In the Pacific theater of World War II, allied landings on islands were challenged by shallow coral atolls that wrecked the normal landing craft available. For example, the Tarawa landings were a disaster leading to troops getting stranded and machine gunned, many never getting ashore.
The solution came from a hard-drinking Irishman Andrew Higgins who worked in the Louisiana bayou supplying material for oil and gas wells. Higgins designed and built shallow draft craft capable of carrying heavy loads in depths less than two feet of water. He realized his boats provided an answer to the Pacific landing problems that could save American lives. Here’s a slice of what happens next from the War Factories documentary: How American Grew the most Powerful Navy in the World.
Higgins boats are tested effective and can be easily mass produced, but once again the government’s monolithic military bureaucracy has other ideas. Somewhat predictably, you’ve got these bureaucrats at the US Navy board who are absolutely determined to use the landing craft that they’re commissioned and designed internally, despite the fact they were obviously bad. They continue to purchase thousands of these inferior internally designed ships even though it’s costing American lives.
This is a theme that you see going on throughout the entire war. You’ve got this real pushback of Army bureaucrats against the expansion of military production into the private sector. Now that of course is going against men like Higgins and Kaiser who really know what they’re doing. But Higgins, like Kaiser, is not easily beaten. He demands that Congress investigate the Navy board and wins a hearing with Senator Harry Truman… Truman calls for a head-to-head operational test: The Navy’s boat versus Higgins. Everything that Higgins would have wished for happens so he shows the Navy designers up as vastly inferior. His design dazzles everybody.
Truman is stunned by the corruption of the Navy board. He launches a full-scale investigation and concludes that the Navy board have shown a flagrant disregard for the facts if not the safety and success of American troops. Higgins is awarded the contract to mass-produce his design. D-Day happens in June 1944. A few weeks later the United States invades the Marianas islands, Saipan, and Guam with a naval force 10 times larger.
By the way, when Henry Kaiser wanted to build a shipyard for the Liberty ships in Richmond California, the “experts” told him it would take six months just to dredge the Santa Fe channel to clear enough land to start work. Kaiser did it in three weeks. He then built the whole shipyard in three months and assembled the ship based on (then) modern assembly line methods. He used welding instead of riveting because you could train a welder in two weeks compared to six months for riveting. The first Liberty ship was constructed in just 124 days. Time matters in war, and it turns out a preference for time also drives down costs and performance up.
As one commenter on the series noted, the United States today can’t even push the paperwork in the time it took to build shipyards and entire ships during World War II. There’s a lot of reasons for that, some of which is internal to the Pentagon and some external. But here is an important aspect which bureaucrats can’t seem to understand:
Lack of planning is useful because it enables the whole productive process to be much more nimble. If you have a rigid plan with fixed targets, rigid designs as to what you’re going to produce, how you’re going to produce it, then if something unexpected happens or you find that something you’re doing is not working, it’s very hard to change course to suddenly reallocate resources, re-tool factories. The whole system has a quality of much greater flexibility.
Let’s take a lesson from history before it’s too late. #Make Industrial Mobilization Cool Again.
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