“The Hell I Can’t”

DURING WORLD WAR II ADOLF HITLER CALLED Andrew Jackson Higgins “the new Noah.” After the war Dwight Eisenhower called Higgins “the man who won the war for us.”

Soldiers and Marines charged out of Higgins’s little landing boats to secure beachheads all through World War II, coming ashore in North Africa, Sicily, mainland Italy, on Omaha and Utah Beaches on the Normandy coast, and on a succession of Pacific islands that stretched to the outskirts of Japan itself, places with names like Biak, Wadke, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Iwo Jima. Those landings always began with Higgins boats.

The GIs who rode them up onto hostile shores also knew them by their official designations, LCM (landing craft, mechanized), LCP (landing craft, personnel), LCPL (landing craft, personnel, large), and, smallest and best known, LCVP (landing craft, vehicle, personnel). The LCW was 36 feet long and 11 feet wide, and it held a platoon of 36 fully equipped men or a dozen men and a jeep. It was built mainly of wood—mahogany, pine, and oak—and was unique in that it could run its bow up onto a beach and then quickly power back off and head for open water. No other craft could do that. The Higgins boat drew only 2 feet 2 inches at the bow and 3 feet aft; it had a steel ramp at the front that dropped down to discharge troops; it was powered by a 225-horsepower Gray diesel engine that could speed it toward a beach as fast as 12 knots.

This author was a combat medic with the 163rd Infantry, a regiment that made landings at Aitape, Wadke, and Biak in New Guinea; Mindoro and Mindanao in the Philippines; and other islands in the Sulu Archipelago. We would begin with the troops gathered on the shore. If the trip was a short hop, we’d take the landing boats the whole way; on a longer journey through heavy seas, the landing craft would carry us to a waiting LSD (landing ship, dock), 458 feet long with a cavernous inside well deck that was 396 feet long and 44 feet wide. The well deck would be filled with seawater, and the LCMs and other small craft could enter and leave through a bulkhead gate in the stern. Up to 18 LCMs would fit snugly inside, and then the seawater would be pumped out, leaving them in dry dock. We’d climb a rope net from our small craft to the main deck, carrying our rifles and other gear with us.

We’d stay aboard the LSD overnight as it steamed up to the attack zone. Early in the morning we would climb back down the rope net to our landing craft in the well. It took at least a couple of hours to get all of us and our equipment loaded while the well refilled with seawater, and we bobbed up and down. With the darkness and the heavy stench of diesel fumes, it came as a real relief to finally see the stern gate open and show daylight as the order to move into attack position came through.

The landing boats would leave the well three at a time and line up in the order in which they were to land. Out on the open water we’d wait for another hour or longer, pitching and rolling, while Navy dive-bombers thundered overhead, to attack the beachfront. When the signal came through for the first wave to proceed, the engines would rev up. We’d hit the beach at full speed to power the bow up onto it as the ramp dropped.

MANY YEARS AFTER THE WAR ENDED, I BEGAN TO LEARN more about the landing craft, how they came to be, and their true significance. The little boats were manufactured by Higgins Industries, in New Orleans. Their creator, Andrew Jackson Higgins, was born in Columbus, Nebraska, in 1886. In the early 1900s, after a stint in the state’s National Guard, he moved south, and at the age of 20 he started a lumber business. His search for hardwood took him deep into the Mississippi and Louisiana swamps, where stands of it went unexploited because no existing boat was able to get at them.

Higgins set about designing one that could. As the Southern lumber industry declined, he shifted into boat building, and to fill a need for swamp explorers hunting furs and oil, in the mid-1930s he devised a shallow-draft craft that he called the Wonderboat. It included features that would later be invaluable to World War II landing craft. A traditional boat’s pointed bow and propeller and shaft could be damaged by floating logs and debris, and its propeller could also snag on swamp vegetation. Higgins rounded the bow and strengthened it with what he called a “head log,” a curved block of solid pine that could smash into almost anything without being harmed. To protect the propeller and shaft he designed and installed a tunnel that covered the 10 feet between the propeller and the engine.

However, this caused considerable power loss due to the formation of bubbles in the water, which coalesced into air pockets in a process known as cavitation. He tried a smaller semitunnel, but the problem persisted. He finally found a solution by pure luck. A hull fabricator’s error caused a distortion on the bottom of one boat that resulted in a hull that was V-shaped in front and had a reverse curve in back. This forced aerated water entering under the bow (where it reduced friction and made turning easier) to flow to the outside at midship. This solved the cavitation problem and increased the boat’s power by two-thirds.

Higgins used the misbegotten hull design as the basis for a new boat, which he called the Eureka. He also devised a tworudder control system, with a main rudder aft of the propeller for normal control and a smaller rudder, which he called a “monkey rudder,” in the tunnel forward of the propeller to provide control when the boat was backing up, for instance when leaving a shoreline. With all these improvements, he had a craft that could operate at maximum power in shallow as well as deep water and was so tough that he liked to show it off by charging it up the concrete Lake Pontchartrain seawall, which was stepped like a flight of stairs. He received orders from oilexploration people, government survey teams, trappers, and others who needed to get deep into swampy areas.

In 1936 Higgins learned that the U.S. Navy was holding a competition for boats that could land troops on beaches. He was eager to show what the Eureka could do, but the Navy wasn’t interested; it was already committed to testing a number of boats from other manufacturers and was pursuing its own research at its Bureau of Construction and Repair. But by 1938 the Navy still hadn’t found a good landing craft, and it gave Higgins an order for a 30-foot experimental boat.

Some changes in the design were needed, mainly to provide an exit ramp in the bow for beach landings, but by late 1940 Higgins was receiving Navy contracts to build vast numbers of the craft. In September 1939, shortly after the war began, he had wisely foreseen that steel would be in short supply and bought a stockpile of mahogany lumber from the Philippines. A typical Higgins landing boat displaced 15,000 pounds and could carry 8,100 pounds of cargo. Its shallow draft let it run high up on a beach, and its two-rudder control system let it pull itself back off and turn around fast enough to face the ocean waves without being capsized.

Higgins Industries produced two classes of boat, not only its four kinds of landing craft but also PT (patrol torpedo) boats and related designs. The firm employed up to 20,000 workers in eight plants around the city at its wartime peak. Higgins’s biographer, Jerry E. Strahan, describes him as an outspoken, rough-cut, hot-tempered Irishman who hated red tape and loved bourbon and who took as his motto “The hell I can’t.” But he must have been doing something right, for at one point more than 90 percent of all the vessels in the Navy were designed by Higgins. He built a total of 20,094 boats during the war, and his company won the Army-Navy “E,” the highest award for excellence, several times.

Raymond Moley, a former aide to Franklin Roosevelt, wrote in Newsweek in 1943: “Higgins’s assembly line for small boats broke precedents. But it is Higgins himself who takes your breath away as much as his remarkable products and his fantastic ability to multiply his products at headlong speed. Higgins is an authentic master builder, with the kind of will power, brains, drive and daring that characterized the American empire builders of an earlier generation.”

IN THE SUMMER OF 1945 THE 163RD INFANTRY WAS IN ZAM boanga, in the southern Philippines, training for what we expected would be our most dangerous landing ever, the invasion of Japan. Luckily for us, that didn’t happen, since in August atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and on September 2 Japan surrendered unconditionally. Nevertheless, the 163rd completed its journey to Japan with a peaceful landing at Kure, a city near Hiroshima. We were among the first Americans to enter Hiroshima and see firsthand the effects of an atomic bomb, an experience that of course none of us would ever forget. Our journey was completed, the war was over, and we were home in time for Christmas 1945. For me it meant a return to school. Memories of our many beach landings and the landing boats we made them in would dim with time.

Andrew Jackson Higgins died on August 1,1952, and is buried at Métairie Cemetery near New Orleans. He and his unique boats never received any public recognition until recently. On June 6, 2000, the National D-Day Museum opened in New Orleans, a site chosen largely because it had been the home of Higgins’s company. The centerpiece attraction at the museum is a reproduction of an LCVP. Another full-size LCVP replica resides at the Andrew Jackson Higgins National Memorial in Higgins’s birthplace, Columbus, Nebraska, dedicated in 2002. There it rests on sand from beaches where landings were made during the war; its bow ramp is down so that visitors can enter it, and statues of GIs charging onto the beach surround it. After 60 years the story of Higgins’s little landing boats and how they contributed to victory in World War II is finally being remembered.