D-Day begins on the Platte ("The man who won the war")

...until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.

—Winston Churchill 

[The New World stepping forth: men of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division storming Omaha Beach in Normandy, 6 June 1944. Photo by Chief Photographer's Mate Robert F. Sargent, USCG.]

Andrew Jackson Higgins was born in Columbus, Nebraska, and grew up in Omaha. His service with both infantry and engineer units in the Nebraska National Guard was to prove fateful: manoeuvres on the Platte River gave him experience with shallow-draft boats.

Higgins later moved down South—first Mobile, then New Orleans—where he made his living importing and exporting lumber. Having of necessity acquired a fleet of ships, he established a shipyard and further developed his personal interest in boat- and shipbuilding. Higgins Lumber & Export Co. eventually went out of business, but by then he had a boatbuilding business, Higgins Industries.

[This statue of Higgins depicts him, appropriately enough, in businessman's uniform: double-breasted suit and quarter-brogues.]

The Higgins Industries Eureka boat, designed to run in shallow Gulf Coast waterways and featuring a recessed propeller, was to become the prototype of the LCPL (landing craft, personnel, large), the LCPR (landing craft, personnel, ramped), and eventually the LCVP (landing craft, vehicle, personnel).

All three of these boats were used for amphibious operations throughout the Second World War in both the European and Pacific theatres, but the LCVP was produced in the greatest numbers and is the one most familiarly known as the "Higgins boat". Despite its widespread use, its fame is associated mainly with D-day, 6 June 1944, for it was the Higgins boat that made the Normandy landings by American, British, and Canadian forces possible.

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. The whole strategy of the war would have been different.

—General Dwight D. Eisenhower

[The LCVP's full-width retractable ramp allowed for the rapid deployment of troops and vehicles.]

[The LCVP was powered by a Gray Marine 6-71 diesel engine, an adaptation of the General Motors Detroit Diesel 6-71 bus and tractor engine. This one was donated by Vic Brandl, a Nebraskan who served as a Higgins boat operator in the Pacific theatre.]

Higgins built over twenty thousand boats for the war effort, including not just landing craft but PT boats and an airborne lifeboat, as well as other materiel. And his commitment to human dignity went beyond fighting German and Italian fascism and Japanese imperialism: Higgins' factories represented the first fully-integrated workforce in New Orleans, with black and white men and women working side-by-side on the same pay scale.

The park in Columbus where I took the accompanying photos is one of several memorials to Higgins, but for those of us living in the free world, Christopher Wren's epitaph applies equally well to Andrew Jackson Higgins: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.