On D-Day, June 6, 1944, thousands of U.S. soldiers and their gear came ashore in Higgins boats on Utah and Omaha beaches in Normandy, France.
Andrew Jackson Higgins, a boat builder in New Orleans, is rightfully credited with the design of the boat that bears his name. A statue of him, along with a Higgins boat, is on display on Utah Beach.
"Andrew Higgins is the man who won the war for us," former President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in a 1964 interview with author Stephen Ambrose.
The military christened the vessel LCVP — which stands for landing craft, vehicle, personnel — as the official name of Higgins boats, used not just in the D-Day landings in Europe, but also in the war's Pacific Campaigns and in the Korean War landings at Inchon.
Higgins crafted the flatbottom boat to navigate Louisiana's bayous in shallow water, which made it perfect for getting to the beaches. However, Higgins' boat had one major design flaw for amphibious landing purposes: It required troops to climb over the gunwales.
That flaw was fixed by Marine Corps 1st Lt. Victor "Brute" Krulak, who designed a bow ramp that could be lowered when the vessels reached the beach, allowing for speedy exit. He also ensured that an engine with sufficient horsepower would propel the vessel partway up the beach. After offloading the troops, the boat driver would reverse the engine and steer the boat back to the ship from whence it came.
The ideas for the design alteration came to Krulak when he was serving in China in the late 1930s. He observed Japanese Yangtze River landing vessels with ramps. The quick-thinking lieutenant made sketches of the vessels and took copious notes that would pay off when he briefed his commander, Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Holland "Howlin' Mad" Smith, on his ideas and showed him a model of the altered Higgins boat.
Eventually, the U.S. Navy adopted the Higgins boats with Krulak's design incorporated.
A later variant of the Higgins boat were the LCMs, landing craft mechanized, that were commonly called Mike boats. They were used during the Vietnam War and are still in use. They were called Mike boats because the last letter of LCM is called mike in the NATO phonetic alphabet.
Krulak participated in many Pacific Campaign battles including on Choiseul Island, which is part of the Solomon Islands, in October and November 1943. At the end of that battle, a PT boat captained by Navy Lt. John F. Kennedy, helped evacuate then-Lt. Col. Krulak's forces. Kennedy later became president, and the two met in 1962 and talked about the battle, as well as Krulak's assessments of the Vietnam War.
In 1964, Krulak became the commanding general of Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, headquarters at Camp H.M. Smith, Hawaii. The camp's namesake was Krulak's former boss.
Krulak also served in the Korean and Vietnam wars and retired in 1968 as a lieutenant general. He died in 2008 at age 95, living long enough to see his son, Charles, became Marine Corps commandant from 1995 to 1999.