The Man Who Won the War
Andrew Jackson Higgins was born in Columbus, Nebraska, in 1886, but he built his empire in New Orleans — and that empire built the boats that won World War II. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, said flatly: "Andrew Higgins is the man who won the war for us." It was not hyperbole. Without Higgins and the landing craft he designed and manufactured in New Orleans, the Allied invasions of North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, and the Pacific islands would have been impossible.
The Boat Builder
Higgins came to New Orleans in the 1920s and started a boat-building business focused on shallow-draft vessels for the Louisiana timber and oil industries. The swamps and bayous of South Louisiana demanded boats that could navigate water mere inches deep, reverse off sandbars and mudflats, and take a beating from stumps and debris. Higgins designed vessels with a distinctive shallow-V hull and a protected propeller that could operate in conditions that would ground any conventional boat.
When the U.S. military began searching for a landing craft that could carry troops from ship to shore during amphibious assaults, Higgins had the answer. His Eureka boat — the design he'd developed for Louisiana's swamps — was exactly what the Marines needed. With modifications, it became the LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel) — the flat-bottomed, ramp-bowed boat that carried American soldiers onto the beaches of Normandy, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and dozens of other invasion sites.
The Factories
At its wartime peak, Higgins Industries employed over 20,000 workers in New Orleans across seven manufacturing plants. The operation was extraordinary — Higgins built over 20,000 boats for the war effort, more than any other company in America. His workforce was racially integrated at a time when segregation was the law of the land in Louisiana. Higgins paid Black and white workers equally, promoted based on merit, and ran his factories with an efficiency that the military brass found both impressive and impossible to replicate.
He was a force of nature — loud, profane, hard-drinking, and absolutely relentless. He fought with the Navy Bureau of Ships, which initially resisted his designs. He fought with labor unions that objected to his hiring practices. He fought with anyone who stood between him and the production schedule. And he won every fight, because the military needed his boats more than it needed his compliance.
D-Day
On June 6, 1944, over 1,500 Higgins boats carried the first wave of American, British, and Canadian troops onto the beaches of Normandy. The boats were designed to approach the beach at speed, drop the ramp, discharge their troops, and reverse back into deeper water — all under enemy fire. The design worked. The troops got ashore. The invasion succeeded. And every single one of those boats had been designed in New Orleans by a Nebraska-born boat builder who understood shallow water because he'd spent twenty years navigating Louisiana swamps.
The Legacy
Higgins died in 1952, and his company did not survive him. But his legacy is permanent. The National World War II Museum — located on Magazine Street in New Orleans, on the site of one of Higgins' former factories — exists because of him. A restored Higgins boat sits in the museum's lobby. The entire institution is, in a sense, a monument to the proposition that a boat builder in New Orleans changed the course of the twentieth century.
Andrew Higgins built boats in New Orleans, and those boats delivered the soldiers who liberated Europe and defeated Imperial Japan. It is not an exaggeration to say that the modern world — the world of democracy and international order that emerged from World War II — was made possible, in part, by a loud, difficult man and his New Orleans factories.
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