Dwight Eisenhower credited a bankrupt Louisiana lumber dealer with winning the war for the Allies. This episode follows Andrew Higgins from the bayous of the 1920s, where his Eureka boat with its tunnel stern and spoonbill bow could slide onto mud banks and back off again, serving trappers, oil drillers, and Prohibition rum runners. When the Depression and the repeal of Prohibition wiped out his business, the Marine Corps' looming amphibious problem gave him a second chance.

We trace his fight with the Navy's Bureau of Construction and Repair, the Fleet exercises of 1938 and 1939 where his boat outperformed the Navy's own designs, the fatal flaw of the solid bow on the early LCPL, and the 1941 photograph of a Japanese Daihatsu ramp boat that inspired the fix. Higgins built three ramped prototypes at his own expense, tested them on Lake Pont ...