LCVP “Higgins Boat”

The most important landing craft of the war was not designed for war. In 1926 Andrew Jackson Higgins, a boatbuilder in New Orleans, drew up the Eureka: a shallow-draft workboat for the Mississippi Delta, meant for trappers, loggers and oil prospectors who needed to run up onto mud and sandbars and get off again. It had a protected tunnel around the propeller so that grounding did not wreck the drive.

That is precisely the requirement of an assault landing, arrived at from the opposite direction. A boat that can be deliberately run aground on soft ground, unloaded and then reversed off, without damaging itself, is exactly what an army needs to get ashore where there is no harbour — and in 1926 nobody in any navy had asked for one.

The Eureka as it stood had one crippling flaw as a landing craft: no ramp. Troops had to climb over the sides, which in an assault is slow, awkward, and takes place in full view of whoever is defending the beach. Equipment heavier than a man could carry effectively could not be landed at all.

The bow ramp that solved it was reportedly added after the US Marine Corps showed Higgins photographs of Japanese landing craft already using one. Whatever the route the idea took, the effect was decisive: with a ramp the boat could put an entire platoon and its weapons onto the sand in seconds, and take a vehicle ashore. The Eureka became the LCVP — Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel.

She was tiny and almost entirely plywood: about 11 m long and 3.2 m in the beam, with steel only where it counted — the ramp and some plating around the coxswain. Four men crewed her: a coxswain at the wheel aft, an engineer, and two gunners on .30 calibre machine guns.

She carried 36 troops — an infantry platoon, which is the unit an assault plan is actually built from — or a jeep with a dozen men, or about 3,600 kg of cargo, at some 12 knots. The plywood hull offered her passengers essentially no protection: a machine-gun burst went through the sides, and the men crossing the last few hundred metres had nothing to do but wait. What she offered instead was the ability to arrive at all, in shallow water, in numbers, and to reverse off the sand afterwards and go back for more: roughly 20,000 were built, with published totals running to about 23,400.

Higgins Industries grew from a small boatyard into a firm employing some 20,000 people, and it did something in the wartime South that deserves recording: its production lines were integrated, with Black and white workers, and large numbers of women, working the same jobs — and, unusually for the time and place, paid the same rate for them.

The company also came to build an extraordinary share of the US Navy’s vessels by number — the small craft that no one counts in fleet lists but without which no fleet lands anyone anywhere. It is an inversion worth pausing on: the yards building battleships were the famous ones, and the yard that mattered most to Allied strategy was a New Orleans boatbuilder that had been making boats for swamp trappers a decade earlier.

From 1942 the LCVP went everywhere the Allies went ashore: North Africa in November 1942, Sicily and Salerno in 1943, Anzio in January 1944, Normandy in June, southern France in August, and across the Pacific from Guadalcanal to Okinawa. On 6 June 1944 alone the invasion fleet carried well over a thousand of them. The experience they delivered has become the standard image of the war’s last two years — a boat wallowing in from the transports, the ramp dropping, and a platoon going forward into whatever is waiting on the sand.

On the worst beaches that image is exactly as grim as it looks. A boat grounding on a defended shore was, for a few seconds, a stationary target holding 36 men behind a plywood wall; where the defences were intact, the loss of a boatload could happen in the time it took the ramp to fall. Where they were not, the same craft put an army on the continent.

The clearest assessment came from the man who had commanded the invasion. In a 1964 interview with the historian Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower said: “Andrew Higgins is the man who won the war for us. If Higgins had not designed and built those LCVPs, we never could have landed over an open beach.”

That is a statement about strategy, not sentiment. The alternative to landing over an open beach was capturing a defended port, and the raid on Dieppe in August 1942 had demonstrated at enormous cost what that meant. Once the Allies could land divisions across open sand, the entire coastline of occupied Europe became a possible front, and the Germans had to defend all of it. The boat did not just carry the troops: it determined where the war could be fought.

By every conventional measure the LCVP is the least impressive warship of the war — plywood, unarmoured, slow, 11 metres long, armed with two rifle-calibre machine guns, against battleships displacing 45,000 tonnes and carrying 15-inch guns.

It also had more influence on the shape of the war than most of them. The battleships fought a handful of actions; the LCVP made the invasions of Sicily, Italy, Normandy and the Pacific islands physically possible, and did it by being cheap enough to build in the tens of thousands and expendable enough that losing them did not matter. Around 20,000 were built, each one carried 36 men — an infantry platoon — and when Eisenhower was asked after the war who had done most to win it, he named Andrew Higgins.

• Jerry E. Strahan, Andrew Jackson Higgins and the Boats That Won World War II (Louisiana State University Press).
• Stephen E. Ambrose, D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (Simon & Schuster).
• Roger Chesneau (ed.), Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1922–1946 (Conway Maritime Press).