Washington Post
May 29, 2000
Pg. C1

The Boat That Sank Hitler

Andrew Higgins's Landing Craft Survived D-Day, and Bureaucracy

By Ken Ringle, Washington Post Staff Writer

NEW ORLEANS -- A former brewery just blocks from Harrah's Casino in the Big Easy might not seem the obvious location for the National D-Day Museum. There was, after all, nothing easy about World War II.

But the museum, set to open next weekend amid a four-day outpouring of ceremonies, lectures, parades and entertainment, has been conceived as a belated tribute not just to the soldiers, sailors and airmen who liberated Europe but to a rough-hewn New Orleans boat builder who made that liberation possible.

Andrew F. Higgins, says historian and museum founder-benefactor Stephen E. Ambrose, was nothing less than "the man who won World War II."

It was Higgins whose miracles of design and production poured forth the thousands of ramp-fronted landing craft that altered forever the concept of the amphibious assault, both on the shores of Europe and on the island beaches of the Pacific war.

No other country had anything that performed like them. Nothing quite like them had ever been seen. And, though it is rarely appreciated, the U.S. Navy, which ultimately rode to victory in Higgins boats, fought Higgins, his design and his production efforts almost every step of the way.

"I think that's one reason so little has been written about him," said Jerry E. Strahan, whose "Andrew Jackson Higgins and the Boats That Won World War II" was published by LSU Press six years ago.

"After the war, everyone wanted to focus on what we'd done right. There is no way to write about Higgins without mentioning the incredible stupidity of the Navy's Bureau of Ships. And nobody wanted to go into that."

So vital was Higgins to the war effort that "Higgins boat" became the generic name for the stubby but versatile landing craft, large and small, that ferried tanks, jeeps, troops and supplies from Allied transports to beaches under enemy fire.

A brand-new Higgins boat, built to WWII specifications by more than 100 surviving Higgins workers, will be the first thing museum visitors see when they enter the old Louisiana Brewery in New Orleans's warehouse district. An exhibit on the second floor will tell the extraordinary and little-known story of the crusty Irishman who turned this then-sleepy city into one of the major industrial capitals of the war.

The $25 million, 70,500-square-foot museum, the inspiration of Ambrose and a host of others, will open June 6, on the 56th anniversary of the Normandy invasion. But beginning Saturday New Orleans will unleash a four-day tribute to World War II veterans, including a USO show and swing dance, international naval visits, a living history encampment in City Park and a military parade, plus concerts and a day-long oral history presentation.

Most of the events are already sold out and, moans Ambrose, "We're running out of room."

In addition to some 10,000 WWII veterans, those scheduled to attend include Secretary of Defense William Cohen and his counterparts from nine other NATO nations, seven ambassadors and such recent WWII consciousness-raisers as Steven Spielberg, director of "Saving Private Ryan"; actor Tom Hanks; and NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, author of "The Greatest Generation."

In addition to "very generous" personal contributions from Hanks and Spielberg, Ambrose says, Spielberg has donated to the museum part of the continuing royalties from video sales of "Private Ryan." Ambrose himself has underwritten the museum to the tune of some $2.5 million.

Along with displays and artifacts depicting the many Allied invasions of WWII, the museum will house a major WWII archive, including more than 2,000 oral histories collected by Ambrose, a former history professor at the University of New Orleans.

But its unique contribution will be to tell the story of Higgins, the maverick, two-fisted boat builder who might have sprung from Central Casting to embody America's industrial production miracles of World War II.

A native of Nebraska with an early flair for organization and a love of boats, Higgins moved to the Gulf Coast in the early 1900s to get into the timber business. In the process of finding ways to log a shallow-water tract in coastal Mississippi, he developed a unique shallow-draft logging boat whose propeller turned in a tunnel that protected it from stumps.

As timber tracts were depleted, he turned more and more to boat building, further developing his shallow-water design and turning out high-performance speedboats for the rumrunners racing whiskey past the Coast Guard during Prohibition.

By 1938 he owned a single small boat yard in New Orleans employing fewer than 75 people. He was best known for turning out uniquely dependable work boats for the oil industry, which was then searching out drilling sites in South America.

He was also turning out boats for the Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Biological Survey, all of which loved his shallow-draft design. But the Navy, which at the urging of the Marine Corps was trying to develop a landing craft, insisted on coming up with its own design and would barely speak to him.

The problem, according to Strahan, was that the Navy's prewar top brass saw no real need for a landing craft. They assumed that if war broke out in Europe, the French and British would hold the Germans away from the French coast as they had in World War I, and the United States could once again land troops through French ports.

The Marine Corps, however, was more receptive. Impressed with Higgins's design and mindful of the hundreds of Pacific islands held by the Japanese, the Corps lobbied for his boat's acceptance. War grew closer and the Navy's bureaucratic dithering cost more and more time, but Higgins eventually won contracts through his craft's clearly superior performance and his factories' ability to turn out boats at an unprecedented speed.

At one point in 1941, having belatedly discovered the need for a landing craft to carry tanks, the Navy asked Higgins to begin designing one. Instead of a design he delivered a working boat--the LCM (Landing Craft, Mechanized)--that would serve the rest of the war. It had been conceived, designed and built in 61 hours.

By 1943, Higgins Industries had grown to seven plants and employed more than 20,000 people. In September of that year the U.S. Navy had 14,072 vessels. Of these, 12,964, or 92 percent of the entire Navy, were designed by Higgins Industries; 8,865 were built in Higgins plants here.

While a landing craft is obviously not the same as an aircraft carrier, the figure is nonetheless instructive. At the peak of production Higgins was turning out 700 boats a month--more than all other shipyards in the nation combined. By war's end he had turned out 20,094 boats, ranging from the 36-foot LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle & Personnel) to the lightning-fast PT boats, the rocket-firing landing craft support boats, the 56-foot tank landing craft, the 170-foot freight supply ships and the 27-foot airborne lifeboats that could be dropped from the belly of a B-17 bomber. He was also making parts for the atomic bomb.

Though applauded by Harry Truman and others investigating defense procurement, Higgins was not universally beloved. He outraged other contractors by underbidding them for contracts, luring away their workers with higher wages and unmasking a scandalous black market in steel. When he couldn't find crucial materials, he stole them. Nothing, he said, should get in the way of the war effort.

He fought unionization bitterly, but when it was forced on him, he became labor's biggest wartime champion. He scandalized the segregated South by giving black workers responsible jobs and paying them the same as white workers. He pioneered equal pay for women, the disabled, the elderly--any worker he could find who hadn't been drafted. What profits he made went back into the business. He once demanded a Navy contract be renegotiated downward because he was making too much money while American boys were dying.

"Let us thank God for Higgins Industries, management and labor which has given us the landing boats with which to conduct our campaign," said Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1944 Thanksgiving address to the nation.

Wrote Marine Gen. Holland "Howling Mad" Smith to Higgins in 1946: "In all my 41 years of service I have never known anyone filled with a higher sense of patriotism than you."

Why is Higgins's story so little known?

"Well, part of it is New Orleans," says Ambrose. The conservative New Orleans establishment never really embraced the Nebraska native, Strahan's book points out. When Higgins Industries folded after his death in 1952 and many wealthy local investors lost money, the antipathy deepened.

"When your home town forgets you, why should the rest of the world remember?" Ambrose says. "But what's incredible to realize is that the largest single employer in the New Orleans area today is the Avondale shipyard with 5,000 workers. Higgins employed four times that many people in a city one-third the present size. You find an old New Orleanean and if he didn't work for Higgins, somebody in his family did."

But in addition to the short memories here, Ambrose says, the Navy's preoccupation with large ships doomed Higgins to be largely ignored by most naval historians. "Nobody gets promoted in the Navy for designing or commanding a 35-foot boat," he says.

He himself learned of Higgins's role only from Eisenhower, whose papers he edited as a young man, says Ambrose. The former president and Allied commander told him that without Higgins's landing craft, the whole strategy of the war would have been different. "Ike told me 'He's the man who won the war for us,' " Ambrose remembered.

But perhaps the man whom Higgins most impressed was Adolf Hitler, who, despite Allied landings in North Africa and Italy, could not conceive of a successful invasion of France being carried out over beaches alone.

"On June 7, 1944, the day after D-Day, when told of the size of the Allied landings, carried out without access to French ports, Hitler asked his generals, 'How did they do that?' " Ambrose says.

"When told about Higgins and the thousands of landing craft his factory had spawned, Hitler said, 'Truly this man is the new Noah.' "