By George Olsen
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/pre/local-pre-823806.mp3
NC Maritime Museum completed restoration of LCVP
New Bern, NC – INTRO - A piece of World War II history has regained some of its original luster thanks to the efforts of the Watercraft Center at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort. George Olsen has more.
More than 20,000 Landing Craft Vehicle Personnel or "Higgins" boats were built to support amphibious landings in World War II. No less a personage than General Dwight D. Eisenhower said without these crafts the "whole strategy of the war would have been different." As important as they were to the War effort, today, only about a dozen remain, which made the preservation of one acquired by the 1st Division Museum outside Chicago, Illinois that much more important. They inquired of the Maritime Museum if they could undertake the task of restoring it. The answer was yes, though a lot of effort was involved.
"Everything from the deck upwards was rotten, and had to be replaced. It had also suffered from being started to be modified to a barge, so the engine had been removed and a lot of the steering and operating area had been demolished, because they wanted to make more space to put cargo in. And it was dirty, it had 60 years worth of grease and oil and water and goodness knows what else in the bilges. It was filthy."
Paul Fontenoy is the Maritime curator with the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort. They received the vessel in August and recently completed the restoration. Despite the state of the Higgins boat, Fontenoy says it was actually still structurally sound because whoever built the boat originally built it slightly out of spec.
"It's built entirely out of mahogany, the sides are planked, the bottom is planked, the stern is planked. All the framing is mahogany. The Higgins company that built the majority of them used very specific specifications. The bottom was supposed to be planked but it was supposed to be planked over a sub-strata of plywood. The sides on Higgins boats were single sheets of 7-ply plywood, and so is the stern. This boat isn't built that way."
The restored LCVP isn't at this time entirely historically accurate they haven't yet found some of the parts necessary such as the steering wheel, the throttle assembly, and the compass, though Fontenoy says they're out there and an active search is ongoing. The search has been two-way the Maritime Museum seeking historically accurate parts, and WWII vets have sought out the Maritime Museum to see a piece of their past.
"It's actually been one of the more satisfying parts of the project is the sheer number of vets who come in. I don't even have a count on it. We even have one veteran who was a Marine raider in WWII and participated in five landings in the Pacific, 3 of them in LCVPs. He showed up. He volunteered, and he helped in the restoration as well."
He said he heard many stories from the veterans, including one that involved the unique construction of this particular LCVP.
"We had one veteran who was in the 3rd wave of Omaha Beach on D-Day who was bringing his boat in and he was saying after looking at our boat he was glad he wasn't in our boat because his was a Higgins boat built with plywood, and an 88mm shell went through the boat from one side to the other just behind the ramp, killed the first two guys in the boat, severely wounded the next two guys in the boat but didn't explode because they didn't hit anything hard enough to ignite the fuse. He said he would've been worried if he'd been in a mahogany built it would've been hard enough to ignite the fuse and then he wouldn't have been there."
The North Carolina Maritime Museum will formally hand over the restored LCVP to the 1st Division Museum Friday at 2:00 pm during a ceremony at the Watercraft Center in Beaufort. Paul Fontenoy is the Maritime Curator for the Musuem. I'm George Olsen.