Orleans. A perfectionist obsessed with good workmanship, he was also positioned to rapidly accelerate his shipyard production to produce shallow watercraft, or even aircraft—whatever was needed. “The sad state of war,” he said, “has made it my duty to build.”

And build he did. Higgins Industries expanded into eight citywide plants, employing more than 20,000 workers able to produce seven hundred boats a month. With a labor pool diminished by the young men drafted to fight, Higgins became an equal-opportunity employer by default, hiring women, blacks, the elderly, the handicapped—anyone he could find to build boats. Everyone who had the same job was paid the same wage. and together they set home-front production records. Winning the Army-Navy “E”—the government’s highest award for a company—was commonplace for Higgins Industries.

In his book Andrew Jackson Higgins and the Boats That Won World War II, the historian Jerry E. Strahan recounts the frenetic boatbuilding mania that swept over the Port of New Orleans under the Higgins name. Higgins Industries constructed two kinds of military craft during the war: high-speed PT boats and various types of steel-and-wood landing craft to transport fully armed troops, light tanks, and field artillery. It was this latter class of body that made the D-Day landing of June 6,1944, feasible. “Without Higgins’s uniquely designed craft,” writes Strahan, “there could not have been a mass landing of troops and matériel on European shores or the beaches of the Pacific islands, at least not without a tremendously higher rate of Allied casualties.”

No less an authority than General Eisenhower agreed. Higgins is “the man who won the war for us,” he said. Ike’s personal assistant Harry Butcher recalled his boss’s saying in March 1943 that when he was buried, his “coffin should be in the shape of a landing craft, as they are practically killing [me] with worry.” But a year later, because of Higgins Industries, there were enough LCVPs (or Higgins Boats, as soldiers called them) for Ike to plan the D-Day invasion with one less worry. “Let us thank God for Higgins Industries’ management and labor which has given us the landing boats with which to conduct our campaign,” he told the nation that year in his Thanksgiving Day address. So crucial was Higgins’s amphibious warfare craft that a disgruntled Adolf Hitler called him the “new Noah.”

Andrew Jackson Higgins may have been short on social graces, but he was a production genius when his nation most needed him. His motto was “The Hell I Can’t,” and he always far exceeded expectations. The profane, nononsense Higgins uncomplainingly worked sixteen-hour days throughout the war. If he bitched about Washington bureaucrats, grasping union leaders, foolish admirals, and New England shipbuilders, he never let a U.S. soldier or sailor down. There was no polish to his talk or elegance

to his gait. He was a boatbuilder with a vision and the ability to turn that vision into reality. Higgins died in New Orleans in 1952, and Higgins Industries no longer exists, but there are many local old-timers who remember their enormous contributions to the Allied victory.

Andy Higgins’s genius is now receiving wider recognition, as predicted long ago by one contemporary who relied on him. “When the history of this war is finally written,” Capt. R. R. M. Emmett, who commanded landing forces in North Africa, wrote during the war, “by historians far enough removed from its present turmoil and clamor to be cool and impartial, I predict that they will place Mr. Higgins very high on the list of those who deserve the commendation and gratitude of all citizens.” It took more than a half-century, but now, thanks to new exhibits at the National D-Day Museum, a great American boatbuilder and the workers he employed will never again be forgotten. Andrew Jackson Higgins is permanently enshrined as one of the most effective armorers in America’s “arsenal of democracy.”