Andrew Jackson Higgins, "The New Noah"
Higgins fought the Navy for the right to compete - and eventually won.
In March 1943, Dwight Eisenhower was consumed with worry about getting his men onto the beaches of Italy. The general told an aide that when he was dead and buried, “his coffin should be in the shape of a landing craft.”
Less than two years later, Allied troops had stormed the beaches of Sicily, Salerno, and, in far greater numbers, Normandy. Ike’s fears turned into relief. “Let us thank God for Higgins Industries, management, and labor which has given us the landing boats to conduct this campaign,” he said in a Thanksgiving address.
Hitler had a different name for these landing craft. He bitterly called them the “Alligator Ark” produced by “the New Noah”: Andrew Jackson Higgins.
Neither man was exaggerating much. Higgins’ biographer, Jerry Strahan, reports that by September 1943, 12,964 of the Navy’s 14,072 ships—or 92 percent of the fleet—had been designed by Higgins Industries of New Orleans.
Andrew Higgins built the U.S. Navy. He had to fight the Navy bureaucracy every step of the way.
Today, Higgins is a hero of New Orleans to rival his namesake. He was actually a transplant, born near Omaha, Nebraska. Higgins was a risk taker and a builder from the start. As a young man, he built a sail-powered ice boat in his basement that could hit 60 miles per hour on a frozen lake. He later moved to the coastal South and entered the import-export business for lumber, a trade that gave him working knowledge of shipbuilding. The company began designing its own, shallow-draft boats to access flooded timber where other boats couldn’t go.
By the mid-1920s, Higgins pivoted to shipbuilding as his main focus. His company filled a valuable niche. The trappers, loggers, and oilmen in the area needed boats that could navigate the bayou. Those boats needed to run in water less than a foot deep, in places, without damaging the propellor. And they needed to ground on the beach under power, without damaging the hull. Higgins mastered the art of boat-building for his local market, making speedy, shallow-draft boats with recessed propellors and strong wooden bows shaped like a duck’s bill.
Higgins’ most successful commercial boat was the Eureka, which got its name because of how its innovative hull design was discovered. Boats with recessed propellors, like Higgins’, suffered from “cavitation,” or air bubbles that formed around the propellor, reducing the boats’ power and speed. One day, a Higgins foreman made a mistake while building one of the boats, so that the hull aft formed a concave ‘V.’ Higgins ordered the boat finished anyway—and employees were astonished when it zipped down the canal upon its completion. The foreman’s mistake had solved the problem of cavitation, directing unaerated water from the sides of the boat into the propellers’ path. Higgins and his employees were learning by doing. A little luck didn’t hurt, either.
By the 1930s, Higgins had built a successful but small shipbuilding company. He had stress-tested his products in the commercial market. He had broken into government contracting by selling motorboats to the Coast Guard, which used them to chase bootleggers. (Higgins sold the same boats to the bootleggers—he was known to enjoy a stiff drink.) As storm clouds of war gathered over Europe, Higgins also began selling Eurekas as landing craft to the British, who were only too grateful for the help.
Higgins’ own country proved a tougher nut to crack. The United States was in dire need of ships of all kinds, but especially small vessels to traverse the last mile from ship to shore. The Marine Corps wanted 120 landing craft (itself a gross underestimate of the actual need). In 1939, the entire Navy had 19.
Still, Higgins couldn’t get a foot in the door. The Navy’s Bureau of Construction and Repairs (later merged into a new entity, the Bureau of Ships) thought it could design its own and was jealous of its turf. The Navy also assumed, wrongly, that landing craft would be unnecessary in the coming war—it could just use French ports, as it had in World War I. That assumption was destroyed by the collapse of the French army and Dunkirk. Finally, Navy construction, then as now, was clubby and dominated by the Eastern shipbuilding giants. Higgins, a foul-mouthed Irishman from the swamp, was very much not in the club. Rival lobbyists and snobby officers boxed him out.
Higgins had to force his way in. When the Navy announced a competitive contract for landing craft, he put forward his Eureka and then browbeat the Navy to come and test it. Eventually his boat was included in trials, along with designs by the Navy and the Eastern shipyards. His rivals’ boats were, for the most part, minimally modified Atlantic fishing boats; Higgins’ was an ugly duck, by contrast, with a bulbous bow and strange hull. But it blew the others out of the water. Higgins won his first of many contracts.
Despite the Eureka’s success in trials, it was not yet the legendary boat (the “Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel—"LCVP”) it would eventually become. That required a further innovation when Higgins was approached by a Marine Corps officer named Victor Krulak.
Krulak had been a military observer during Imperial Japan’s invasion of China in 1937. He had taken a photo of a Japanese landing craft with a ramp in place of the bow, which allowed troops to disembark without clambering over the sides and exposing themselves to enemy gunners. Krulak sent the photo back to the States, but it was dismissed by the Navy as the work of “some nut out in China.”
Krulak found a more receptive audience in Higgins, who immediately built prototypes. The usefulness of the ramp bow was so obvious that his contract with the Navy was amended to add it to all the remaining boats. A lot of GIs owe their lives to the fact that a couple of nuts were willing to learn from experience on the battlefield.
Higgins had an even more dramatic run-in with the Navy to win a contract for “tank lighters” (the Landing Craft, Vehicle, Mechanized, or LCVM). The Bureau of Ships, stung by its earlier defeat, tried to do an end-run around Higgins by designing a tank lighter on its own. When Higgins caught wind of the plot, he insisted on the right to compete, cursing naval officers who knew more about “fancy dancing,” in his words, than building small ships. Higgins’ protest was backed by Senator Harry Truman, whose committee investigating waste in wartime contracting came to Higgins’ rescue several times during the war.
Eventually, the Navy ordered a head-to-head competition between the Bureau-designed tank lighter and Higgins’s barge-like entry. The competition, held in choppy waters off Norfolk with Higgins and representatives of the Navy in attendance, was no contest. As a Bureau officer admitted, “Higgins’s tank lighter came through fine, upside in and made the beach and the poor old Bureau tank lighter was out there wallowing around.” Higgins had won again.
He was not magnanimous in victory. When Truman’s committee investigated the tank lighter contract, Higgins held nothing back. “The Bureau of Ships has grown like a mushroom,” he told an investigator. “No industrial concern with the proper management would ever have such a cumbersome, outlandish, and inoperative octopus as has the present Bureau of Ships.” Truman put this criticism somewhat more artfully, remarking that the Allied war effort had been spared “irreparable damage” by Higgins’ “repeated criticisms of the shortcomings of the designs prepared by the bureau of ships… without fear of the results which such criticisms might incur with the agency.”
It took years, but Higgins had proven indispensable—and he had proven the doubters wrong.
The urgency of wartime played to Higgins’ strengths, while excusing his faults. He was a terrible money manager, but money was suddenly no object. He broke the rules and sometimes the law—as when he ordered his employees to rob a Texas oil company for its copper, leading to a Dukes of Hazzard-style police chase to the Louisiana line—but he got away with it because, after all, there was a war on.
Higgins Industries expanded rapidly in scope and scale as a result. At its peak, Higgins employed 20,000 people manufacturing landing craft, torpedo boats, life rafts, and even components for the Manhattan project. But it didn’t last. The evaporation of military contracts at the end of the war, paired with bitter labor disputes, forced an almost immediate consolidation of the business. The company was scrapped for parts, and Higgins was dead, before the 1950s were through.
Higgins’s vindication was on distant beaches far from Washington or New Orleans, in places with now-immortal names: Normandy. Guadalcanal. Iwo Jima. Tarawa. Okinawa.
Allied forces stormed these beaches in thousands of landing craft that he had fought to design and build for his country. In the ultimate tribute, servicemen didn’t call the landing craft by their official designations. They called them “Higgins boats.”
Recommended Reading
Andrew Jackson Higgins and the Boats That Won World War II by Jerry E. Strahan