When you think of D-Day, I imagine you like me, picture thousands of preposterously courageous soldiers storming the beaches of France's Normandy amid a hail of Nazi machine gun and artillery fire.

You picture paratroopers bravely and brazenly dropping from the sky, also encountering enemy fire as they float so incredibly exposed down onto European soil, hoping their hearts

will still be beating when they land. Overall, you picture a bunch of young men sacrificing literally

everything to stop Hitler's aggression and the Axis powers. What you probably don't typically

think about are the boats that took the overwhelming majority of soldiers to those beaches, boats that made D-Day possible. Or at least those boats aren't the

first thing that come to mind. Perhaps the imagery just isn't as sexy. And yet many World War II

historians, politicians, and soldiers don't believe that a D-Day victory would have been possible

without the naval ingenuity of one man and his remarkable mind.

Andrew Higgins.

If his name sounds familiar, well, you're probably a bigger World War II historian than I am or most of the people who listen to Timesuck are.

I'd heard of his boats before this week's research,

but only because of previous research for this show and a trip to the World War II Museum in New Orleans. I certainly was not familiar with the man behind the name of the Higgins boat. Higgins was a

boat manufacturer and won a hell of a colorful character based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Prior to

working for the U.S. military,

he had owned a successful wood import business, Higgins, Lumber, and Export Co, a business that

required a lot of boats to be profitable. He'd acquired a fleet of sailing ships, said to have been

the largest in America at one time, and to service his massive fleet, he'd established a shipyard,

and to improve his fleets, he'd figured out how to design and manufacture his own boats.

Boats had turned out to be a lot better than the ones he was previously buying. Higgins loved boats.

He had been obsessed with designing them since he was literally in grade school. He was also brilliant,

inventive,

and ambitious, and after making a lot of money importing a whole lot of hardwood, he wanted to do something different, something more important. He wanted to work with the U.S. military.

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