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This mindset would quickly change after the 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 the story first with Stephen Ambrose. The first time I ever met General Eisenhower was in 1964. He had asked me to come to his office in Gettysburg, 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.
Mr. Higgins died the year before I moved to New Orleans, so I never knew him. And Eisenhower said, well, that's too bad. You know, he's the man who won the war for us.
We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important bulletin from the United Press. This country is at war with Germany. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender. Flash Washington, the White House announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. 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 beach. Higgins was born in Nebraska. I think the fact that he was born there probably has a lot to do with the development of his personality. He was born in 1986, which was at the height of settlers coming in.
You had to be pretty tough and resilient. He was a family of 10 and his mother was Irish and they came from Chicago and his dad was an attorney and a newspaperman. So I think he started life with being around people who were hard working, energetic, vibrant people who were trying to make a better life for themselves, get a slice of the American dream, so to speak.
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 saw a wrecked sailboat on the side of the lake, he pulled it out and built it back. But he named it Patience because he needed a lot of patience 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 he wanted to go on and do other kinds of boats. So he tried developing a boat out of a bobsled 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 problem was when he got it finished, he couldn't get it out of the door. And so he recruited friends. He managed to talk them into coming and helping him take apart 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 apart some of the wall, took the boat out, had managed to 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 60 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 things done. 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 scythe or a sickle. He kept on with that and the push mowers came out. He ended up buying 17 push mowers and hiring other people to do the work. He continued on into business at age 12. He started the newspaper delivery business.
He organized the routes. He sold subscriptions. He collected the payments. He hired others and that netted him a hundred dollars a month, which in today's money is about $3,000.
And he sold the business after a year for $1,700, which is almost $50,000. So he 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.
In a lot of ways, he was already so much of a man compared to what we think of 17-year-old boys as being, I mean, he had been working and having businesses since he was nine years old. So when he left Nebraska, he went to Alabama, but there was a hurricane and it destroyed everything. He and his wife, who was pregnant with their first child, they had $16 and a man going before he took the job that brought him to 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.
And then when the Lusitania was sank in 1915, he cut ties with the company and started his own business, A.J. Higgins Lumber and Export Company, and he bought Timberland. He got the Timberland really cheap because there was no way to get the wood out. 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 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.
It was too difficult. So he decided that he would make boats that could bring the timber out. 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. He studied the whale. He studied everything he could to try to get as much maneuverability as he could. Most boats had a 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 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. He had the most amazing imagination and also foresight. Many times he would come into the drafting room and say, I had a dream last night.
I want you to make a sketch of it. 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 and the air back and then out from the boat. And so the objects were sent away from the boat. 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 the Eureka. The Eureka landing boat. It was all the things that were going to be needed in the future for a landing craft. Landing boats, 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. This is the same type of thing that they took from the Louisiana swamps to the beaches at Normandy. So he was developing this boat, but he wasn't yet developing it for the military. And you've been listening to the story of Andrew Higgins and what a story you're hearing about his inventiveness, his entrepreneurial nature.
When we come back, more of the story of Andrew Higgins here on Our American Story. There's nothing like sinking into luxury. Anibé sofas combine ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price. Anibé has designed the only fully machine washable sofa from top to bottom.
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We're also hearing from historian Stephen Ambrose and audio from 4WWL-TV in Louisiana. 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. They were built in New Orleans, Louisiana by the Andrew Higgins in 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 the late 1930s. Higgins first contacted the U.S. Navy in 1934.
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. The Bureau of Ships assumed that they had the best designers in the world. They assumed that their people were trained in the best military academies in the world, that their people knew what the Navy was going to need. There was a gang of people in the Navy Department who thought they could design boats, and they couldn't. The Navy had 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 boat, their design. And he was so rough that he didn't hold his tongue, and he made enemies out of these people. He was loud. He cursed a lot. He drank a lot. 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, and he was brash, and in many ways was his own worst enemy. And he tended to tell people what he thought, which tended then to isolate him 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 a little boat builder that had a plan on St. Charles Avenue that wasn't on water. 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 Pontchartrain and ride in the boat and see how it operated himself.
And in that sense, everybody that did that was impressed. And then finally, in 1938, they gave him a little bit over $5,000 to build an experimental 30-foot landing boat. That ended up costing him more than $12,000 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 lot because right before that, his company's net earnings had been $250. So it was quite a risk that he took in 1938. And of all the experimental boats that were tested there, Andrew Higgins' boat was found to be far the best.
And then finally, in 1940, he got 335 contracts for 335 Eurekas. 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 chance. And those boats are the Higgins boats. They're not the boats designed by the bureauship. Just to recap, until after 1937, Andrew Higgins had no Navy contracts. Which is to say, when World War II began, the United States not only didn't have any landing craft, it didn't even have any plans for one.
It didn't have a design for one. 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. 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.
We weren't even tracking that kind of thing. In 1939, the U.S. military had a total of only 18 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 bombed Pearl Harbor, Higgins became an international figure. Higgins converted his oil exploration Eureka boat into what became the LCVP, or as it was known to the GIs, the Higgins boat. The Higgins boat was 32 feet long.
It was made of cheap plywood except for a steel front ramp. He had saw that the Japanese were using this drop where they could drop the ramp and the soldiers and the equipment could be taken out that way. So they modified an existing boat off the production line and cut the bow off and rebuilt it so you could put a lamp on it. Now we can debark with men and equipment from this boat, and not only can we carry men, but we can carry small vehicles such as a jeep. It could carry a platoon of men, 32 fighting men, drop the ramp, and you would have 32 men pouring out of this landing craft ready to fire, ready to go to work. Carried 50 cal machine guns in the back, flat bottomed boat as you can see, so they could go right on into the shore and then drop the ramp.
Everybody rushes out, and then you wait for the tide to come and lift it and take it off. He was more important in 1944 for the state of Louisiana than the combined rice and sugar cane crops. And one out of every five people employed in manufacturing in Louisiana was employed by Higgins Industries. In the 1930s, Higgins was a small plant, 30 to 50 people on St. Charles Avenue. By the height of the war, Higgins employed 20,000 people, and he had eight different locations in New Orleans.
He was a man without prejudices. We had the whole New Orleans working for him, and they all worked on building this Higgins boat. And whether they were old or young, male or female, black or white, they all got paid according to not the color of their skin or not what their name was, but what they did. 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 1940. Especially in the South, it was a very bold statement that he made, but he got results from it.
I wish we would learn, you know. Of all the shipyards in the country, he has produced the most. In September of 1943, 92% of all Navy craft were either designed by Higgins or built by Higgins in New Orleans. At the Higgins Yard, they were working 24 hours a day. If the shifts, men were working or women were working 12-hour shifts, and they were doing it six and sometimes seven days a week without any letters.
I mean, things that would be unheard of going into the 21st century. They were done as a matter of course, and they knew that what they were doing was critical to the war effort, and they knew that this war was critical to their whole way of life. If we lose the war, everybody's going to be going around zig-highly. They moved the boat every hour, so in a 16-hour day, they produced 16 boats. 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. Higgins was building a world-class product, par excellence, that was critical to winning the war. It was critical that those boats, particularly on D-Day, that they 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 was the man that won the war, he said it later 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 normally probably wouldn't have happened.
They couldn't have done it like that. 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 II.
The story of Andrew Higgins here on Our American Stories. Behind every successful business is a vision. Bringing it to life takes more than effort. It takes the right financial foundation and support. That's where Chase for Business comes in.
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