America Needed Boats That Could Land on Any Beach — So a New Orleans Builder Made 20,000

In 1936 the Marines needed a boat that could put men on an open beach and get back off again. One of the most promising designs belonged to a hot-tempered New Orleans lumberman who would not even bid on the Navy's tests. This is the paper trail of how Andrew Higgins and the Navy's own Bureau of Ships fought over the landing craft, from a bayou boat built for trappers and oil drillers to a tank lighter built in a street in sixty-one hours, and how the argument was finally settled in a choppy sea off Norfolk. Topics covered: The 1936 Cape May landing-boat trials The Eureka boat and its spoonbill hull Fleet Landing Exercises 1939–1940 Victor Krulak's Yangtze photographs and the ramp The 61-hour tank lighter on Felicity Street The Higgins vs Bureau of Ships lighter test off Norfolk, 1942 The Truman Committee Higgins Industries' plants and workforce Normandy and Tarawa What happened to Higgins after 1945 Sources used: USMC official history, History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in WWII, Vol. I, Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal, Part I, Ch. 3 (Hyperwar) NHHC, Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships: USNS Andrew J. Higgins U.S. Patent 2,144,111, "Boat Hull Construction" (filed 24 Dec 1937, granted 17 Jan 1939) Life magazine, August 1943, on Higgins Industries (via American Battlefield Trust primary sources) University of New Orleans, Higgins Industries Collection (MSS 65) finding aid National WWII Museum: "Landing Craft Mechanized, the 'Other' Higgins Boat at D-Day" (Kali Martin, 2020) and "Higgins in New Orleans" fact sheet National Park Service, "The Truman Committee" (Maj. Howard Quinn's test summary) USPTO, National Inventors Hall of Fame entry for Andrew Higgins Naval History magazine: "Return to Tarawa" (Oct 2006) and its 1995 review of Jerry Strahan's biography Robert Coram, "The Bridge to the Beach" (HistoryNet), from Brute: The Life of Victor Krulak History News Network, 2010: Tim Rives on the Ambrose and Eisenhower meetings