At the National World War II Museum in New Orleans a sign asks the question that most visitors to the museum probably ask themselves:  Why is New Orleans the host city for a museum dedicated to World War II?   The answer is simple.  It was home to the man who, as Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower once put it, “won the war for us.”

Andrew Jackson Higgins, who died this week (Aug. 1) in 1952, was the founder of Higgins Industries, a New Orleans-based shipbuilding firm that built the famous “Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel,” better known as the LCVP, but best known as the “Higgins Boat.”   The Higgins boat was a shallow-draft craft that could carry soldiers and equipment from offshore transport ships right up to the shoreline, allowing them to disembark quickly.

It was, in other words, the perfect craft if an army needed to invade enemy territory from the sea.  And as it happened, on June 6, 1944 — better known as D-Day — an allied invasion force needed to cross the English Channel and land on the beaches of Normandy, France, in order to reclaim the European continent from the armies of Nazi Germany, which had controlled most of Europe since 1940.  As Eisenhower also said, “If Higgins hadn’t designed and built those LCVPs, we never could have landed over an open beach.  The whole strategy of the war would have been different.”

The Higgins boat actually evolved from his earlier Eureka boat, which had helped oil drillers maneuver along the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River.  The Eureka featured a recessed propeller built into the boat’s hull, which enabled it to maneuver in shallow waters where thick flora and other submerged objects rendered most boats useless.   The Eureka also had a flat bow that allowed it to run right up to riverbanks and then easily disengage.

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Sir James Alfred Ewing, one of history’s true unsung heroes, died this week (Jan. 7) in 1935.  Ewing ran the unparalleled code-cracking team that worked in “Room 40” (where the team started, but quickly expanded) in the British Admiralty during World War I.  When that war ended, the 90-plus code-breakers who worked in Room 40 had decrypted nearly 15,000 German communications, mostly German naval codes, which gave the British Royal Navy a leg up against the German High Seas Fleet.  To give two famous examples, at the battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland the British Admiralty benefitted greatly from Room 40’s intelligence, although — especially at Jutland — they didn’t always use it well.

As for Ewing, he was a trained engineer who had taught at Tokyo University in Japan and later at King’s College, Cambridge.  But his hobby had always been cracking secret codes — a hobby he began as a boy solving acrostic puzzles in newspapers.

Ewing was also, certainly by Edwardian England’s standards, an egalitarian who hired code-breakers for their talent, not their background.  As a result, in addition to professors, his Room 40 team included a business tycoon, a dress designer, a priest, a music critic, former soldiers and a historian.  What’s more, Ewing was neither militaristic nor corporate in the work environment he fostered, which attracted talented people — “oddballs, misfits and boffins,” as they became known — who never would have survived the standard disciplinary regime of the British Admiralty.  Indeed, perhaps Room 40’s most brilliant member was Alfred Knox, whom Ewing allowed to work while sitting in a bathtub because Knox claimed he did his best thinking surrounded by “an atmosphere of soap and steam.”  Ewing also hired many women.

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Among Winston Churchill’s most under-appreciated gifts was his gift of foresight, which was uncanny but also the product of his deep understanding of human nature and his sure grasp of history.   Indeed, many of Churchill’s speeches leading up to (and during) World War II were great not only because of the matchless rhetoric he seemed to call forth effortlessly, but also because — as history would show — he was dead right in his assessment of the issue at hand, even though that assessment was invariably unpopular with, and unheeded by, his countrymen.

A perfect example of this is the little-known speech Churchill gave this week (Oct. 5) in 1938, just days after then-British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had returned from his meeting with Adolf Hitler in Munich, Germany, and declared that the agreement he and Hitler had signed (actually it was a scrap of paper that Hitler barely glanced at) had averted war and produced a “peace with honor.”  Unfortunately, what Chamberlain and France’s leader Edouard Daladier had ignominiously agreed to at Munich, under pressure from Hitler, was that the Czech Sudetenland, which was part of the Democratic Republic of Czechoslovakia, would be forcibly transferred to Germany, and all non-German Czechs would be forced to leave the Sudetenland immediately.

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