Higgins Industries was at the center of a massive New Orleans contribution to the war effort. From boats to planes to anti-aircraft shells, tens of thousands of workers churned out war supplies across the city.
Vast cargoes of stores left the Mississippi River docks, dodging German submarines in the Gulf of Mexico on their way overseas. Most of the lakefront was home to armaments factories, airfields, bases and military hospitals.
Nebraska-born Andrew Jackson Higgins came to New Orleans to log cypress. He turned his attention to building small craft for oil workers to traverse the marshes. He fought a recalcitrant Navy bureaucracy on the benefits of his Eureka work boat. Once a front-ramp was added to the design, the LCVP, the famed “Higgins boat,” was born.
From a plant built on City Park Avenue next to Delgado Trade School, Higgins churned out LCVPs around the clock. Finished boats were loaded onto rail cars and taken to Bayou St. John, where they were put in the water and tested. Higgins grew from 79 employees in 1939, to more than 20,000 by war’s end.
Higgins had women and black people in skilled and supervisory positions, while at other contractors such as Delta Shipyards, workers walked out if a black man got a skilled job. The plant quickly outgrew its space, spilling into the potters field cemetery behind it. The site is now a parking lot and an administration building for Delgado.
Higgins expanded quickly as it won contracts to build larger landing craft, PT boats, Liberty ships and even a handful of airplanes. Eventually seven plants were open, including on the Industrial Canal, and at Michoud, on the site of today’s Michoud Assembly Facility. Trinity Yachts now occupies the Industrial Canal site.
German subs took a heavy toll on shipping out of New Orleans in 1942 and 1943. Scores of local mariners were killed before the Navy won control of the seas.
More than 5,000 PBY Catalina flying boats were made at the Consolidated Vultee Aircraft plant on Franklin Avenue at Robert E. Lee Boulevard. Shells were made at a Jones-Laughlin Steel plant on N. Miro Street and a Rheem plant on Jefferson Highway, which now houses parish water and sewerage offices. There were five other shipyards at work: Avondale, Todd, Louisiana, Pendleton and Delta.
After the war, President Dwight D. Eisenhower called Higgins "the man who won the war for us,” for getting the troops ashore. All but forgotten after the war, Higgins and his boats were the inspiration for historian Stephen Ambrose to found the National World War II Museum.
Tomorrow, 1945: Sportswriter Peter Finney begins a career that is now in its 66th year.