties,
Higgins was a small plant, thirty to fifty people on
Saint Charles Avenue. By the height of the war, Higgins
(16:45):
employed twenty thousand people and he had eight different locations.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
In New Orleans, he was a man without prejudices. He
had the whole New Orleans working for him, and they
all worked on building this Higgins boat. And whether they
were old or young, or female, black or white, they
all got paid according to not the color of their
skin or not what their name was, what they did.
(17:10):
So the women got the same pay as the men.
The blacks got the same pay as the whites. Now
that was unheard of in America in nineteen forty.
Speaker 6 (17:20):
Especially in the South.
Speaker 5 (17:22):
It was a very bold statement that he made, but
he got results from and I wish we would learn.
Speaker 6 (17:28):
You know, of all the shipyards in the country, has
produced the most.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
In September of nineteen forty three, ninety two of all
navy craft were either designed by Higgins or built by
Higgins in New Orleans.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
At the Higgins Yard, they were working twenty four hours
a day after shifts. Men were working or women were
working twelve hour shifts. And they were doing at six
and sometimes seven days a week, a lot of I
mean things that would be unheard of going into the
twenty percent. You were done as a matter of cars.
And they knew that what they were doing was critical
to the war effort. And they knew that this war
(18:04):
was critical to their whole way of life. If we
lose the war, everybody's going to be going around zig Heilich.
They moved a boat every hour, so in a sixteen
hour day they produced sixteen boats.
Speaker 4 (18:15):
You don't have time for the paint to dry on
the boats, really, so actually they were painted as they
were moved out of the plant.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Higgins was building a world class product par excellence that
was critical to winning the war.
Speaker 5 (18:33):
It was critical that those boats, is particularly on D Day,
that they'd be able to move quickly, get in and
get out, and that was a critical factor. They could
lower that landing ramp and the men could get off
and the equipment could get off, and then they could
get out of there. And that was a huge part
of it too. And when Eisenhower said that about he
(18:56):
was the man that won the war, he said it
after lay in life, way after he was president even
and he was talking to Stephen Ambrose and he said that,
and he said that there was no way they would
even do the beach landing if they hadn't had the
Higgins boats, that Normandy probably wouldn't have happened. They couldn't
have done it.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Like that.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
A special thanks to Nancy Rust and Carol Stubbs. They're
the authors of Andrew Higgins and the Boats that Landed
Victory in World War Two. The Story of Andrew Higgins
here on our American Stories
And we returned to our American stories. Before World War Two,
the idea of a beach landing wasn't something on the
radar of most militaries. We didn't have the right technology,
nor did most nations want or foresee a need for
the right technology. This mindset would quickly change after the
(00:30):
fall of France and later the attack on Pearl Harbor,
and one man from the swamps of Louisiana had a solution.
Here to tell the story of Andrew Higgins is Nancy
Rust and Carol Stubbs. You'll also hear from Stephen Ambrose
and segments from Louisiana's four WWL TV. Let's get into
(00:52):
the story first with Stephen Ambrose.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
The first time I ever met in General Eisenhower was
in nineteen sixty four. He had asked me to come
to his office and get Hissburg, Pennsylvania to talk about
being the editor of his papers. And we talked through
the day, and at the end of the day he
leaned back in his chair and he said, I see
that you come from New Orleans. Did you ever know
Andrew Higgins? I said, no, sir, mister Higgins died the
(01:18):
year before I moved to New Orleans, so I never knew.
And Eisnarer said, well, that's too bad. You know, he's
the man who won the war for us.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
We interrupt this broadcast to bring to this important bulletin
from the United Press.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
This country is at war with Jimminy Hill.
Speaker 5 (01:37):
You'll never surrender, Ladie Washington.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
A White House announced this Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
If it hadn't been for Andy Higgins, we would have
had to change the whole strategy of the war. We
couldn't have gone in over an open peak.
Speaker 6 (01:55):
Higgins was born in Nebraska. I think the fact that
he was born there probably he has a lot to
do with the development of his personality. He was born
in eighteen eighty six, which was at the height of
settlers coming in. You had to be pretty tough and resilient.
Speaker 5 (02:16):
He was a family of ten, and his mother was Irish,
and they came from Chicago, and his dad was an
attorney and a newspaper man.
Speaker 6 (02:28):
So I think he started life with being around people
who were hardworking, energetic, vibrant people who were trying to
make a better life for themselves get a slice of
the American dream, so to speak.
Speaker 5 (02:47):
When Andrew Higgins was seven. The father died in an accident,
and so the mother moved them to Omaha and they
lived near a lake, and so that's where he became
interested in boats and timber and the things that kind
of set the course of his life. So when he
(03:07):
saw a wrecked sailboat on the side of a lake,
he pulled it out and built it back. But he
named it Patients because he needed a lot of patients
to get it built, and so he put it out
on the water. He was so excited, but Patience was
really too slow. Andrew really liked speed. He liked doing things.
He was not a person to sit still, and so
(03:30):
he wanted to go on and do other kinds of boats.
So he tried developing a boat out of a bob slid.
That was also too slow for him. So he went
on to a faster kind of boat. He looked at
the ice boats that were out on the rivers in
the winter, and so he built that boat. And he
built it in the basement of his home. But the
(03:52):
problem was when he got it finished, he couldn't get
it out of the door. And so he recruited friends
and he managed to talk them into coming and helping
him take a part the wall of the basement. Now
he did this when his mother had gone to do shopping,
so she wasn't at home. He took a part some
of the wall, took the boat out, had managed to
(04:14):
put the wall back together and get a lot of
the bricks relayed before she actually got home. But the
boat was a success. He took it out on the
lake and it went about sixty miles per hour, which
is huge. So he had his speed and that kind
of set his course for being a boat builder and
a kid and a man that knows how to get
(04:36):
things done.
Speaker 6 (04:36):
But actually even before that, he had shown how much
he was able to get things done. When he was
nine years old, he started his first business, mowing lawns
for people. And the way that he had to do
it then was with a side or a sickle. He
(04:56):
kept on with that and the push mow came out.
He ended up buying seventeen push moowers and hiring other
people to do the work. He continued on into business.
At age twelve, he started the newspaper delivery business. He
organized the routes, he sold subscriptions, he collected the payments,
(05:22):
He hired others, and that netted him one hundred dollars
a month, which in today's money is about three thousand dollars.
And he sold the business after a year for seventeen
hundred dollars, which is almost fifty thousand dollars. So he
(05:43):
was even before he built that first boat, he was
showing a lot of ingenuity. And he went to three
high schools. He stayed until the end of his junior year,
and then he stopped a lot of ways. He was
already so much of a man compared to what we
(06:04):
think of seventeen year old boys as being. I mean,
he had been working and having businesses since he was
nine years old.
Speaker 5 (06:14):
So when he left Nebraska, he went to Alabama, but
there was a hurricane and it destroyed everything.
Speaker 6 (06:24):
He and his wife, who was pregnant with their first child.
They had sixteen dollars and a mandolin before he took
the job that brought into New Orleans. When he moved
to New Orleans, he worked for five years for a
company called phil Adam, which was a lumber export business,
(06:48):
and then when the Lusitania was sank and nineteen fifteen,
he cut ties with the company and started his own business.
Aj Higgins Lumber an export company, and he bought timberland.
He got the timberland really cheap because there was no
(07:10):
way to get the wood out.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
You had to have a way to float it out,
and the average boat could not pull the logs out.
It couldn't go in the shallow.
Speaker 5 (07:18):
Water in the swamps and the bayous and the rivers. There.
They were facing issues of logs and obstacles in the water,
things that they would have to maneuver around.
Speaker 6 (07:32):
It was too difficult. So he decided that he would
make boats step could bring the timber out.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
He came up with a very shallow draft boat that
could go into the swamps that could haul the timber out.
It was a matter of necessity.
Speaker 6 (07:49):
He studied the whale, He studied everything he could to
try to get as much maneuverability as he could.
Speaker 5 (07:59):
Most boats have pointed bow, and he changed it to
make it a rounded bow that was made out of
one piece of wood that was kind of the spoonbill
shape that you had that went forward. Then he used
a tunnel system underneath the boat, a tunnel so that
the propeller and the rudder were protected, and that was
(08:20):
amazing help. They kind of slowed the boats down, but
he kept working with that, and that's when he looked
at the blue whale to see how it moved so
that it didn't slow the boat down.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
He had the most amazing imagination and also foresight. Many
times he would come into the draft in room and say,
I had a dream last night, and I want you
to make a sketch of it.
Speaker 5 (08:45):
Then what ended up happening was the boat would be
able to roll over these logs and roll through all
the hyacinths and seaweed and stuff and not slow down
because it would send the water in the air back
and then out from the boat, and so the objects
were sent away from the boat.
Speaker 6 (09:03):
So he just kept working and working to get faster.
That was his main focus, I think, to have it
sturdy enough and fast enough, until he had Eureka.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
The Eureka landing boat give us all the things that
were going to be needed in the future for landing craft.
Landing boats and when they hit the beach had to
be able to pull up on the beach, had to
be able to retract the propellers, couldn't be damaged. The
boats had to be able to jump the sandbars. They
had to be able to go over obstacles in the water.
And this is the same type of thing that they
took from the Louisiana swamps to the beaches at Normandy.
Speaker 5 (09:35):
So he was developing this boat, but he wasn't yet
developing it for the military.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
And you've been listening to the story of Andrew Higgins,
and what a story you're hearing about his inventiveness is
entrepreneurial nature. When we come back more of the story
of Andrew Higgins here on our American stories. And we
(10:09):
returned to our American stories, and our story on Andrew
Higgins telling the story is Nancy Rust and Carol Stubbs.
They are the authors of Andrew Higgins and the boats
that landed victory in World War Two. We're also hearing
from historian Stephen Ambrose an audio from four WWLTV in Louisiana.
(10:30):
When we last left off, Andrew Higgins, seeking to find
a way to move logs out of the Louisiana swamps
more easily developed his own boat called the Eureka Boat.
Soon he tried to sell it to the military. Let's
return to the story.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
They were built in New Orleans, Louisiana by the Andrew
Higgins and five different locations in his boatyards. The design
evolved out of boats that Higgins had been building for
the exploration of Louisiana's swamps in nineteen.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Piggin's first contacted the US Navy in nineteen thirty four.
Speaker 6 (11:05):
They didn't want anything to do with him. He kept
on because he was a very persistent person. Two years
later he told the Bureau of Construction and Repair he
knew it was the right boat for the right time,
but they didn't pay any attention to him.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
The Bureau of Ships assumed that they had the best
designers in the world. They assumed that their people were
training the best military academies in the world, that their
people knew what the Navy was going to need.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
There was a gang of people in the Navy department
who thought they could design boats, and they couldn't. The
Navy has never yet designed a good small boat. They
just didn't like the idea that here this boat builder
was telling them what to do. They wanted their vote,
their design. And he was so rough that he didn't
(12:02):
hold his tongue, and he made enemies eyes these people.
Speaker 6 (12:09):
He was loud, he cursed a lot, He drank a lot.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
He was an irishman. He was boisterous, He never took
no for an answer. He tended to knock down doors
that got in his way. He was arrogant, he was brash,
and in many ways it was his own worst enemy.
And he tended to tell people what he thought, which
tended them to isolating from certain people, especially the military
brass and admirals in Washington. The South was a place
that you didn't look for a military designer. Higgins was
(12:35):
a little boat builder that had a plan on Saint
Charles Avenue that wasn't on water.
Speaker 5 (12:40):
He never took no for an answer, and so they
would always kind of deflect him and say, well, we're
going to use this boat, We're going to use that boat.
But then he would invite them to come down to
New Orleans to go on Lake punch a train and
ride in the boat and see how it operated himself.
And in that sense, everybody that did that was a prey.
Speaker 6 (13:02):
And then finally in nineteen thirty eight, they gave him
a little bit over five thousand dollars to build an
experimental thirty foot landing boat that ended up costing him
more than twelve thousand dollars to build, and then he
had to get it to Norfolk and pay to have
it unloaded there. So really he was risking a whole
(13:26):
lot because right before that his company's net earnings had
been two hundred and fifty dollars, so it was quite
a risk that he took in nineteen thirty eight, and
of all the experimental boats that were tested there, Andrew
Higgins boat was found to be far the best. And
(13:47):
then finally in nineteen forty he got three hundred thirty
five contracts for three hundred thirty five Eurekas.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
It took the Marine Corps and the Army to say, listen,
we want our guys to land in the best possible
boats and have the best possible fighting chains. And those
boats of the Higgins boats are not the boats designed
by the Bureaushift.
Speaker 6 (14:10):
Just to recap like, until after nineteen thirty seven, Andrew
Higgins had no maybe contracts.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Which is to say, when World War Two began, the
United States not a not only didn't have any landing
fract didn't even have any plans for one, didn't have
design for one.
Speaker 5 (14:25):
I don't think they were even concerned about or the
Navy for sure wasn't concerned about amphibious landings before the war, because,
for one, they thought that they would go to a port,
they would go to a port, they would land there
and then they would go. Well, that proved disastrous. But
they also thought when the war came about that France
would protect the beaches and that we wouldn't even be involved.
(14:47):
You know, we weren't even we weren't even tracking that
kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
In nineteen thirty nine, the US military had a total
of only eighteen landing boats and its fleet. They weren't
thinking they were going to need amphibious craft. Had the
war not come, Higgins would have been a very successful
small boat builder in the South, but because the Japanese
bomb Pearl Harbor, Higgins became an international figure.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Higgins converted his oil exploration Eureka boat into what became
the LCVP or, as it was known to the GI's
the Higgins Boat. The Higgins Boat was thirty two feet long.
It was made of keep plywood except for a steel
front ramp.
Speaker 5 (15:31):
He had saw that the Japanese were using this drop
where they could drop the ramp and the soldiers and
the equip that could be taken out that way.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
So they modified an existing boat off the production line
and cut the bow off and rebuilt it lamp on it.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Now we can debark with men in equipment from this boat,
and not only can we carry men, but we can
carry small vehicles such as e cheap.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
It could carry a tournament thirty two fighting men. Dropped
the ramp and you would have thirty two men pouring
out of this landing craft, ready to fire, ready to
go to work. Carried fifty cow machine guns in the back,
flat bottom boat as you can see, so they could
go right on into the shop and then drop the ramp.
(16:16):
Everybody rushes out, and then you wait for the tide
to come and lift it and take it off.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
He was more important nineteen forty four to the state
of Louisiana than the combined rice and sugar cane crops,
and one out of every five people employed manufacturing in
Louisiana was employed by Higgins Industries. In the nineteen thirties,
Higgins was a small plant, thirty to fifty people on
Saint Charles Avenue. By the height of the war, Higgins
(16:45):
employed twenty thousand people and he had eight different locations.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
In New Orleans, he was a man without prejudices. He
had the whole New Orleans working for him, and they
all worked on building this Higgins boat. And whether they
were old or young, or female, black or white, they
all got paid according to not the color of their
skin or not what their name was, what they did.
(17:10):
So the women got the same pay as the men.
The blacks got the same pay as the whites. Now
that was unheard of in America in nineteen forty.
Speaker 6 (17:20):
Especially in the South.
Speaker 5 (17:22):
It was a very bold statement that he made, but
he got results from and I wish we would learn.
Speaker 6 (17:28):
You know, of all the shipyards in the country, has
produced the most.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
In September of nineteen forty three, ninety two of all
navy craft were either designed by Higgins or built by
Higgins in New Orleans.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
At the Higgins Yard, they were working twenty four hours
a day after shifts. Men were working or women were
working twelve hour shifts. And they were doing at six
and sometimes seven days a week, a lot of I
mean things that would be unheard of going into the
twenty percent. You were done as a matter of cars.
And they knew that what they were doing was critical
to the war effort. And they knew that this war
(18:04):
was critical to their whole way of life. If we
lose the war, everybody's going to be going around zig Heilich.
They moved a boat every hour, so in a sixteen
hour day they produced sixteen boats.
Speaker 4 (18:15):
You don't have time for the paint to dry on
the boats, really, so actually they were painted as they
were moved out of the plant.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Higgins was building a world class product par excellence that
was critical to winning the war.
Speaker 5 (18:33):
It was critical that those boats, is particularly on D Day,
that they'd be able to move quickly, get in and
get out, and that was a critical factor. They could
lower that landing ramp and the men could get off
and the equipment could get off, and then they could
get out of there. And that was a huge part
of it too. And when Eisenhower said that about he
(18:56):
was the man that won the war, he said it
after lay in life, way after he was president even
and he was talking to Stephen Ambrose and he said that,
and he said that there was no way they would
even do the beach landing if they hadn't had the
Higgins boats, that Normandy probably wouldn't have happened. They couldn't
have done it.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Like that.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
A special thanks to Nancy Rust and Carol Stubbs. They're
the authors of Andrew Higgins and the Boats that Landed
Victory in World War Two. The Story of Andrew Higgins
here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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