The Ugly Little Boat That Won WWII
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- Опубліковано 8 вер 2024
- During WWII, the Allies needed a landing craft that would enable them to invade open beaches in enemy territories as quickly and efficiently as possible. This came in the form of the Higgins Boat, a landing craft that had been designed by Andrew Higgins. 'the man who won the war for us'.
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Higgins hiring process was way ahead of his time. He didn't care what you looked like only can you do your job. the way it should always be.
I'm surprised, that Simon failed to mention, that many of Higgins' employees were out of work pimps & prostitutes, since most of their clients were overseas in the military. Also, when he needed to expand production, rather than waiting for a building to be built, he simply made an assembly line outdoors right down the middle of Bourbon Street, reasoning, that they were boats so were destined to get wet anyway, so who cares if they get rained on?
You just upset all the modern Lefties who place us all in insptersection categories which they then rank. Good stuff! Best person for the job, in terms of skills, is the way to go.
There was no time for anything else. Anything else is a waste of time, money and resources. The famously segregated army discovered this in Europe. During the battle of the bulge when there was a man power shortage they discovered that it didn't matter what race the troops were, they could all fight.
Seriously! Didn’t care what race, religion, or sex you were, didn’t even care if you had a disability. As long as you could do the task you were given.
The complete opposite to these new woke times...
My dad worked for Higgins in New Orleans at the time of World War II and helped build the boats that were used for the D day invasion. I’m very proud of him for that. I miss you dad. 🇺🇸
He paid his people more and got better work. It’s almost like people work harder when they feel like they’re properly compensated and appreciated. What a novel concept
Well put my man from Wichita 😊
Aircraft Carriers and Battleships make movies, But the small boats made history. Great video.
I like how every ship is "the ship the won the war".
Aircraft carriers: The ships that won the war.
Liberty ships: The ships that won the war.
LCVP: The boats that won the war.
@@rubiconnn "How I Won the War" with John Lennon
Oh, boy...
Higgins made boats not ships…
D-Day had very few Higgins boats - most of the troops landed in British built assault boats.
@@rubiconnn In reality they all did. Each had its own role to play. Carriers provided air cover and support and offensive power. Battleships provided some antisurface work against enemy ships, bombardment of shore defenses and ground units, anti-aircraft support, Cruisers same as the BB's. Destroyers same as BB's and CA's with antisub role, submarines were good against merchant ships, occasionally against warships, mining harbors, rescuing downed pilots, Liberty and Victory ships soldiers aren't swimming to Europe or across the Pacific especially with tanks strapped to their backs, Landing Craft: Soldiers and Marines need to get ashore somehow especially under fire and they were far superior to typical ships' boats. Minesweepers need to clear mines - yours and the enemy's.
In the early 80's, I was broke, living on a broke boat that I'd purchased for $100, paying $50 a month slip fees to live on.
The next slip over, was a 47 ft Higgins boat (like the eureka) that had been converted for salmon fishing. I wound up crewing with the guy for a season.
We was a WW2 vet, had lied @ 16 to get in the Navy, wound up being one of the first UDT/EOW guys. Got left on Guam doing recon a week before we attacked.
Short story long...
He told me of his experiences and how the Higgins boats were all over the Pacific.
His name was Mark, his picture was on the cover of Life magazine back in 63-64, as a miracle heart surgery patient out of a hospital in Napa Valley, It is normal now, yet then, the first. He was up and running (really running!) 7 days after open heart surgery!
Very cool guy. He taught me a lot on that Higgins boat, named 'UGLY DUCKLING'.
I learned my boat handling and ocean navigation skills on that boat! Some lessons learned the hard way!
One time, inopportune stalling of the 6-71 (it hadn't ever happened before, but, you know, Murphy...) and wound up ramming the drawbridge at Mare Island at about 5knts or so. Put a DEEEEEP gouge in the bow! That bow, I found (while repairing the damage...) was basically a 3 cubic ft piece of fir, carved to a bow shape! Where did they get all those trees from?!
I learned how to rotate a single screw, 47 ft boat in a 50 ft basin.
Poorest year I had in my life, but the most valuable in experience!
Cool great boats!
The World War II museum in New Orleans is a great monument to this innovation. Truly an American success story.
There actually was a naval ship named for him: the USNS Andrew J. Higgins T-AO 190. It was a Kaiser-class oiler operated by the Military Sealift Command between 1986 to 1996 including service during Desert Storm or almost. On the night the bombing of Baghdad started, the ship grounded on an uncharted reef off of Socotra Island. Unlike the Higgins boats, oilers are not designed for beaching operation and the ship was quickly sent to a UAE shipyard and quickly repaired but the ship missed most of action. It was sold to Chile in 2009 and renamed the Almirante Montt AO-52. She is still in service.
In 1943 60 000 US Marines were stationed in New Zealand, to secure the country because one in ten New Zealand males were away in North Africa. The Marines were preparing to Island hop to Japan, and they under took many training exercises.
One of the first large ones, was with their landing craft, on one of our large sand beaches on the East Coast. The problem with these beaches is they face the open Pacific ocean and in a matter of hours, the weather can change here from calm to "OH, and THAT is why they call this place the Roaring Forties". The beach they chose was particularly vulnerable because it is at the end of a 30 mile long funnel shaped gulf, which is aimed EXACTLY towards where the foul weather comes from.
The weather deteriorated the night before the exercise, but the US Navy thought it was still within their capabilities. It went ahead. And more than a hundred Servicemen were drowned.
Because such a thing was in the first place a military secret, and also bad for morale, and our Press was carefully controlled during the war, it was kept from public knowledge for a long time. The first time it was revealed in the Press here was when, in 1949, the US Marine Corp and the New Zealand government erected a memorial on the headland in the town nearby. And the name of the town?.
Omaha, Omaha bay, Rodney district, North Island.
Mt Grandfather was the superintendent of the Higgens PT Boat plant on the Industrial Canal durning the war. He worked for Higgens before the war building the Eurika Boats. They also built small pleasure boats.
Funny how the people who have done the most and asked for the least in return are the forgotten, trampled over by those that bought their importance and did so little.
This video was amazing. Higgins was 100% a genius. A great piece of WW2 history, that should be remembered much more than it is.
They still use a few of these boats up here in Alaska to get cargo and vehicles to islands in the southeast and aleutions.
I took a cruise up that way some years ago and saw some of these in various harbors, as well as converted larger landing craft. The utility of such craft was obvious in that environment. I think I took more pictures of various vessels than anything else.
My Uncle worked for them in the shipyard and my grandparents and my dad lived in Higgins Projects. A local high school is named after him. My family may have never moved to New Orleans had it not been for Mr. Higgins. The model in the WWII museum built out of plywood has a rutter forward to navigate backward after beaching.
I am learning more American history from a British guy than I have ever learned from my history teachers, and I am learning more world history to boot. Keep up the good work and all the great channels. If you add a nature channel to your line up that you mentioned in I think it was the dingo ate my baby episode on one of you other channels casual criminal and you’ll pretty much be covering everything except food and hobbies.
First Episode: The Unicorn
Most American history teachers don't know much about the subject they teach.
@@popuptarget7386most teachers are resourced enough to learn the subject they teach
In addition to the Higgins boat, another product developed without any government contract or even request (as far as I know), Paul Fisher developed the Fisher Space Pen. Walt Cunningham was the first astronaut to use one on the Apollo 7(?) mission. It has been used ever since to provide reliable writing under almost any conditions and has been adopted by most, if not all, space agencies in the world. Private enterprise outproduces and out innovates government nearly every single time. Thanks for bringing the story of Andrew Jackson Higgins to a wider audience.
Andrew Jackson Higgins went by the name "Jack." His genius was on par with Keiser who build the shipyards that made the Liberty and Victory ships.
There's still what appears to be a Higgins boat used as a houseboat on Hayling Island near Portsmouth. An amazing survivor given it's age.
actor eddie albert drove one of these in the pacific . where he put his life in jeopardy many times landing tropops then saving the wouned
Despite all the thousands that were made, and their importance to the war effort, there are only a tiny handful left in museums.
My father served in the Coast Guard for almost the entirety of WWII. Ca. 1944 he was assigned to the Salmon P. Chase, an attack transport carrier. The larger vessel that moved the landing craft from one theater to another. The Chase was nicknamed :"The Lucky Chase" because during the invasion of Sicily, the crew watched in horror as a torpedo headed for it....only to pass between the bow and the anchor chain. (We used to have bills up to $10,000 in circulation. The latter denomination had Chase's image, first Secretary of the Treasury.)
My father would have been involved in the invasion of Japan, so you can imagine what I think about the morality of the atomic bombs.
I really question the statement about 225-250 HP diesel engines. Without either a Roots supercharger or a turbocharger, that kind of output would have been impossible to attain outside of something like a 15 liter engine. And heavy.
IIRC, the landing craft had an anchor at the stern. As it approached the beach, it was dropped and line spooled out. After the men were discharged, the line was winched back to the anchor. No need to rely on luck and the engine/propeller to reverse the craft.
FC 842..............my Pops was going in on the invasion of Japan , and we probably wouldn't be communicating right now !!!!!!!! LOL
Higgins...a true patriot. I didn't know about him and thanks to Simon...I do now.
Why is this channel so underrated?
I love the video showing them testing the boat climbing the levee (what you called sea walls)! Worth the visit to the WWII museum just to see that vid.
Fun fact: Seamen at Cavite Naval Station in the Phillipines outfitted their Higgins boats with 75mm pack howitzers and dubbed them "Uncle Sam's Mickey Mouse battle fleet".
A lot of the video's focus was beach lamdings, but Higgins boats/LCVPs also allowed the allies to conduct assault crossings of inland rivers including the Rhine.
LVT’s and DWK’s were more common on the Rhine crossings.
Weapons win battles, logistics win wars. The Higgins boat, the liberty ship, 6x6 2 1/2 ton truck, the jeep, all enabled a victory.
And the C 47 (Douglas DC 3).
At 6:30 is the famous photo of a British officer going into combat armed with a sword. Well, the photo is from a training exercise, but he did go into combat like this, a little later. That's Mad Jack Churchill. He also used an English longbow in combat. And bagpipes. Look him up, he is insane.
I'm glad you mentioned how they where deployed. I assumed they might have gone straight across the English channel. Which is plain bonkers. I couldn't find out how they actually got to the battle zone until now.
ua-cam.com/video/I_JU_nfHdVk/v-deo.html
At Dieppe the allied air cover was supreme. The first success of the RAFs new plane, the Mustang was there shooting down an FW-190.
COOL!! We have a nice memorial to Andrew Jackson Higgins here in Columbus. And a replica of one of his boats albeit in steel at the memorial.
We have a wartime issue of the National Geographic with an article 'Winning the War of Supply' that showed these pipe-laying cylinder called 'conundrums' that laid fuel pipelines from the British coast to France - kind of like running a garden hose to your neighbor's house when their water connection is disconnected.
Or an extension cord to keep their refrigerator running after a fallen tree ripped the electrical service entry off the side of their home.
What an amazing man. I suspect that had I ever met him I'd warm to him straight away. I especially like it that he paid equal wages to all his workers, regardless of gender or colour, but also that he took it upon himself to develop this craft which he could see would be badly needed if the allies were to win WW2, even though he had to fund all the R&D and manufacture himself.
I feel we all owe him a huge debt of honour for his outstanding contribution not only to the war, but because he showed by example how equal rights and by being a fair and good employer we could have a fairer and better world.
If you slowed down you would be able to read the difference between 'altered' and 'alerted', (just to mention one error). I recommend 'In Praise of Slow' by Carl Honoré.
Great video 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻 But would you mind taking the pace down a bit… We are not all brought up speaking the Queens English at 2000 bpm.. Not 1/2 pace or 3/4 pace… Just a “tad” slower 🇬🇧 please 🙏 Love your videos, keep it up..
You can adjust the speed of the video to slower with the gear icon so it’s easier to understand
I love when you surprise us with a video on a channel you haven't posted on in a while! I'm still waiting for you to start a gaming channel lol Glory to Arstotzka!
5 videos on this channel only this month... What do you want more ? 🤷♀️
@@cathyb1273 I just went and checked....UA-cam put my notifications on sometimes. Or I did incidentally did falling asleep with my phone listening to fact boi lol
@@joeyr7294
😂😂
The Higgins boats are very handy utility craft, and that was definitely needed during the war, but its use (in unmodified form) as an assault craft was criminally negligent!
(And of course, that was not Higgins' decision!)
The Higgins was unarmoured unlike the British craft.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC, the majority of the wood (or all the wood) used for the boats came from the Philippines
Higgins is remembered. The stuffy admirals are not.
Good video 👍
Hey! Good job with the Effortlessly! It's a red-letter day.
I had to explain the meaning of oxymoron to some kids so I said military intelligence, they all caught on.
Function is beauty!!!
Another "GREAT VIDEO" surcomed by SIMON WHISTLER.
This was a very interesting video containing information that little or none of knew forehand...
I am still amazed as to how you able to aquire these stories for Video's!
-You "Sneaky Devil"! 🤣
Great video - informative and entertaining, as always.
Designed and built and launched in 3 days OMG🤯
I'm a carpenter and have done a vit of boat building, I almost spat my beer out when I heard that! That is a mind blowing achievement!!!
11:35, right side of the picture is 'Mad Jack' Churchill with Claymore in hand.
How about covering the 1600 converted or purpose built military fishing trawlers employed by the RN? Everyone seems to be ignorant of them
4:56 Simon effortlessly reading his favorite word.
I’ve been studying WW2 for 20 years. What would have happened if the allies went to Normandy instead of Dieppe? Were the wall defenses and mines there at that time? I’ve never seen anyone do a video on that theory. Were there objectives in Normandy?
Dieppe was a _test_ of enemy defences. No more.
The more I hear about the shortsightedness of the US military in the run up to WW2 the more foolish and hidebound they sound.
The interwar period in the USA was very, very much like what they are experiencing now. Conservatism/fascism/racism resulted in a strong political influence that opposed any and every thing that they didn’t propose. It’s an extraordinarily selfish and shortsighted way to be.
It's basically unheard of now for any government contract to not come with buckets in government subsidies just to get it off the ground.
Michoud - Mishoo, accent on the last syllable. A little Cajun going on there.
3 most commonly used words in the French language: "I give up!" (kidding, lol)
I met Mr. Higgins on a trip to northern russia in the 90ies. He was a keen bird watcher and a very delightful chap. The french guests laudet him especialy on D day memorial.
Andrew Jackson Higgins (28 August 1886 - 1 August 1952)
Supposedly the guy drunk a 1/5 of whiskey almost every day. Wasn’t Noah a drunk also?
Simon finally said "effortlessly" right!
But he mispronounced Mobile.
@@KayakTN one small victory at a time.
Coxswain is pronounced "cox un". It is another of the English words that was butchered by the great vowel shift.
@@KayakTN Alabamainians butcher it! Sorry matey, your queer American pronunciations are wrong.
He's forgotten to those who easily forget.
My father tried to enlist in the Navy twice and Army Air Force but was turned down each time because he was a welder in the Philly Ship Yard making Higgins Boats
Higgins would be a great subject for a movie (as long as it wasn't totally wrecked by misplaced 'woke' crap)!
You must have missed the part where his factories were fully integrated and equal wages were paid irrespective of colour, sex or disability..... hate to break it to you, but that's "woke" as fuck!
@@ET-jv1wm I must disagree. Today, Higgins would have been required by the government to hire all the people you mentioned even if they had been unable or unwilling to do the work demanded of them from a Higgins-like taskmaster. We have migrated from a meritocracy to a woketocracy.
Higgins was the kind of individual genius that Ayn Rand should have idolized. But he dedicated his abilities to winning a world war, which she would not have appreciated.
so she was more willing to learn german, see the war prolonged, be complicit in nazi shenanigans?
Andrew Jackson Higgins.
In 11.00m into video, is that a werewolf? That's some hairy arms
Cinnamon is for elves.
Navies still use bigger Higgins boats to move Marines and equipment to the beaches
Hey Simon! When's the video about the Mulberries?
"...the German coastal defenses were now altered(?) to the raiders' presence." Don't you mean "alerted?"
So that's why Dieppe keeps my packages hostage. They mad.
my grandfather is in the ww11 museum he was the big guy that supervised the buliding of andrew higgins boats and he did much more than this with small but important impormants want to know his name
You called it the boat that won WW2. I'm sure if you ask the remaining men that fought in the war, they would say different .
It was not great on heavily defended shores, but many landings were not heavily defended. The invasion of Africa, the invasion of Sicily, and island hopping campaign in the Pacific would have been impossible without these craft.
Context. 😂
Good job Higgins!!!!! 🇺🇸👍👍
War is definitely a very profitable business
Eisenhower also said the British Bailey bridge won the war.
A hero Ayn Rand would have celebrated.
BTW "coxwain" is pronounced "cox'n", and the front of a boat rhymes with "now", not "boe".
It was unfortunate that the landing craft were not equipped with mortars to provide smoke and pit the beaches for cover with h.e.
No mention of Higgins PT boats?
Bowmen do not shoot arrows ahead of Higgins boats.
LEST WE FORGET.
I find these presentations to be very educational and informative. I really to enjoy them.
May I offer one constructive criticism. This is to do with the written panels. The contrast between the words and the background in this video was difficult to read. White letters on a black background, is by far the easiest to read.
Keep up the great work.
FYI: MobIle not mobil...Alabama. also, NASA Mi Shu facility.
Can't believe this ain't got more likes n comments
Simon created a new channel?!?!
1 note, he told the navy to change the davits to fit his boats, not the other way around.
He’s the reason we didn’t hear this story on this. Chanel in German
Shame Higgins didnt market torpedoes. WWII might have been over in 1944.
The heading is a bit rich. The Soviets defeated the Germans in WWII (85% of German casualties were on the eastern front).
The soviets helped facilitate WW11 by making a pact with the Nazis and then found themselves in the cart when they turned on them.The massive loss of life was also due to clumsy tactics and their purging of their officer corps.Modern day Russian tactics don't seem to be much different .
@@geraldperyman6535 Don’t be a child. Armchair army officers are ridiculous.
@@StoneInMySandal Sorry mate I've got a downer on Russians at the moment.
And 80% of those German casualties were weather caused, not combat. Hitler made the same mistake Napoleon did when he invaded Russia. Waited too long to do it, and his troops and equipment were not prepared or equipped to cope with the brutal cold of Russian winters. Had Hitler not delayed his invasion six weeks the USSR would have been knocked out of the war, the winter weather stopped the initial German invasion less than 100 miles from Moscow.
Have you done a video on any of your channel's about Henry J. Kaiser?
Come on man, they're no big battleship pride of the fleet but there's no need to be so mean! 🥺
1:04
"Altered to their presence", huh?
Don't you mean alerted?
Blame the ignorant American scriptwriters and editors.
He changed his name from Higgers to Higgins in 1902. He's my father Ivan's cousin. My name is Ivan Nathaniel Higgers the 2nd or......
I. Nate Higgers II
Ok mister big brain. If the oast was always the worst just imagine a SURPLUS OF MAHOGANY.
Also known as the "Dumpster Boat" by individuals of these Later Years...
Once "landed", the ramp would go down on the surf, and most where killed before taking land approach.
Movies picturing these still "make me sick", as they where also known as "Killing Boxes"!
It was not great on heavily defended shores, but many landings were not heavily defended. The invasion of Africa, the invasion of Sicily, and island hopping campaign in the Pacific would have been impossible without these craft
Is it me, or does Maj. Gen. J H Roberts look remarkably like Capt. Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe) from "Dad's Army?"
I'm from the USA, and I've watched old British sitcoms on PBS in the 1970's & 80's, FYI...
,,, so, who made the Diesel engine for these pups ,,, ?
What if we crossed the channel in 1942 with our entire Navy? They would leave the Pacific for 3 months. All our carriers and battleships in the English Channel.
German U-boat Happy Hunting Time in the English Channel?
The US Navy couldn’t have staged a landing in 1942. Not enough landing craft. The landings in North Africa were marginal.
Four US aircraft carriers would have been simply humorous to the Luftwaffe (and very few battleships - five WW1 vintage ships (the rest were on the bottom of Pearl Harbor and other places in the Pacific).
@@allangibson8494 One week before Dieppe and several weeks before the disastrous landing attempt by the British Army and Royal Marines at Tobruk, The US Navy and Marine Corps successfully landed 1 and 2/3 divisions in 5 landings, 3 of which were opposed in the Guadalcanal campaign.
Great video. Preposterous title.
Hi Simon! Good job. Thank you!
Michoud facility is pronouced "Mee-shood" not "Mee-kood".
Many Louisiana pronounciations are only mastered with immersion in the culture. Tchoupitoulas, is an example. Cheers, Chuck in Florida now. New Orleans resident for 26 years.
.. and Mobile, Alabama isn't pronounced mobil..it's pronounced mo-beel😊
Not mobile, Simon, mo-beel.
Tried to share on Facebook and was hit with a Community Standards Violation.
You can tell the videos where Simon is just in the eyes out the mouth because he says things like "the coastal defences were altered to their presence"
Mr Simon, I find that your videos are very difficult to understand. So I tried an experiment, slowing the playback speed to .75, and voila! - your voice sounded normal and understandable. So, do you speed up the playback speed when you print your videos in order to 'enhance the pace' so to speak? If so (which at this point I'm pretty sure you do,) I have to say, nice try, but please desist! It's a technique that makes you sound like a bit of a 'babbling loony', which I imagine is not your desired effect.
Of course, this is just my opinion, and I now just slow down the playback rate when I watch your content. (You would be surprised at how many channels I choose to do the opposite, and play them at 1.25 to quicken the pace intentionally, but I wish YT had a variable rate for playback, as often 1.25 is just that little bit too fast, making them sound very much like your videos!
Thanks again for the otherwise excellent content!