<v Speaker 1>I'm Jerry Broadway, and this is Anonymous America where we

<v Speaker 1>take a deep dive into American history to find those

<v Speaker 1>amazing people who did incredible things and then slipped through

<v Speaker 1>the cracks of time. General Dwight Eisenhower commanded the largest

<v Speaker 1>invasion force in human history. He gave the order that

<v Speaker 1>said one hundred and fifty thousand men across the English

<v Speaker 1>Channel on d Day, and years later, when a reporter

<v Speaker 1>asked him who really won the Second World War, Eisenhower

<v Speaker 1>didn't name a general. He didn't name a president. He

<v Speaker 1>named a hard drinking boat builder from New Orleans that

<v Speaker 1>almost nobody in America had ever heard of. For eight

<v Speaker 1>ad productions, This is Anonymous America. His name was Andrew

<v Speaker 1>Jackson Higgins, and by every account, Andrew was a handful.

<v Speaker 1>He was born in Nebraska, self taught, quick tempered, foul mouthed,

<v Speaker 1>and known to drink whiskey like it was going out

<v Speaker 1>of style. At some point, Andrew drifted down to New

<v Speaker 1>Orleans and started a career building boats, not warships, just small,

<v Speaker 1>shallow bottomed wooden boats for the men who worked the

<v Speaker 1>swamps and the bayous oil drillers, trappers, loggers, and the like.

<v Speaker 1>He called his design the Eureka. It could run in

<v Speaker 1>a foot and a half of water, slide right over

<v Speaker 1>a submerged log without damaging the propeller, moved straight onto

<v Speaker 1>a muddy bank, and then back itself off again without

<v Speaker 1>so much as a scratch. That was the whole trick

<v Speaker 1>of it. And at the time, nobody, including Andrew, had

<v Speaker 1>the faintest idea how much that little trick was about

<v Speaker 1>to matter, because the American military had a problem. I mean,

<v Speaker 1>you can build all the great warships you want, but

<v Speaker 1>a ship needs a harbor, and in war, the enemy

<v Speaker 1>is holding all the harbors. So how do you land

<v Speaker 1>an entire army, men, jeeps, artillery onto an open defended

<v Speaker 1>beach with no dock under fire? For years, nobody had

<v Speaker 1>a good answer to that question. The Marine Corps in particular,

<v Speaker 1>had been chewing on it for the better part of

<v Speaker 1>a decade, and the whole time the answer was floating

<v Speaker 1>around down in a Louisiana bayou. But you need to

<v Speaker 1>understand something. The Navy did not go out looking for

<v Speaker 1>Andrew Higgins. He had to force his way in the door,

<v Speaker 1>and they fought him every step of the way. It

<v Speaker 1>started out with smaller services. The Coastguard bought one of

<v Speaker 1>Andrew's boats and then bought several more. So did the

<v Speaker 1>Army Corps of Engineers. And it was that track record

<v Speaker 1>that finally caught the eye of the Marines, who were

<v Speaker 1>desperate for exactly this kind of craft. In nineteen thirty six,

<v Speaker 1>the Navy, at the urging of the Marines, agreed to

<v Speaker 1>test a batch of commercial boats. When they invited a

<v Speaker 1>bid from Andrew, he refused to submit one. He didn't

<v Speaker 1>like their terms, and he told them that the boat

<v Speaker 1>they were asking for was too small for the job.

<v Speaker 1>They wanted to do about it. Year later, Andrew changed

<v Speaker 1>his approach and he wrote a letter to the Navy

<v Speaker 1>offering up the Eureka, and that's where he ran straight

<v Speaker 1>into a wall. Navy leadership was busy developing its own

<v Speaker 1>boats in house, and they had no interest whatsoever in

<v Speaker 1>some little wooden boat outfit from down in New Orleans.

<v Speaker 1>The Marines lobbied on behalf of Andrew, but the Navy

<v Speaker 1>brass held firm. So Andrew Higgins did the most Andrew

<v Speaker 1>Higgins thing imaginable. He got on a train to Washington,

<v Speaker 1>walked into the Navel's Bureau of Ships and asked to

<v Speaker 1>see the blueprints of the boat they were designing, and

<v Speaker 1>they showed him. He looked it over, carefully, picked up

<v Speaker 1>a pencil, and wrote three words right across their drawing,

<v Speaker 1>this boat stinks, and then he signed it. AJH. Andrew

<v Speaker 1>had not come to Washington to make friends. But the

<v Speaker 1>thing is he was right. When the Navy finally ran

<v Speaker 1>its own design through a set of trials, it turned

<v Speaker 1>out their boat really did stink, And so it was

<v Speaker 1>in nineteen thirty eight the Navy swallowed its pride and

<v Speaker 1>agreed to put the Eureka up against their boat. It

<v Speaker 1>wasn't even close. Andrew's boat beat the Navy's boat in

<v Speaker 1>every single test. They tested it again during a big

<v Speaker 1>fleet landing exercise at early nineteen thirty nine, and the

<v Speaker 1>Eureka passed with flying colors, with just one problem left

<v Speaker 1>to solve. The men still had to climb over the

<v Speaker 1>side of the boat. And a soldier climbing over the

<v Speaker 1>side of a boat onto a defended beach is a

<v Speaker 1>soldier standing straight up in front of his enemy, and

<v Speaker 1>his enemy has a machine gun pointed at him. Might

<v Speaker 1>as well paint a bullseye on his back, and the

<v Speaker 1>fix well, the fix came from the other side of

<v Speaker 1>the world, from the enemy, no less. The Japanese had

<v Speaker 1>been running landing boats with a ramp built into the

<v Speaker 1>bow during their war in China, and American observers watching

<v Speaker 1>at Shanghai had studied these boats up close. One young

<v Speaker 1>marine officer named Victor Krulak had even photographed and sketched

<v Speaker 1>these Japanese boats and tried to push the idea up

<v Speaker 1>the chain of command, where it mostly got filed away

<v Speaker 1>and forgotten about. But then somebody finally laid a photograph

<v Speaker 1>of one of these ramp bowed boats in front of

<v Speaker 1>Andrew Higgins, and he didn't wait around for a committee

<v Speaker 1>to make a decision. He picked up the phone, called

<v Speaker 1>his chief engineer back in New Orleans, described the ramp

<v Speaker 1>to him and said, have a mock up of this

<v Speaker 1>built and waiting by the time I get home. And

<v Speaker 1>within a month they were testing it out on Lake

<v Speaker 1>Ponta train and it worked. That was the final piece.

<v Speaker 1>Take the Eureka, cut the bow clean off the front

<v Speaker 1>and drop in that ramp so the boat could run

<v Speaker 1>straight up onto the sand, slap the front end down

<v Speaker 1>and a squad of soldiers or a jeep could come

<v Speaker 1>pouring out right onto the beach. The military called it

<v Speaker 1>the land Craft for Vehicles and Personnel, or the LCVP.

<v Speaker 1>Everybody else just called it the Higgins boat. And then

<v Speaker 1>Andrew Higgins began to build, and he built, and he

<v Speaker 1>built and he built. By the end of the war,

<v Speaker 1>his factories in New Orleans had turned out more than

<v Speaker 1>twenty thousand boats. Over twelve thousand of them were the

<v Speaker 1>famous Higgins boats. On d Day, the landing craft that

<v Speaker 1>carried our men onto the beaches at Normandy were all

<v Speaker 1>Higgins boats. You've seen those iconic images, the ramps dropping down,

<v Speaker 1>the young soldiers waiting out into the surf, and the gunfire.

<v Speaker 1>That's a Higgins boat across the entire Pacific Island after

<v Speaker 1>Bloody Island. Higgins Boats a strategy built on a swamp

<v Speaker 1>boat that the Navy never wanted. There's one more thing

<v Speaker 1>you should know about Andrew Higgins, because it's worth telling.

<v Speaker 1>It's something genuinely remarkable for the Deep South. In the

<v Speaker 1>nineteen forties, Andrew's factories were fully integrated, black and white,

<v Speaker 1>men and women, old and young, the disabled, all of

<v Speaker 1>them working side by side, and almost unheard of at

<v Speaker 1>the time, Andrew paid every one of them the same

<v Speaker 1>wage for the same job. Now, Andrew wasn't trying to

<v Speaker 1>make some grand statement. There was work to be done,

<v Speaker 1>and he knew that he needed every last able pair

<v Speaker 1>of hands he could find to build boats faster than

<v Speaker 1>anyone believed possible. And he flat out did not care

<v Speaker 1>what color those hands were. And in Jim Crow New Orleans,

<v Speaker 1>that was close to revolution. And when the war finally ended,

<v Speaker 1>General Eisenhower, the man who had commanded the whole invasion

<v Speaker 1>at Normandy, said without hesitation when I asked, Andrew Higgins

<v Speaker 1>is the man who won the war for US. If

<v Speaker 1>Higgins had not designed and built those LCVPs, we never

<v Speaker 1>could have landed over an open beach. The whole strategy

<v Speaker 1>of the war would have been different, and on the

<v Speaker 1>other side of the ocean. It is even rumored that

<v Speaker 1>Adolph Hitler himself took bitter notice of Andrew Higgins, referring

<v Speaker 1>to Andrew as the new Noah. Andrew Higgins died in

<v Speaker 1>nineteen fifty two, And it's an interesting thing to sit

<v Speaker 1>with the one man the Supreme Allied Commander personally credited

<v Speaker 1>with winning the war is the name most Americans have

<v Speaker 1>never once heard spoken out loud. But go and stand

<v Speaker 1>at the water's edge at Normandy someday take another look

<v Speaker 1>at those images, the ramp coming down, the young men

<v Speaker 1>waiting in the gunfire. Every single one of those men

<v Speaker 1>got to that beach because a stubborn, self taught, hard headed,

<v Speaker 1>foul mouth bow builder down in Louisiana refused to be

<v Speaker 1>told it couldn't be done. And he refused it so

<v Speaker 1>completely that he wrote it in pencil across the navy's

<v Speaker 1>own blueprint and then went and built the answer to

<v Speaker 1>their problem twenty thousand times. That's Andrew Higgins, and that's

<v Speaker 1>anonymous America.