 Normally, people would attack near a fortified base or near a harbor and you would land away on an unfortified beach and mass yourself there and then go attack coastal fortifications or try and storm a harbor and take a harbor so that you could bring in men in supplies. We studied amphibious training in doctrine and we decided that we wanted to be able to land more directly on the beaches to avoid enemy interference. And starting with Gallipoli in World War I, they saw that you could land on unimproved beaches and they had very primitive landing craft. But the biggest change in World War II, the size of the armies had grown so large that there were no areas that were undefended. So while the idea of landing at a port like Dieppe, you know, that disaster showed that ports were too heavily defended to try and capture. You would have to land on a beach, an unimproved beach, but even an unimproved beach was defended. Andrew Piggins was a civilian entrepreneur who designed a boat in 1926 that would be able to work on the Louisiana backwater. And one of the things he saw when he came to New Orleans was a need for a boat that was able to land on an unimproved shore. In this area we had a lot of oil and we had trappers. And they were often working in the coastal waters and bayous Louisiana and they needed to be able to land on an unimproved area, an unimproved beach, and unload supplies or load supplies and then pull off again. And what you need on a boat to do that is turbulent water at the bow so that you can run in very shallow water and you need nice still water at the stern so that the propeller doesn't cavitate. And he kept working on different designs and trying different things and the story goes that one day his crew was building a boat and they pulled some braces out of the inside of the boat before they were supposed to. The hull shape warped and Higgins was very mad at them and he said, well go ahead and finish it. And it turned out that that was a shape that lent itself to turbulent water at the bow and still water at the stern. And he improved on that and eventually built what he called his Eureka boat. And that was a looks today more like a cabin cruiser. Most of the most successful businessmen in the 1940s promoted themselves. If you sat quietly in your factory and waited for business to come to you, you didn't have any business and you went bankrupt. Higgins had great confidence in his product and he went to great lengths to ensure that everyone knew he had that great product so that he could sell that product and advance it. And so he had this boat and when he heard that the Navy was working on plans for landing craft, you know, before this Marines were still going ashore on long boats. And that just wasn't going to work. Everybody knew that was a bad idea. And so there were trials to come up with a new design. Higgins went with his boat and the Navy thought, oh, what do you know about boats? He created a competition between the Navy's idea of what a tank landing craft should be and his idea. And his idea was, in his judgment, much superior. So he recommended to the Navy Bureau of Ships that they have a competitive test just south of Norfolk and it was a rough day. I was in a boat alongside the two that were tested, watching. They got the boats and they came out of Norfolk Harbor. It was a rough day, real rough, and turned south. And when they turned south, they got in the Seaway and the Navy boat almost upset. The crew hanging onto the boat, our outer skin of the boat. Higgins turned, went in, landed, retracted, landed again three times, no problems. They changed the contract for 1200 boats and gave it to Higgins, been in there. Captain Victor Krula, U.S. Marine Corps. As many industries did, they did start out small and as they got contracts, they grew and grew and grew. So the first boat he came up with was classified as the Landing Craft Personnel Large, which didn't have a ramp on it. The LCPL has several bulkheads across the vessel so that the troops aren't all sitting in the troop compartment at the beginning. So either you jump off towards the stern or you have to get up and move forward across, you know, the engine was right in the center of the boat. And unfortunately the men had to clamber out over the sides, which made them vulnerable to enemy fire. So they decided to modify it by incorporating a ramp so that the men could literally advance directly out of the boat. There are various stories of how the ramp came about. One of them indicates there was a Marine who was in China and saw Japanese landing craft with a bow ramp and sent pictures of it back to Washington and this eventually filtered back to Higgins. And so eventually they do end up with the LCVP Landing Craft Vehicle and Personnel, which is built with a bow ramp and that's the classic Higgins Landing Craft. They were used all over the world, they were used in Africa, they were used in Europe. They even brought these kind of boats inland across the Rhine River into Germany. We use the LCVPs for a variety of missions and one of them was logistics. We were able to use them from ship to ship, from ship to shore. We transport supplies, ammunition, food, medicine, fuel, casualties. We evacuated prisoners, civilians, we helped them with humanitarian assistance. When you look at World War II, there were more casualties in the 8th Air Force than there were in the United States Marine Corps. Of course, when a B-17 or B-24 is hit, it's headed down and everybody on board. Sometimes two or three men would get off, but often the whole crew is lost. If 10 Marines hit the beach and a shell goes off near them, two or three might be killed and the rest might be wounded, but they can very quickly, in relative terms, very quickly be gotten off the beach and back to a hospital ship. LCVPs were actually fitted with a rack that was two by fours that fit in slots so that you could double deck the stretchers when they were bringing people off the beach. They could bring, of course, people who were mobile or stretchers. There was a lot of space inside. It was easy to load them through the ramp. And oftentimes they would go back either to hospital ships or LSTs. And LSTs, once they had dropped their loads of tanks or trucks or whatever, were set up to be hospital ships. They often contained extra doctors and things with the understanding that they would be a portable hospital to provide early care first on, and then when they were full they would go back, in this case, to England or go back to some rear area. The LCVP made a great small barge, small lighter, self-propelled, lots of cargo space. It could move material between ships from ship to shore. We used to pick up supplies and bring it to the island and they would put it in storage and if a future ship needed any particular plot and supplies, they would call it in and they would put it in cargo nets and have it available when the ship arrived. And then they would put it in the landing ground, would bring it out to this particular ship that ordered it. They'd put a hook down, would hook up the net, they'd put it on the boat, ship, and when they completed, give us the net back, maybe pick up a second load and that's how it was done. Over 20,000 LCVPs were produced and I believe the figure is that over 98% of the craft in the Navy were Higgins designed. Many of which were built by Higgins, but Higgins did have other plants that were using his designs. The vast majority of vessels in the Navy were Higgins. And thus they had the development of the Landing Craft Vehicle and Personnel, LCVP, which General Eisenhower pointed out was one of the most important Allied inventions of the war.