There were many other types, including the oddest of all, a floating two-and-a-half-ton truck. It was designed by a civilian employee at the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Palmer C. Putnam. He took a deuce-and-a-half truck—the U.S. Army’s basic (and much loved) truck—and turned it into an amphibian by providing buoyancy through a body made up largely of sealed, empty tanks and by giving it a pair of small propellers to provide forward motion in water. Once it hit the sand, it would operate as a truck. The vehicle was capable of making five and a half knots in a moderate sea, fifty miles per hour on land. It could carry artillery pieces, fighting men, or general cargo.

Most everyone laughed at this hybrid at first, but it soon showed its stuff and was adopted. The Army called it a DUKW: D for 1942, the year of design; U for amphibian; K for all-wheel drive; W for dual rear axles. The users called it a Duck.⁴

Production was as great a problem as design. The difficulties involved in building a landing-craft fleet big enough to carry three to five divisions ashore in one day were enormous. Neither the Navy nor the shipyards had any experience in such matters. There were competing priorities. In 1942 escort vessels and merchant shipping were more immediate necessities, and they got the available steel and marine engines.

As a result, there were severe shortages, so severe that the chief limiting factor in planning the invasion was lack of sufficient landing ships and craft. Indeed, that was the single most important factor in shaping the whole strategy of the war, in the Pacific, in the Mediterranean, in the Atlantic. Churchill complained with some bitterness that “the destinies of two great empires . . . seemed to be tied up in some goddamned things called LSTs.”⁵

That these shortages were overcome was a miracle of production and a triumph of the American economic system. The Navy did not want to mess around with small boats, and their big contractors, the large shipyards, felt the same. Perforce, the job fell to small businessmen, entrepreneurs, high-risk takers with little boatyards, designing boats on speculation, producing them on the basis of a handshake contract.

There were many such men, but the greatest designer and builder of landing craft was Andrew Jackson Higgins of New Orleans.

THE FIRST TIME I met General Eisenhower, in 1964 in his office in Gettysburg, where he had called me to discuss the possibility of my becoming one of the editors of his official papers, he said at the end of the conversation, “I notice you are teaching in New Orleans. Did you ever know Andrew Higgins?”

“No, sir,” I replied. “He died before I moved to the city.”

“That’s too bad,” Eisenhower said. “He is the man who won the war for us.”

My face must have shown the astonishment I felt at hearing such a strong statement from such a source. Eisenhower went on to explain, “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.”

Andrew Higgins was a self-taught genius in small-boat design. In the 1930s he had been building boats for the oil industry, which was exploring in the swamps of south Louisiana and needed a shallow-draft vessel that could run up on a bank and extract itself. His “Eureka” boat, made of wood, filled the need perfectly. He was so confident there would be a war and a need for thousands of small boats, and so certain that steel would be in short supply, that he bought the entire 1939 crop of mahogany from the Philippines and stored it for future use.

When the Marines forced the Navy to begin experimenting with landing craft, Higgins entered the competition. The Navy Bureau of Ships wanted to do the design itself and wanted no part of this hot-tempered, loud-mouthed Irishman who drank a bottle of whiskey a day, who built his boats out of wood instead of metal, whose firm (Higgins Industries) was a fly-by-night outfit on the Gulf Coast rather than an established firm on the East Coast, and who insisted that the “Navy doesn’t know one damn thing about small boats.”