Andrew Jackson Higgins and the Boats That Won World War II, by
Jerry E. Strahan, is the first biography of perhaps the most
forgotten hero of the Allied victory. It was Higgins who designed
the LCVP (landing craft vehicle, personnel) that played such a
vital role in the invasion of Normandy, the landings in
Guadalcanal, North Africa, and Leyte, and thousands of amphibious
assaults throughout the Pacific. It was also Higgins who, after
twenty years of failure by the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Ships,
designed and constructed an effective tank landing craft in
sixty-one hours - a feat that caused the bureau to despise him. In
1938, Higgins owned a single small boatyard in New Orleans
employing fewer than seventy-five people. Through exceptional
drive, vision, and genius, his holdings expanded until by late 1943
he owned seven plants and employed more than twenty thousand
workers. Because of his reputation for designing and producing
assault craft in record-breaking time, Higgins was awarded the
largest shipbuilding and aircraft contracts in history. During the
war, Higgins Industries produced 20,094 boats, ranging from the
36-foot LCVP to the lightning-fast PT boats; the rocket-firing
landing craft support boats; the 56-foot tank landing craft; the
170-foot FS ships; and the 27-foot airborne lifeboat that was
dropped from the belly of a B-17 bomber. Higgins dedicated himself
to providing Allied soldiers with the finest landing craft in the
world, and he fought the Bureau of Ships, the Washington
bureaucracy, and the powerful eastern shipyards in order to
succeed. Strahan's portrait of Higgins reveals a colorful character
- a hard-fisted, hard-swearing, and hard-drinking man whose
Irishbackground and Nebraska birthplace made him an outsider to New
Orleans' elite social circles. Higgins was also hard working,
quickly progressing from an unknown southern boatbuilder to a major
industrialist with a worldwide reputation. He was featured in Life,
Time, Newsweek, and Fortune magazines, and appeared frequently on
the front pages of the country's major newspapers. Even Adolf
Hitler was aware of Higgins, calling him the "new Noah". Through
Higgins' example, we see the way technological innovations,
politics, labor unions, changing military agendas, and
personalities worked together - and sometimes at odds - for an
Allied victory. Strahan has based his work on extensive personal
interviews with family members, key employees, and other close
acquaintances of Higgins, as well as on previously inaccessible
Higgins Industries archives. The result is an extremely informative
account of one of the key players, and industries, of World War II.
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