![]() ![]() officials at the highest levels of government: "Andrew Higgins is the man who won the war for us," President Dwight Eisenhower told an interviewer in 1964. Such was its impact on D-Day and in other naval operations of World War II that great credit was given to its designer by U.S. The vessel could carry a 36-man platoon or a jeep and a 12-man squad at a speed of up to 12 knots (13.8 mph, or 22.2 km/h) and a key to its design was a "spoonbill bow" below the front ramp that forced water underneath and allowed the vessel to push up onto shore, according to Smithsonian magazine. military, using innovations he'd developed for swamp boats. "The surplus nature of the craft highlights an earlier era of the lake when Las Vegas and Lake Mead were much more remote and removed from much of the United States, where relatively inexpensive WWII surplus could be pressed into duty for new peaceful purposes in the park," NPS officials said in an email to the newspaper.īoatbuilder Andrew Higgins of New Orleans designed the Higgins boat in the late 1930s for the U.S. Local dive operators then included the sunken wreck on tours, and staff from the National Parks Service began diving on the site in 2006 to remove its engine, the report said. The vessel was then used in surveys of the Colorado River, but it was later sold to a marina at Lake Mead eventually, it was deliberately sunk to anchor a breakwater - an offshore structure built to protect a marine area from waves - at a depth of nearly 185 feet (56 meters). War surplusĪccording to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Higgins boat at Lake Mead was surplus to the war effort and was sold off by the military in the years after World War II. The most famous moment for these iconic boats was on D-Day on June 6, 1944, when around 1,500 Higgins boats carried American, British and Canadian troops to beaches in Normandy in France while under heavy fire from occupying German forces. ![]() and Allied militaries, to carry soldiers and fighting vehicles from ships to shore, according to Stanford University. More than 23,000 Higgins boats were built during the 1940s for the U.S. ![]()
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