Higgins: The Times-Picayune covers 175 years of New Orleans history

Andrew Jackson Higgins left Nebraska for New Orleans to log cypress trees from the Louisiana swamps. He ended up a shipbuilding hero of World War II, a civilian credited by President Dwight D. Eisenhower as “the man who won the war for us.”

Higgins found success as a builder of workboats for Louisiana’s burgeoning in-shore oil industry in the 1930s. After the United States entered the war, he doggedly pursued military contracts to adapt his Oil Patch vessels as troop carriers.

Higgins Industries constructed many types of vessels for the war effort at several New Orleans plants, but none was more critical than the LCVP (for “Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel”), which came to be known as the Higgins boat. Its shallow draft and front ramp provided for the delivery of troops from ships directly to beach landing zones, without the need for harbors to offload personnel and equipment.

Its effectiveness made possible the D-Day assault on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944. More than 12,500 were constructed, and they were used in every major amphibious operation by American forces in Europe and the Pacific.

Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe during the war, served two terms as U.S. president in the 1950s. It was to his biographer, historian Stephen Ambrose, that he praised the New Orleans shipbuilder’s contribution to the Allied victory.

Decades later, Ambrose was inspired by the story of the Higgins boats to establish the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. Originally called the National D-Day Museum, it opened in 2000.