How Higgins and His Boats Won the War (from HISTORY This Week)

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Something you might have heard of or know a little bit about, but we do the digging, interview the experts and bring that story to life. If you head over to History This Week now, you will see recent episodes like the anti-rent war against landlords in upstate New York or how the crusades were forgotten, rediscovered and then took on a whole new meaning. We cover stories across all eras and places, everything from ancient Egypt to the birth of AI. So head over and subscribe to History This Week on Apple Spotify or wherever else you get your podcasts. History This Week June 6th, 1944. I'm Sally Hound. It's 3 o'clock in the morning. The full moon reflects off the choppy sea. Soldiers begin to climb down the net straight along the walls of their transport ships. They've been told to keep their guns and equipment loosely strapped to their bodies because if they slip and fall into the English Channel, they'll have to shed their gear or drown. These allied soldiers are climbing down into smaller boats. Boats specifically designed for amphibious assault. They're going to land these boats on the beaches of Normandy. This will be the largest amphibious assault in world history and the soldiers know how dangerous it is. One officer told a group, "Look to the right of you and look to the left of you. There's only going to be one of you left after the first week in Normandy." Only so many troops can land on the beach at once so the majority of these boats move to an assembly area out in the water. They're in constant motion, spinning in giant circles, one-and-a-half boat lengths apart, so that they can zoom off into action at a moment's notice. The craft themselves are very specific, perfectly designed for this type of assault. Technically, they are called LCVPs, landing craft vehicle personnel, but you may know them as Higgins Boats. And the insides are incredibly bare bones. Think of a 36-foot long rectangular wooden box with a motor tucked in the back and a hinged metal door at the front. Up to 36 soldiers with all their equipment are crammed inside. Years later, when surviving soldiers are asked about what they remember in this purgatory phase of D-Day waiting to be deployed, they mention two smells. The first is diesel. Dozens of Higgins Boats, spinning in a circle, creates a huge, inescapable cloud of exhaust out on the water. Higgins Boats are engineered to speed through any obstacle, pull up on the beach, drop their ramps, let them end off, and reverse back into the water to load for the next wave, fast. So relative to the size of the boats, the engines are big, hence lots of exhaust. The other smell is vomit. The choppy waters, the spinning boats, the stench of diesel, the likelihood of death, the man get sick. And there's stuck in these little spinning craft. One soldier from the US Army's 4th Division says that Guy Higgins ain't got nothing to be proud of inventing this god-damned boat. But General Eisenhower will later disagree. He'll say, "The inventor of these boats is "the man who won the war for us." Today, the story of Andrew Higgins. How does a small-time New Orleans boat builder force his way into the military industrial complex? And what exactly is so special about these boxy little Higgins boats? Andrew Higgins was interested in boating from a very young age. This, despite the fact that he grew up in Nebraska, a state not known for its bodies of water. But one day, at 12 years old, Andrew Higgins makes a chance discovery. He finds a wrecked sailboat. No, I'm one of the few legs that's around there. That is Dr. John Curetola. He's a senior historian at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. He says, "The young Andrew Higgins drags this boat back home and restores it himself." He names it Patience, because he has to put in so much painstaking work. And he floats it, but he finds it kind of not satisfied. It's not fast enough for him. Even at 12, Higgins likes to go fast. That winter, he builds himself a bob sled. But that is too slow for him, too. So he returns to the idea of a boat. But now it's winter in Nebraska. So he decides to build a so-called ice sailing boat, one that can speed across the ice on blades. That'll be much faster. He builds his own boat, called the Annie O, which is named after his mother. But he doesn't actually think the process through because he builds this boat in the basement of his home. And then he realizes, "I can't get the boat out of the basement." Higgins waits for his mom to go shopping and makes his move. And he removes the wall between two windows in his basement. With some friends help, he demolishes part of the foundation. Jocks his family home up on timbers that he finds at a junkyard. Moves the boat out and then rebuilds the wall. And as the lure goes, he did this before his mother returned home from the store. The Annie O ends up hitting 16 miles an hour, sailing on the ice. As you can already tell, Andrew Higgins is highly confident and likes to take matters into his own hands. He's also a bit of a brawler. He gets kicked out of one school for fighting, starts at another, but eventually drops out. It's reportedly too slow for him too. He joins the National Guard and eventually finds himself in New Orleans, where he starts a business, the Higgins lumber and export company. Then his new job, it's going to require him to do something that he loves. Andrew Higgins is going to have to build a boat. He buys a tract of woods not far away from New Orleans on the water in Mississippi. That's where he's going to get his lumber. And he gets a good deal on it because it is almost impossible to access. You have to get the wood from the bayou in these swampy areas to the marketplace. This swamp and the river going to it contain all kinds of obstacles. You have cat tails, you have water heistens, you have all kinds of floor and floor that will impede the movement of the craft. So Andrew Higgins gets to work. You want a craft that has a very low draft, meaning it doesn't sit very low in the water. The more shallow the boat is, the better it can ride over obstacles, like cat tails and boulders. Higgins designs a shallow boat where the motor is held above the water rather than underneath it. That way it won't hit any bayou debris. He designs a tunnel for it in the back of the hole and it works. He keeps refining his design over the years, eventually adding a reinforced bow, almost like a battering ram. A very robust nose on it that can stand, you know, running into logs or rocks or anything like that, and have a design that helps push the plants and the obstacles that are on the surface away from the boat itself. This design evolves into what Higgins humbly calls his "wonderboat." It's working for him, and he soon realizes other people might need it too, like big oil companies who are heading into the bayou to look for oil, or something called the Biological Survey Agency of the United States. When they go in there and they survey these lands, the Army Corps of Engineers, as they are building dams and levies, they need access to these areas. Higgins starts developing some contacts within the federal government. He gets a contract with the Coast Guard. Prohibition was the rule of the day, and the Coast Guard's mission was to intercept bootleggers or rum runners who were bringing alcohol into the country. Higgins sells them some of his boats for that job, but he doesn't stop there. Then by the same token, he goes to the bootleggers and the rum runners, and he tells them, "Hey, this is what the Coast Guard has as a vessel. I can build you one better." Then he goes back to the Coast Guard to say, "Hey, this is what the bootleggers are using. I can build you one better." So that tells you a lot about his business acumen fifth the way he thought. Higgins is building a reputation as a colorful New Orleans character. He's known to drink, swear, and push until he gets what he wants. And soon, he sets his sights on his biggest customer yet, the Navy. He writes letters to the Navy Bureau of Construction and Repair, which basically designed boats. Higgins knows he's going to have a tough time competing with huge Northeastern shipbuilders with our lobbyists in Washington. But he's persistent, and by his own description, possibly obnoxious. And they're writing my letter back and they say, "Hey, it's a nice design, but we're not really interested in this." Nevertheless, Higgins Industries has developed into a very healthy, successful business in New Orleans. But when it comes to his flagship model, the Wonderboat, something is still bothering Andrew Higgins. It is too slow. Remember, the motor is suspended up in the body of the Wonderboat to keep it away from swampy debris. That is kind of the whole point. But as a result, the propeller isn't only moving through water. A lot of air gets sucked in, too, which creates drag. So the question is, how do you stop air from getting into the propeller? One day, Higgins and his engineers are on the factory floor. And one of them makes an error. It just happens, Dan, on one of these vessels, and this mistake creates a V-section of midship. A V-section. The hull accidentally has a downward bulge somewhere between the middle of the boat and the motor. It's a manufacturing defect. Higgins launches into a cursed laden tirade at his employees. But he's also a tinkerer at heart. And he says, OK, finish the boat anyway. See what happens. What it does is this mistake of building this particular vessel reduces the amount of drag that's going underneath the boat itself. This lump in the hull, it actually pushes the air away before it gets to the motor. Plus air, plus drag, more speed. In fact, almost double the speed. It's faster, it's safer, it's more efficient in terms of its movement through the water. And it's more maneuverable, so there's a whole host of things. This design really kind of revolutionizes this idea of shallow water design and the ability to navigate these kinds of areas. Higgins calls this design appropriately the Eureka. Now, he is still trying to land his white whale client, the US Navy. And he knows this boat is better than anything they have in this category. A quick nimble craft that can float over any type of obstacle. It can even go partially onto the shore and then reverse back into the water. What Higgins doesn't know yet? Is that for the military, the Eureka is arriving right on time. Do you ever wish you could ask nosy questions about people's money? I have $729.71 in my bank account. We bought, you know, a $1.3 million house on a $350,000 income. On the podcast, what we spend, we ask those questions. It's a show about money and all the feelings that come with spending it. I want to be the kind of person who can just take care of the people in my life. Listen to what we spend, an Odyssey original available now wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the scenes, unbeknownst to the American public. One of the branches of the US military has been having an identity crisis. There is a strange organization in northern Virginia called the US Marine Corps. In addition to being a historian, John Cortola himself is a Marine Corps veteran. He explains that after World War I, the Marines didn't really have an obvious purpose. The Marine Corps fought as a land army during the First World War, so why do I need a Marine Corps? What is unique about these guys? If the Army can fight on land and the Navy fights at sea, the Marines fight on, we don't know where. They're looking for a role in a mission. And one of the things that the Marines latch onto during the inner war years is this idea of amphibious assault. Attacking from the water and moving on to land. Famously, the Allied powers in World War I try this at Gallipoli in modern day Turkey. This assault is led by the young head of the Royal Navy, Winston Churchill. The Australians, the New Zealanders and some French and some British troops tried to do an amphibious assault and it's a complete failure. This defeat sticks with Churchill for the rest of his life. It's also a cautionary tale for militaries across the globe on how not to do an amphibious assault. But years later, the Marines reason that if they can figure it out, master this tactic, that can be the thing that justifies their existence. Meanwhile, Andrew Higgins is trying to market his new Yoreka boat. He has his son, Andrew Jr., taking people out for demonstrations on Lake Pontitrain. They're more like thrill rides. He has the Yoreka jump over patches of floating blocks, make hairpin 180 degree turns. And actually, he will take his Yoreka boat and he'll drive it ashore. And then he can put it in reverse and take it off the shore. At the same time, the Navy has been trying to develop boats on its own to give the Marines the kinds of craft they'll need for these amphibious assaults. The Navy designs its own boats and the course they're going to want to go with their own design. But their design, it just isn't very good. It's basically a modified fishing boat. It's slow, it's difficult to maneuver. The propellers would get stuck in the sand. And by coincidence, a Navy officer catches one of Higgins' high-flying demonstrations of the Yoreka on Lake Pontitrain. He makes his recommendation to leadership. Let's give this Higgins guy a shot. They offer him $5,200 to build a Navy-specific prototype. That is far less than the $12,500 that it costs him in parts and labor. But to Higgins, it is worth the loss to get his hat in the ring. Testing lasts for over a year. They actually do some exercises where they try out the Yoreka against some Navy-designed boats, and it is clearly better. But the bureaucracy still doesn't budge. We're going to go with a Navy design, as opposed to some guy we don't even know who he is. And they tell him that you're cute, you know, but you know, kind of go away, we know what we're doing. But the Marines see the promise here. They know that the Yoreka is the right option for amphibious assault. After all, it can drive right up on land and then back right off. So they apply some pressure. Higgins, unsurprisingly, has also never stopped pushing his boat. And the Navy finally concedes. On November 18, 1940, a little over a year before Pearl Harbor, they place their order. They want 335 Yoreka boats to start. And soon after, minesweepers, tank carriers, patrol boats, rocket launching boats, Higgins needs to move fast. He builds eight separate factories, all in New Orleans. The one in City Park becomes his main hub. That was the largest boat factory in the world. And he's going to need it, because by late 1941, America is at war. And the Navy keeps ordering Higgins boats. By the summer of 1942, Higgins is employing 6,000 people. And he is one of very few business owners in New Orleans, who is adhering strictly to a recent executive order from President Roosevelt. That wartime industry needs to be integrated. He hires African Americans. And they're on those production lines with their white counterparts. And that is something here, you know, the South is kind of unheard of. It's actually one of the first racially integrated workforces in New Orleans history. And Higgins is totally on board. He has a huge fan of FDRs. He also starts to employ women. He starts schooling ladies to work in the factories themselves and on the production lines. The operation becomes so huge that Higgins builds employee housing, which he simply calls our town. You see him looking out for them outside of their employment, like giving them decent housing at a time of just wasn't a decent housing around. An average pay is like $58 per week. Higgins reaches near legendary status in New Orleans. He becomes the city's largest employer by far. And his hiring practices help lay the groundwork for future civil rights gains. One of the core arguments of segregation was that block people should be paid less because their labor was inherently less valuable. But when large numbers of block and white workers are working together, it is much harder to maintain that lie. Higgins is a microcosm of this larger progressive movement. Workers saw what happened during the war. And so there's a lasting effect. In late September 1942, Andrew Higgins gets a chance to meet President Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself. FDR decides to come visit the factory. Higgins knows this is a big opportunity. This is how business gets done in New Orleans, face to face. He's a character and he likes to deal with people on a personal level. You see him playing in this political realm. And that's not strange for New Orleans, you know, political patronage. Who you know able to get good deals on, say, a leasing contract. or tax breaks or whatever the case may be. That is still part and parcel of politics at the time. FDR's train pulls right up to the factory entrance. Higgins' nephew recalled seeing Roosevelt use crutches to get into a waiting convertible. The factory door had been widened by three feet the night before, so his car would be able to drive right down the factory floor. On their tour, Higgins talks the president's ear off. He explains every step of the production process while workers dressed in all white staring all at the president as his motorcade slowly rolls past. At the end, Roosevelt is greeted by the Higgins company Bayou. Here's the greatest man in the world is how he introduces the president and, of course, you know, they all applause. And then, after that, he goes, "Let's impress the president and show him how fast we can get back to work." And then, whoop, they straddle back, you know, to their production line. As FDR departs, he says to Higgins, "You're the only man I've ever met who has done all the talking." Higgins takes it as a compliment. And he is also right that the FaceTime seems to help his business. Shortly after FDR leaves, he gets a new order, a little strange, for 1200 wooden cargo airplanes. Production only continues to grow from there. Higgins' workforce swells to over 20,000 people across his factories in New Orleans. In September 1943, the Navy has 14,000 vessels of that 13,000-year Higgins boats. That includes all boats, not just the Ureka model, and it doesn't include battleships or aircraft carriers. But still, the volume is enormous. Higgins can't produce them fast enough. And the Ureka model, now just called the Higgins' boat, has become indispensable. It is that vital link, without those, you don't have that efficient movement of men and material from ship to shore. These boats are crucial and vulnerable. When the U.S. invades North Africa, they lose 40% of all their landing craft. They also suffer losses later in baiting Italy. And the loss of these boats has leaders anxious. Eisenhower says, "If I die, bury me in the coffin. It looks like a landing craft because the lack of them is worrying you need a death." Moving into 1944, Higgins' plants are running around the clock, pumping out an estimated 54 boats a day. He's at mass capacity. And everyone, including Andrew Higgins, knows that a larger allied invasion of the European mainland is somewhere on the horizon. The only question is when. Back in 1940, the last British soldiers were driven off the European continent. Germany took France. The Allied troops evacuated at Dunkirk. And in the four years since, they've been running through their options, looking at plans for an invasion of France. Winston Churchill wants to move into France from the South through Italy. The Allies also consider invading at an established French port, which would have been the traditional tactic. But they'd already tried this in 1942, attacking the French port at Dieppe. The Germans wiped them out, a more than 50% casualty rate. Still, Hitler thinks they'll try again. The Germans think the Allies are going to come at the port of Calais, at the shortest part in the English Channel. But the Americans are pushing for something else. An amphibious assault. Landing not in a city or a port, but on a beach. In part because that has become their specialty. The Marines have achieved their dream. They've mastered the amphibious assault. With the help of Andrew Higgins and his boats. Unless you have these vessels, you don't have North Africa, Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, and all those other amphibious operations that occur both in the Atlantic and in the Pacific. And now, the rest of the US military is looking to the Marines. For this invasion, code named Operation Overlord, the Allies need a thousand Higgins boats. His classic model, 36 feet long, flat-bottomed, mostly made of wood, with a steel drop-down ramp at the front. What started as the Wonderboat, then the Eureka, now the Higgins boat, is the most produced naval vessel in the war. Higgins boats are flying out of his factories in New Orleans. We asked John Curtola, "Given the pace of production, does Higgins suspect Dede is coming?" "He probably doesn't. All he does is get the requirement, and he'd have to have an amount of boats." June 6th, 1944. Dede. Some of the Higgins boats begin to land on the beaches of Normandy. The rest are churning in the water, miles out, rotating in circles. "You have to go to a holding area, and you circle around, until your wave is ready to be formed in Goanland." Curtola has poured over countless hours of oral histories, stored at the National War of War II Museum in New Orleans, where it works. "These guys are on these boats, literally, four hours before they go ashore. You have sea spray coming over the gunels, so most of these men are cold-soaked. The sea is, you know, pretty rough that morning, and so that is guys are bailing water out with their helmets. You do. And so you're in this horrible environment, and they still got to go and land. The world's going to even get worse once they hit the beach." When a given Higgins boat is called into action, spins out of the circle and heads towards the shore. The boat flies onto the sand bar and drops the ramp down, exactly as it's designed to do. It's the scene so many Americans already know, famously depicted in "Saving Private Ryan." It's a bloodbath. But the Higgins' boats perform their job. When the troops are off, the pilot pulls the boat back from the shore and heads back out to sea to get the next wave. The casualties are high. Over 10,000 Allied soldiers killed, captured, or wounded. But the number that land on wave after wave of Higgins' boats is staggering. 160,000 soldiers on June 6th alone. One thing that the Germans really have not understood is American production capacity. So you talk to some of those German soldiers, you know, that survived, and they talk about just seeing ship after ship out there. Even those pilots flying over it, or the sailors, they all talk about this vast armada. 7,000 ships out there in landing craft. It had to be awe-inspiring to see that much naval presence in the channel. The D-Day invasion is the first step on the Allied march towards Berlin. Months later, in his 1944 Thanksgiving Day address, General Eisenhower says, "Let us thank God for Higgins' industries, management, and labor, which has given us the landing boats with which to conduct our campaign." Andrew Higgins emerges from D-Day as a national celebrity. He becomes one of Franklin Roosevelt's biggest homefront boosters and then Truman Afterham, hosting bond drives, helping on the campaign trail. By the end of the war, he'll have built exactly 20,094 boats, which, if you think about where he started, annoying the Navy into considering his designs, it's pretty stunning. If it's not for his individual initiative, and individuals say stubbornness and pig headiness, which in this case is a good attribute, not a bad attribute, if he would take no for an answer, you wouldn't have these vessels to the Second World War. Not everyone treats him as a hero. A year after the end of the war in 1946, the Department of Justice opens an investigation into Higgins as part of a broad accounting audit into possible wartime profiteering. He goes, "This is all prejudicial against me, because he feels like he's being singled out, probably because he's not part of the establishment." He's not a huge corporation, you know, he's not consolidated aircraft, he's not Boeing, he's a small guy down there making these boats, and so he's probably an easier target than most. A grand jury exonerates him a year later, but Higgins claims that the investigation permanently damages his reputation. His company has a hard time finding its peacetime footing. They do manage to secure some military contracts for the Korean War, and it's during that war, in 1952, that Higgins dies from a stomach ailment in New Orleans at the age of 65. Now, Higgins Inc. hasn't operated in New Orleans for almost seven decades, and a lot of New Orleansians don't know the name Andrew Higgins. For the younger generation, the Second World War might as well be the Crusades, or Ancient Rome. If you know where to look, there are placards throughout the city where Higgins' factories once stood, where thousands of New Orleansians of all demographics were employed. But perhaps his most tangible legacy is New Orleans's National World War II Museum, where Courtaulder works. When historians Steven Ambrose first got the idea to build the museum, he said it would be, quote, "to honor Higgins." Here Andy Higgins and to preserve the story of the great Allied invasion. The museum now sits at 525 Andrew Higgins Drive, but he is not as prominent in national memory as other figures from that era. Higgins didn't lead a charge on the battlefield, he didn't mastermind a strategic operation. But what Higgins' story does represent, Kurtola says, is the power of tenacity. Who could have predicted that the kid building a boat in his mom's basement would eventually help defeat Nazi Germany? Higgins is a hard-drinking, hard-working, problem-solving, hard-driving individual who won't take no for an answer to get to his objectives and to find solutions to very difficult problems. That, he says, is the point of the museum. We're here to remind our fellow Americans what we can actually do and decide to do something. Thanks for listening to History This Week, a Backpocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel. To stay updated on all things history this week, sign up at historythisweekpodcast.com. And if you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email at [email protected]. Special thanks to our guest, Dr. John Kurtola, Samuels and Murray Stone senior historian at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana. His book is "Army's a Float," how the development of amphibious operations in Europe helped win World War II. You can find links to that and all the other books we use to put this episode together at our website, historythisweek.com. This episode was produced by Ben Dixteen and by me, Sally Helm. It was Sound Designed by Dan Rosado. For Backpocket Studios, our executive producer is Ben Dixteen. From the History Channel, our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fiddler. Don't forget to follow, rate and review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next week. [BLANK_AUDIO]