The
LCVP (Landing Craft Vehicle or Personnel), otherwise known as the
Higgins, was instrumental in the storming of Normandy. While most of
the amphibious assaults in the European and Mediterranean Theaters of
Operation occurred on the coasts of Northern Africa, Sicily, Italy,
and Southern France, the battle we remember, the one that haunts our
dreams, the one that made the Higgins boat as mythic as the Trojan
horse, was the invasion of Normandy. D-Day.
The Higgins was a homely creature, not unlike a coal car from a cargo train. Made of long-leaf yellow pine for flexibility, mahogany, oak, and steel, the flat-bottomed boat was 36 feet long. It carried 36 troops, plus a three-man crew—coxswain, engineer, and deckhand. Or a three-ton truck, a one-ton truck with 12 troops, or 8,000 pounds of cargo. Flimsy matchboxes. It is hard to imagine they could even float.
The men lined up three across, two men in the aft with 30-caliber machine guns. It could operate in 18 inches of water, and went up to 12 knots. Loaded in weather, closer to 7 knots. Hardly an object of terror. Yet it was designed to plow through shallow water like a bulldozer onto the sand. Then a steel ramp dropped down, sending soldiers running ashore, guns blazing.
Landing companies were organised into six boat teams, subdivided into teams of riflemen, BAR men, wire cutters, demolition men, 60mm mortar men, bazooka men, and flamethrower operators. A seventh landing craft carried company command. Anthony Higgins, who manufactured the boat out of New Orleans, designed them to be stackable for transport. A typical transport ship carried 22 of them, 4 LCMs (Landing Craft Mechanised), and 2,000 troops.
Most soldiers were trained in their use at Camp Gordon Johnston, a WWII amphibious training camp on the desolate coast of the Florida Panhandle. In July 1942, despite what seemed to be insurmountable challenges—swamps, snakes, wild boar, clouds of stinging insects, hurricanes—the Army began building a camp to train up to 20,000 men at one time. Three weeks to survey 155,000 acres, 60 days to build, at a cost of $10 million. A city rose from the swamp.
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