A group of Landing Craft, Vehicle (LCVs) maneuver in the Chesapeake Bay off Camp Bradford, Little
Creek, Virginia, in 1943. (Naval History and Heritage Command image)
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HRNM Historian
As the world prepares to focus once again on the beaches of Normandy and recognize the men who gave their lives to cross them on June 6, 1944 to free France from German occupation on D-Day, it's worth mentioning the simple but brilliantly conceived landing craft, commonly known as Higgins boats, that got them from their hulking transport vessels to those beaches.
Not to be forgotten as well are those who trained their operators and maintained the myriad types of landing craft that ultimately paved the way back to Europe. Much of the training and maintenance that paid dividends during Operation Neptune (the littoral phase of Operation Overlord), as well as earlier operations in North Africa and Europe occurred all over Hampton Roads.
The first and most numerous of what became over a dozen varieties of Higgins boat, known as the Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel (LCVP) entered U.S. naval service in June 1941 after the first nine of them rolling into Norfolk aboard rail cars from Andrew Jackson Higgins' factory in New Orleans. The LCVP was originally made from Higgins' Eureka boat, a favorite of Prohibition-era smugglers as well as their Coast Guard adversaries, modified with innovations rooted in Japanese designs noted by Marine Corps Lieutenant Victor "Brute" Krulak while he was stationed in China a couple of years before.
From North Carolina's Outer Banks to the Ocean View section of Norfolk to Naval Amphibious Training Base Solomons, Maryland, halfway up the Chesapeake Bay, hundreds more LCVPs and their larger cousins, the Landing Craft, Mechanized (LCMs), Landing Craft, Vehicle (LCVs) and a dozen other variants would perform rough duty loading and landing trainees over and over on beaches throughout the Mid-Atlantic for the duration of the war. After endlessly bobbing and banging against the transport vessels to load personnel and pounded by the surf disgorging them on local beaches, it became readily apparent that specialized facilities were needed to keep the boats, constructed from five-eighths inch plywood, from falling apart.
The Naval Landing Force Equipment Depot in Norfolk, one of only two established during the war (the other being in Berkeley, California), began before the war as a small activity known as the Base Material Office on the Naval Operating Base (now known as Naval Station Norfolk) with a staff consisting of eight officers and 271 enlisted personnel.
By June 1942, 738 personnel maintained a pool of 397 new landing craft in their modest five-acre stowage yard and had 32 under repair. They were also training operators who would accompany the landing craft to their new commands. The hundreds of landing craft converging upon Hampton Roads and the thousands of personnel needed to operate them were overwhelming the small facility, but help arrived in the person of Henry Ford's son, Edsel, who sold his sprawling vehicle assembly plant along the south bank of the Elizabeth River's Eastern Branch to the Navy for $2 million on September 8, 1942.
Sailors quickly emptied out the three small buildings and stowage yard they maintained at NOB in October and moved 20 miles south into a main building measuring roughly 300 feet by 1,400 feet containing office spaces, a large galley, mess halls, and recreation areas in the southern end, and storerooms, repair shops, classrooms, paint booths on the north end, where as many as 25 railroad cars could be loaded or unloaded under its roof at one time. The facility was equipped with a practically new 400-foot pier and was surrounded by 65 acres of stowage. By March 1943, Naval Amphibious Force Atlantic Fleet was finally ready to maintain and refurbish the many thousands of landing craft required to prosecute the war in North Africa and Europe.
By October 1943, the depot, which boasted a staff of 1,117 enlisted men led by 70 officers, had repaired or overhauled over 10,000 landing craft, with thousands left to go. After D-Day, however, the work load eased as more and more landing craft were transferred to the Pacific.
The need for such a large depot on the East Coast evaporated after the war, so the Ford Motor Corporation scooped the facility back up from the Navy on February 25, 1946, for $1.6 million–$400,000 less that it had sold it to the Navy for for less than four years earlier. Nearly that much had to be invested into the empty facility to begin cranking out vehicles again, which it did in August. The assembly plant continued to produce vehicles of all types, from sedans to trucks to school bus chassis, for decades until the last F-150 rolled off the assembly line there in April 2007.
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