-Kind of switch around,
and I'm going to start my webcam
so you all can see me.
There we go.
All right. Okay.
Now all of you should be able to see me.
Hello. Good morning or good afternoon.
So as I was saying earlier, our program is all around the theme,
"What Floats Your Boat?"
And this is part of actually a festival through CILC.
They have content providers like us,
museums, other organizations,
and we're all doing programs around this theme this week,
so this is our version of it here
at The National World War II Museum.
To give you a quick rundown, what we're going to do
is we're going to talk about three main things today.
First off, we have Kali and Josh from PT-305.
They're going to be talking about PT boats
and the restoration process here at the museum.
They're historians, but they also work on the boat regularly,
so they're our awesome special guests.
Next, we're going to talk about Higgins boats,
and we actually have a veteran for you all to meet.
His name is Johnny Difatta.
In the second half of the program,
he's going to tell you about driving Higgins boats.
And then, to close it all out, my coworker, Rob Wallace,
he's the STEM education coordinator here.
He will be talking about pontoons,
and we'll give you guys your own pontoon design challenge,
see if you can actually make something float
in your own classroom.
As an FYI, everybody, I'm going to be moving out screen
in just 1 second,
but below me, you see this Q&A pod.
I will be watching this Q&A area
throughout the rest of the program,
and if you have any questions
for Kali or Josh
or Mr. Johnny, type them in there,
and we'll be answering them in different parts of the program,
and also, if you have any tech issues
and you want to type in and let me know, feel free,
and I'll try to help you as best as I possibly can off camera.
You may occasionally hear my voice off camera
as we're kind of moving everybody around
since we have five of us in here right now,
but that'll be me, and, you know,
I'll be helping to direct this whole program and moderate it.
So with that, and now at 12:03,
hopefully not taking up any more time,
I'm going to shift over, and I'm going to welcome
in Kali and Josh from PT-305.
Thanks so much for joining us, guys.
All right. Do you both fit?
There we are. -There we go.
-Good morning.
-Hello. -Afternoon, everyone.
-Good morning, afternoon. -I'm Kali.
-I'm Josh.
We're with the PT-305 restoration
down at that center.
-Yeah. -PT-305 Restoration here
at the National World War II Museum today,
so I'm going to talk to you a little bit about PT-boat history
starting with why PT boats existed.
This is actually a photograph...
Do my pointing the other way.
This is actually a photograph of the PT boat
that we're restoring right now.
It's a specially designed craft used during the Second World War
made out of wood,
and they fought in almost every major naval theater of action.
Andrew Higgins here in New Orleans built 199 of them,
and we're lucky enough to have one of them left we can work on,
and the whole purpose of these boats
is actually to fire a torpedo.
Next picture, please.
So this is a torpedo.
It's called a Mark 13 aerial torpedo.
These boats were meant to be small and fast boats
that would go out at nighttime.
They would sneak up on enemy ships,
whether it's a big combatant ship or a merchant ship,
to sink enemy supplies.
They'd sneak within about 500 yards,
drop this torpedo in the water,
and the torpedo would go strike the ship, sink it,
and then our boat would speed away.
I've got a little video of a PT boat firing a torpedo
in a test,
kind of show y'all...
-There we go.
Let's... -For these boats...
-Show y'all a little bit what it did.
-...Higgins also designed and built lightweight torpedo tubes.
These scenes are official records of...
-And that's a 2,000-pound torpedo...
-...tests made with 20 torpedos...
-...shooting out of a tube,
so what they would do is they would...
-...prove that their many... -...come up at nighttime.
-...revolutionary features make...
-They'd sneak up on a ship,
and they would point their torpedo towards that ship,
push the button, and it would go jetting out of a tube there.
-...these the most efficient torpedo tubes in...
-Now, a little bit later in the war,
boats develop the ability to put it in a side-launching rack
as you see in our little photo here,
so instead of shooting it out of a tube,
the guys would just kind of drop it over the side,
but all that being said, the entire point of these boats
was to have that torpedo there
so that they could go and shoot it.
Next, we're going to talk a little bit about
the construction of these boats.
How did they build them?
The first thing you have to do when you're building something
is you got to get blueprints,
so this is a quick little shot of blueprints.
The couple hundred different prints
go into building one whole boat.
Every single little piece has got a blueprint
and a picture with all the measurements.
It tells you how to build it, what to do.
These blueprints have been important to us
in our rebuilding process,
but this is where it all starts, so at the Higgins factory,
they look at...
I believe it's in some of our catch words.
We've got hull and keel and frames.
If you look at this photograph,
the frames are all little vertical lines
that go all the way down the boat and all the ribs,
and the keel, as you'll see in all your definitions,
is the main board that goes down the middle,
and that's where they start, build the boats up from there.
So these... Yeah.
So these boats were made out of wood because,
if you studied in some of your classes,
metals were strategic materials,
which means they needed to save some of the metals for tanks
and bigger ships
and other important things,
so they needed a torpedo boat that was lightweight,
easy to build,
and didn't use strategic materials,
so they made them out of wood, so amazingly enough,
a lot of these boats were built by hand,
so you can see our guy here.
He's chiseling a cut into some of the ribs
on the bottom of the boat.
Another larger piece will fit in there,
and actually, if you look at the two holes above his head
that makes it look like he has Mickey Mouse ears,
that's actually where the propeller
shaft goes through the boat,
so he's kind of cutting the rest of the hull
to let that shaft come through.
Go to the next picture.
It's not just cars that are made on assembly lines.
You can make really big, big things on assembly lines.
This is a picture of the Higgins City Park plant,
so at the very far, far, far end of that picture,
the whole boat starts with one piece of wood,
and by the time it gets to this end of the picture,
they've been putting on piece by piece by piece
as the boats are coming down the line,
and you end up with an entire 78-foot PT boat
all made out of wood.
Next one.
Here's another guy working with some hand tools.
Higgins industries was very good about employing.
They employed almost one in five people in New Orleans
over the course of the Second World War,
which is roughly 20,000 people,
and a lot of them worked on the Higgins boat line,
and here you see a guy working his hand tools
and putting the pieces together.
And I think, at this point,
we're going to kind of go conserve our time.
We're going to have Kali talk about
the boat's history in the war.
-So the boat that we're talking about is PT-305.
She was also known as The Sudden Jerk,
and that's a story we heard
that she backed into a dock really hard once,
so they gave her a good nickname for that.
Once she was built here in New Orleans,
she went all the way across the Atlantic Ocean
to the Mediterranean,
and there in the Mediterranean,
she was fighting German coastal shipping,
so they would go out late at night in the dark,
and they would look for German barges or boats
and try to sink them with torpedos or their guns.
The average crew on a PT boat was two officers
and about 12 to 14 enlisted men.
You had torpedo men. You had gunners.
You had a ship's cook.
We even had a baker as a specialist on our boat.
You had what were called motor machinist mate,
and they ran the engines, the three engines in the boat,
and these guys would work.
They would leave in the evening, and they would go out all night
patrolling the coast in Italy and France looking for Germans.
All right? And you see a picture here,
can see the 50-cal guns that were on the boat
and one of the torpedos.
Like I said, our boat was in the Mediterranean,
and while she was there, she sank three German boats,
and she was there from April of 1944 until the end of the war.
She came back in May of 1945.
She operated in what was called a squadron,
and that was 12 boats that operated together,
and they would sometimes...
They would go out two or three together at night.
Now, once she came back from the war,
she had a very long, long history,
so they were sent back to New York,
and they were going to go to the Pacific.
Thankfully, our good fighting men got the job done,
and she didn't have to go over there.
That's one of the reasons we still have the PT-305.
So, after the war, she was sold for just $10.
This boat that cost over $100,000 to make during the war
was sold for only $10,
and since 1948 when she was sold,
she's had many different careers.
She's been a tour boat, a fishing boat,
and we have a picture of her here as an oyster boat,
and she would go out where they could put baby oysters out
and grow oysters out in the Chesapeake,
and this is what she was doing
until 2005
when a group from Texas found out that,
hey, this oyster boat is actually a boat
with a great World War II history,
and they were able to rescue her and take her down to Texas.
Well, unfortunately,
they weren't able to finish working on her,
and they were going to restore her to this beautiful PT boat
from the war again.
So the World War II Museum found out about it,
and the World War II Museum got the boat in 2007,
and that's when people like Josh...
Josh started at the beginning restoring the boat,
and so we're going to tell you a little bit
about the boat's restoration.
So you saw the pictures before and how pretty she was
and everything on top,
and this is what she looked like when we got her.
It's kind of sad.
The boat was 78 feet long originally,
but so that people could use it after the war,
they had to cut 13 feet off
so that she was only 65 feet long,
so one of the things we had to do
was put that extra 13 feet back on,
and then we had to take her down to all the bits and pieces.
We had to take out all the metal.
It starts to rust, and it starts to expand.
So this is a really good picture to show you
how we've opened up the boat,
and you can see the old planking,
and you see the new pieces
and how we've combined the new pieces and the old pieces,
and we take the old pieces,
and we can use them somewhere else.
Josh actually has here...
This is a new piece of the boat's decking,
so you can get a little idea of the construction.
So it's all wood construction like Josh said, so it's...
Turn it, and we'll see how thin it is.
So you got... What's the thickness?
-It's an inch thick.
-So just imagine being out in the Mediterranean at night
looking for Germans in a boat that's only an inch thick.
There's no metal on it to protect you,
nothing between the water but you and this inch of wood.
So the way the boat is constructed
is you've got the two pieces
that are put together with canvas to make it watertight,
and one of the things we've had to do is find out
all these original techniques that they used
so that we could copy these techniques
and do it as it was before.
So you can see all of these here.
These are copper rivets, so, yes,
I did a little Rosie the Riveter job,
and I got to help rivet all these in.
There are 39,000 that we did with just an air gun
and a lot of...
-Patience. -...patience, yes,
sometimes being crammed.
You can see in the picture, as deep as the boat gets in that V,
we had to climb all the way down there
and rivet all the way down.
And this right here, this piece,
is where one of the ribs would've gone,
so the ribs get screwed in,
and then we rivet in between that,
and it makes it nice and watertight,
so that's been a big challenge.
Originally when they built the boats, it took them a month
to put the boat together at Higgins Industries.
It took us a year just to re-rivet it,
so that's been a very big, big challenge for us.
But part of the fun... Chrissy, can you play?
-Yeah. -We've got a special time-lapse
video that... -Yeah.
This is really cool.
-It's a good up-close shot of me to begin it.
-Yeah.
All right. Let's check it out.
-So one of the things that's important to us
is putting back in things that were originally in the boat,
and when our boat was built, did it have portholes, Josh?
-Did not have portholes. -So you want to tell them
about how we got the portholes in our boat?
-Yes. A crew member of ours...
-James Nerison. -...James Nerison,
he was in France during the war in 1944,
and he saw a bunch of wrecked French yachts
that had been bombed out in the harbor
that they were staying in that day,
and so he saw some portholes, and he went up to his captain,
and he said, "You know, I'd love to have a window
in the side of my side of the boat,
and so captain said that,
"That's fine as long as you black it out
so that no light gets out while you're patrolling at night."
So he installed the portholes that you're seeing them
install in this time-lapse video,
and the captain apparently liked them
so much the captain asked for another set for himself too,
so what's really special about these is that,
for everything we've had to rebuild,
we've got these portholes that James Nerison
took from a French boat in 1944,
and he placed them inside the boat.
That was his own little personal touch
that makes our boat very unique,
and we're very honored,
and we're very lucky to have objects like this
that represent our boat's specific history and story
and things that our crew members did for our boat,
and so we went through the process.
We took them off.
We cleaned them.
We fixed the hull,
and then here's the guys reinstalling them,
and then me sitting in a video just kind of watching.
-So one of the challenges we have on the restoration
is trying to understand how the boat was built,
and as historians, we are able to do research
and look at the National Archives
and find original documents
and get recollections from crew members,
and this allows us to do things like put the portholes back in
and put them in and understand
why they were there in the first place
because, when we got the boat, everyone said,
"Why are there portholes? This must have been after the war.
These boats aren't supposed to have portholes,"
but once we got the story from James Nerison, we understood.
Okay. This is something the crew did,
and it's a special thing that, as we restore the boat,
it makes it true to the boat's, you know, origins,
and it's also these special touches
that the crew members put in that make the boat unique
and make it special.
-Yeah, because, ultimately, the most important thing
isn't just to have a piece of equipment,
but it's a piece of equipment that has a story.
These guys were young.
They had to go to war.
This is the service they chose.
They fought.
They lived on this boat, so it's very important to do it right,
do it the way it was and to share their story
because we do not want to forget their story at all.
-So we've got a few minutes.
We're going to tell you a little bit about
Higgins Industries, and you see here
this is actually one of the plants
where they built PT boats,
and we saw we got some people here from New Orleans,
so you might have some family members who worked at Higgins.
As Josh said, he employed at least 20,000 people at a time
in New Orleans during the war,
and he had an impact on a lot of people here.
So Higgins not only built PT boats,
but he built landing craft of different kinds.
You'll hear more about that later, and at one point,
92 percent of the boats
in the United States Navy in World War II
were built by Higgins Industries,
and that was quite an accomplishment.
-Mm-hmm. -And this picture you see here
is a celebration for the 10,000th boat
that Higgins built for the Navy during the war.
Yep. I'll show you some other pictures I forgot.
-Well, I'm going to actually...
We'll leave that to the expert on the LCVP here in a minute.
-Yeah. Yeah. We got him in a sec.
Actually, we've got some great questions.
-Do you guys want to take some questions
in the time that we have left? This is Chrissy,
the disembodied voice off camera.
But we've got... -It's over there.
-...a couple good ones from PFTSTA sixth graders.
They want to know, "Are any crew members
from PT-305 still alive today?"
-Yeah. -Yes, there are.
We're very fortunate that Mr. James Nerison
is still alive, and he's...
You can see him in the picture here.
-Think I have a pointer. -Yeah.
I was going to say...
-He's... -...hard to do this.
-...right there. -Oh.
-Yeah. That's...
-Sometimes it doesn't work.
Let's see here. There he is.
Right there? -Yep.
That's Mr. Nerison. -Yep.
-So he's from California,
and he was one of the original crew members,
and original crew members to a boat are called plank owners,
and this photo here, it's our plank-owner crew,
and Mr. Nerison is one of those,
and he's still out in California.
And then Joseph Brannan, he came onto the boat
in late '44, I believe.
-Yeah. -And he lives out in Colorado
as we understand, and the museum has actually interviewed
both of them and two other crew members
who have since passed on, unfortunately, Benedict Bronder,
who lived in Minnesota, and he was 99 last year.
He was a little bit older for our PT boaters.
-We... The boat...
This is the only crew that was on this boat.
There was how many men?
-About 46. -Yeah.
About 46 men, not all at once.
-No. -That would be a little crowded.
They did shifts, so this crew served
for about a year,
and then, in late 1944, another crew came on,
and then there was a couple other guys,
so of the 47-odd men that were on the boat,
we are lucky enough that two are still alive to this day.
A few others passed before they may have been able
to see the boat,
but unfortunately, they've since passed,
but we're also looking for other men
that are still alive from the squadron
and from her 11 other sister boats,
so the search will continue.
-Yeah. -We've got...
-Say, is it Mr. Pincher's class? -Yes.
-"Were you guys talking about watertight doors,
and what do you"... -We are now.
-Yeah. Well, now let's talk about it.
-That's a good question. -That is a very good question.
When we're talking about the wood here,
the two layers of planks,
in between it is canvas
and then a bedding compound called Dolfinite.
It looks like green peanut butter.
It's real nasty and really sticky and everything.
-It never dries. -But what you do is you
take two pieces of wood.
You put canvas cloth and then Dolfinite,
and then you smash them together,
and it fills in the gaps between all the boards
to make a watertight seal,
so when you say it's a wood boat, you put Dolfinite in it.
You caulk around it, so you make this big watertight thing.
Then the boat does have watertight doors,
so you've got different compartments,
and then you use doors to get between.
Hopefully that answers the question.
-And the watertight doors are actually metal doors that seal.
-Yeah. The watertight doors are aluminum.
They've got rubber gaskets, and you can close them.
We actually have a...
We have actions reports of boats taking damage,
and those watertight doors saved the boat,
kept it from leaking so very useful.
-Mm-hmm. -All right.
I have one more. This is maybe a little selfish.
This is my question, last question before we move
on to Higgins boats.
What's been the hardest thing about restoring that boat?
What's been the most difficult thing for you guys
if you can even name one?
-I would say just getting parts and getting information.
-Yeah. -We have a lot
of original drawings
but not all of them, so we have to fill in the gaps
with photographs
or other documentation
and then finding the parts. -Yeah.
You can't go to a boat store.
There isn't a PT boat section.
-No Home Depot, no trips to Home Depot.
-Yeah.
And so the crew changed little things while they had the boat,
and then just a lot of parts aren't made anymore,
so what we have to look for are called
usually legacy companies, you know,
maybe someone that built a piece back then.
They've got bought out by someone else,
and it's under a different name,
or you would be amazed what's on eBay,
and you would be amazed what people walk in the door and say,
"Oh, I have one of those in my attic.
You know, I'll bring it down."
-Yeah. -But we're still looking
for parts
if y'all are holding on to anything for a PT boat.
Just put it on the question thing.
-We're looking for a compass this week.
-Yes. Compass this week. -All right.
Compass is our next challenge.
All right.
Well, thank you, guys, so much.
I know we're doing a whirlwind sort of webinar today,
but if you all are interested about more information
about PT-305, at the end, I've included a document
that Kali and Josh put together
that could answer almost every single question
about that boat if you want to know more.
And I think this is just the first of many webinar series
that we'll do with them, so,
everybody, give a virtual round of applause for Kali and Josh.
-Yay. -Thank you.
-All right. Thanks, guys.
All right? -Nice talking to y'all.
-Next, we're going to shuffle in,
and I'm going to come back into the screen,
and I'm going to welcome Mr. Johnny Difatta.
All right. Let me scooch on in here.
Mr. Johnny, how about you come this way?
-Okay. -All right.
Let's see here, and let's get you on camera here.
Let's see if we're both on camera.
All right.
And while we're kind of getting situated,
I'm going to play a little video of the next thing
that we're going to be talking about,
the Higgins boat, or the LCVP.
All right. There we go.
Now we're both on camera here.
There we go. -Hi.
-And you guys can see an LCVP loading in right now troops,
and Mr. Johnny, during World War II,
he drove one of these boats.
And these are actually...
I think this is some video from Europe,
but he actually drove boats out in the Pacific,
so we want to know kind of all about that, you know,
and what your experience was like.
Can you tell us a little bit
about driving one of these boats?
What was it like?
-Well, it wasn't an easy riding boat,
and it wasn't an easy driving boat
because you had one engine in here,
and you have to watch the bow.
-Show that on the screen if you want.
There we go. There we go.
-You have to watch that bow doesn't pull on you.
You have to keep it straight.
Now he built
20,000 of these during the war. -Yeah.
Show some pictures here.
Let's get to them. There we go.
-And it's all wood except the ramp.
It's seven-ply, which you just saw the PT boat wood.
-Yeah. Want to hold that up for everybody?
Yeah. There's the wood. -And that's it.
That's how thick it is.
He built 20,000 for the war, and then he built...
Well, it holds 36 fully packed troops.
-See? There's some on that image there.
-Yeah. And this is when it hits the island.
-Yeah. There we go.
Can you tell us, why does the boat have a ramp?
Why would a boat like that need a ramp?
-Well... -What was its purpose?
-...actually, I'll tell you why.
This is the first boats he built with a bow on it.
We had one here at the warehouse.
The reason that boat hit the beach in Guadalcanal in '42,
the back was still in deep water.
Troops were jumping off the sides.
Well, that didn't work too good, so Mr. Higgins
told his engineer,
"Graham, cut 14 feet off that boat and put a ramp on it."
Since 1942, every boat built here had a ramp on it,
20,000 of them.
We actually built 16,000 here, 13,000,
and we gave our plans to other boat builders
because we couldn't put out any more than 18 a day,
and they wanted more,
so we gave our plans to another boat builder,
Chris Craft and two other ones.
They built 7,000.
We built 13,000.
20,000 LCVPs were built in New Orleans.
Now he built 10,000 of these.
These are all steel.
They're 50 feet long, carried 60 fully packed troops,
a Sherman tank, bulldozer.
-Did you drive one of these? -I ran one of these.
Actually, I was on this boat when we invaded
Treasury Island in the Pacific.
-Actually, I've got a map of the Pacific Ocean.
-1943. -Let's see here.
-So Treasury Island is somewhere. Let's see.
-I don't think you're going to find it on the map.
-Is it not on there? -It's close to Bougainville.
Actually... -We're down there, I think.
-...we were a decoy for Bougainville,
and we didn't know that until after the war.
We were 16 miles south of Bougainville.
Bougainville is the closest island to the United States,
and the Japanese had a big air base on it.
They were getting ready to bomb the United States,
so we took it back in '43.
And I got a picture of it.
-Let's see. -It's so small.
It's not on...
-Oh, I want to put it up on screen.
Yeah. -It's so small.
It's not even on a big map. -Oh, yeah.
-It's a little bitty island
right there 16 miles south of Bougainville.
-Small island. -Yeah.
Actually, the reason we got this map, the admiral
that bombed Pearl Harbor, this was his flight.
From Guadalcanal, he was going to Bougainville.
When he got that far, we broke the code.
We knew where he was.
Seven planes went after him.
Three of them shot him down.
After the war, they went back to check.
They found his plane.
He still had the seat belt on him, so we knew it was him.
Now...
-Got another picture? -One of this.
-Oh, which one?
This one or... -The big one.
-Big one.
Ah, here's the big one, this one.
-Now I was on this boat here as a crew member.
-There we go. Yeah. -I was sitting back here
with a 50-caliber machine gun at 17.
-Age of some of you guys out there, right?
-And today, they still use this gun, a 50-caliber.
It was in World War I, II, all the way until today.
That's how good this 50-caliber machine gun is.
-Tell us a little bit about you signing up for the Navy.
I know you... -Well...
-He was 17, so tell us some...
I know we probably have some 17-year-olds out here, right?
How'd that happen?
-Well, I was 17 in July, and I told my mother,
"I want to get in the Navy,"
so I talked her into it because my brother was in the Army,
and then I get 18.
They're going to draft me.
They'll put you where they want, so I wanted to get in the Navy,
so she signed for me.
Soon as they signed for me, I went to the custom house,
swore me in.
I was in San Diego in July, August.
September, I was in Guadalcanal.
October 19, I was invading Treasury Island,
and I didn't come back until 20.
I was...
-You want to show that picture of...
-This is... -He's got a picture
of when he came back from the war,
so we can check that out.
-This is September 1945, San Francisco.
I was 20 years old there.
The war was over. -You're in the middle, right?
-Yeah. -Right here.
Right there.
So you started off.
You know, your jobs changed, right,
on different boats, so you were on one boat...
-Well, actually... -...and then another boat,
right? Yeah. -...after we leave a ship,
we don't go back to the ship.
We stay on the island
because we're unloading ships all day long.
We have to put CBs on the island.
You know what the CB is.
-I don't know. Tell them.
-Construction Battallion, men that have all kind of...
They build a lot of stuff, contracts.
Well, we put them on the island,
so we have to put their equipment on the island.
Then they build us a tent, so we get in the tent,
and then they build an air strip.
Every island we hit, we put an air strip on it.
Our planes land.
We fuel them up, send them back to fight.
And then I was forced at Admiralty Islands.
I was 2 degrees off the equator on Manus,
and I stayed there until September 1945.
That's when they dropped the second bomb August the 9th,
and after that, the Japanese quit.
-And then you came home, right?
-And then I was on my way home.
-That's right.
-Got out in 1946, got married in '47.
My daughter was born, so I got my life back together.
All my teenage years, most of them was overseas,
out of the country. -That's right.
Can you guys imagine that, you know,
being that far away from home, right, near the equator, right?
-Oh, right on. -[ Chuckles ]
-Course I'm from New Orleans,
so it didn't bother me, the heat,
as much as boys up north.
This is what it looks like on the island.
-Let's see. Got any...
-I don't know if you can...
-...big pictures or... Oh, yeah.
There's some good ones here.
Maybe we can zoom in a little bit.
Looks pretty tropical. -Yeah.
And we did have coconuts.
There's a coconut tree.
-Oh, yeah. Okay. There we go.
-We have coconut, pineapple.
We had bananas, all kind of fruit.
-So, I mean, did you enjoy your time in the service?
Did you enjoy driving a Higgins boat?
-Yeah. It was nice once you got used to it.
I was a deckhand.
I was a seaman first, but I qualified after 3 1/2 years
to run the boats, didn't get the rate,
but I got it in my rackets.
-What was the most difficult about driving a boat
or even being a seaman on one of those boats?
What was so...
Was there anything that was really tough about it,
or you knew what you were doing?
-Well, once you got used to it and you ran it one time,
you didn't have a problem anymore.
-Yeah. -It was that easy.
-Well, tell us just a little bit about...
You know, this museum, we started off, you know,
as the National D-Day Museum,
and that Higgins boat is so, so important to our story.
Can you tell the students, you know, why is this boat
so important to World War II?
-Because they were built right here in New Orleans.
That's the reason the museum is here.
When this museum opened in 2000, I had 147 of our members
and their wives to come here because of that boat.
I said, "We have to"...
Every year, we go to different states,
so I had it hosted here in New Orleans
to get all the men around this boat,
and once they got around there, couple of tears were falling.
First time they saw the boat that long.
-And these boats were used in every major amphibious landing
during World War II... -Every one.
-...to bring the troops to shore, right?
-Right.
-Including some of the stuff you did, of course.
-Well, I can say we were fighting the war since 1941.
These boats made every invasion and then Normandy in '44.
That's why General Eisenhower said,
"Mr. Higgins won the war with his boats."
-That's right. He did win the war with these boats.
-He did. -Yeah. For sure.
-That was the...
President Eisenhower said that.
-Can you tell us a little bit about...
Now we're kind of going into present day.
Tell us a bit about when you started volunteering here,
how often you're here and...
-Well, I'm here...
-...your experience with some visitors.
-...three years going on 4 years now.
I just got my $1,000 -- 1,000-hour...
-Thousand dollars would be nice, too.
-Yeah. I know. -[ Laughs ]
-We don't get paid.
No. Thousand-hours pin.
I think it was the blue one, and I don't know
how many I got now since then.
That's about a year ago. -Yeah.
-So I've been about 3 years now.
-Every single Thursday, right?
-Every Thursday, I'll come in.
-You'll find him here if you guys ever get down here.
-Till 4:00, I'll stay here till 4:00.
-All right. So you got to get here before 4:00.
That's right. -Yeah.
Make sure you come on Thursday.
It's the only day I'm here.
-Well, we've got some questions.
I told you people were typing in some questions for you.
-Oh, okay. -Let's check some of them out,
so Mrs. Guthrie's class was asking,
"Were you always on the same boat,
and if not, how many boats then were you"...
Do you remember how many boats you were on
during the course of the war?
Is that... -Well, let's see.
We went on one going across, then we went from Guadalcanal.
That was two,
then from Treasury Island to Admiralty Island.
That was four, and I went to...
Coming back home, it took us 4 1/2 days to get home.
That was another one. That's five,
so there was five boats, ships,
five ships I was on.
-Did you have any kind of affection for...
Was there a boat that you were on or that you drove
that you felt like,
you know, once you were apart from it,
you kind of missed it or, you know, like that?
-I'll tell you a little thing.
Coming back, we were on transport,
lot of troops on there.
They asked for any volunteers.
I said, "Volunteers for what?"
"For the galley."
Whoa. I put my hand up, so I was...
-Could you tell them what a galley is?
-The galley is where you eat. -Yeah.
-That's the main thing with a trip.
A ship full of troops, you could have eaten a long time
before you get up there,
so working in the galley, I was first class.
I ate first time, and all I had was a mop,
and if you missed the garbage can,
I mopped it all the way home, and I want to tell you.
My last...
In the Navy, I was mess cooking for the waves...
-Yeah. There you go.
-...for 2 months.
I had to serve my last time 6 months in Norfolk, Virginia,
the 8th Navy District,
and that's when I got out.
-All right. Now, next, from Mr. Pinter's class,
we have a question,
"What was the most frightening experience you had?
Did you sustain any injuries?
What kept you going, being so far away
from New Orleans and from home?"
-I was fortunate. I never had any...
Never got hurt or anything.
I know what I did, but I didn't get hurt, so I'm okay.
-Yeah.
Were you ever scared?
-Oh, yeah.
Well, you know, at 17, you didn't know
what you were getting into,
but when we dug a fox hole and we had to get in that fox hole
and them bombs were falling, yeah, you were afraid.
I have a 10 percent disability in hearing because of that bomb,
and it came so close,
and Fred, my buddy, was here about 2 months ago.
He has total -- he's got hearing aids,
and he wrote a letter where we were in that same fox hole
when that bomb fell that close, so yes.
-You were scared.
-You do get afraid, and you start praying then.
-Were you homesick? Did you ever miss...
Did you have a girlfriend back at home or anything like that?
-Yeah. My wife.
-Oh, your wife. [ Laughs ] Yeah.
-I knew her when she was 9 years old.
She lived right next door to my grandmother,
and I used to see her all the time,
and when I got back, I was 20.
I got married at 21.
She was 18.
So were you guys writing back and forth
and all that kind of stuff? -She wrote. Yes.
-Family, too? -Yes.
-Yeah.
-My mother, she couldn't write.
She couldn't...
No education,
so my wife had to write to her,
and she'd go to my mother's house.
-Oh, and ask what your mom wanted to tell you.
Oh, that's so nice.
-So how that's how that happened.
Mail wasn't that close anyway. We never...
-Took a while to get the mail, right?
-Took a while to get it. -[ Chuckles ]
Now, you were talking about food, so now
Ms. Guthrie's class also is wondering,
"What kind of food do you eat on a boat or a ship?
Is it any good?" -Well, our rations was Spam.
You know what Spam is?
We had it in a can, and we had a key to open it.
Today, you just pull a tab. -So yeah.
Canned ham, is that what you got every day?
-Spam. Yeah. We had that.
We had chocolate and stuff like that,
but mostly Spam until we put the Seabees on the island,
and they built us a tent, and then they built us a galley,
which is where we ate,
so that was okay then.
-Wasn't so bad, right? -No. Unh-unh.
-So yeah. -No. We had eggs then.
Whew. -Yeah.
Do you have... -Nice eggs.
-Do you have any friends that you still keep in touch
with that were either on the boats with you
or part of your crew or anything like that?
-Right. Well, I just talked to one of them 2 months ago.
I mean, he was here in the museum,
and I talked to another one.
He's in Sarasota, Texas.
I keep in touch with him, so there's three of us.
We talk to one another.
-That's great. -And we're all 90 years old.
One is 92. -Yeah.
So you guys all entered pretty early in the war.
Yeah. -Yeah.
And Fred came here, and he went to the boat, and he says,
"Man, I packed more of these boats, patched them up."
That's what his job was because we used to bang them up.
We'd hit the ship, hit the beach.
He'd have to take all that off, redo it.
-So that was another important, you know, job.
You know, there are a lot of different jobs...
-Right.
-...you know, taking care of those boats
that you were running too, right?
-Right. And when I got to the Admiralty Islands,
they took me off the boats and put me in a galley
with a ship fitter maintaining the galley.
That was a big base there.
-You kind of had to know a little bit of everything, right?
-Right. So I'm a qualified ship fitter, third class,
and coxswain for the boats.
-There you go. -It's all in my record...
-[ Laughs ] Oh, nice.
-...my discharge papers.
Well, I really appreciate you sharing these.
Oh, here is another good one from Ms. Guthrie's class.
You guys have a lot of great questions.
Maybe last one for you, if you don't mind.
Where did you sleep on the big boat or big ships?
-On the ships? -Yeah.
-Out on a rope or anything.
Coming back? -Yeah. Anytime,
coming back or going there. -Going there, we had a bunk.
-You had some bunks? -Yeah.
Going there, we did have a bunk on the Liberty ship,
but coming back, you never had...
-Why, because there's so many people?
-There's too many on there. Yeah.
Two transports after the bombing,
and Navy and the Marines. -Yeah. Wow.
Well, you're going to sleep... -Wherever you can.
-...wherever you can lie, right? -Right.
So you sleep standing up, huh?
-But it was... We were coming home, so it wasn't that bad.
-Yeah.
-You just keep thinking about getting to that base.
-Yeah.
Well, you know, Mr. Johnny,
we really appreciate you sharing your story with students about,
you know, being able to drive a boat
and, you know, running and
on the galley and what you ate on it,
where you slept, all that good stuff.
-It's fortunate I didn't get hurt,
so I thank God for that.
-Well, I know they all really appreciate your perspective.
They can't... you know, we can't see them,
which he really wanted to see all of you guys,
but, you know, please give him a virtual round of applause,
so... And thank Mr. Johnny
for spending some time here today,
and actually, if you don't mind, what we're going to do
is I'm going to swap you out.
Do you want to swap spots with Rob?
And we're going to kind of close out the program today.
-All right.
-And tell them about what they're going to do...
-Sit Rob in there. -[ Chuckles ]
...all about the pontoon,
so we're going to transition into another area.
Everybody, welcome Rob.
-Hi. -Wait. Wait.
You guys maybe saw him earlier if you watch a lot
of our webinars.
We were talking about the atomic bomb last year,
and so we are actually going to go
and transition into another area,
and we're going to tell you all about your design challenge,
and, Rob, first tell them...
Let's talk about what they're going to do
and what a pontoon is.
-Right. Most of the time, you see in the slides now,
but in between the slides,
you've been seeing this big map between us,
and so in World War II, we made all this stuff,
and we had 14 million military guys to get to war,
and as you'll notice from looking at that big map,
there's two big oceans on either side of us,
so getting guys onto a boat isn't that hard,
and getting them over there isn't that hard,
but getting them on shore was hard,
and so that's what the Higgins boats did,
was they got the guys on shore.
About a year before
the successful D-Day invasion of Normandy,
they tried to take a port in France called Dieppe,
and it didn't work out because they tried to go
into this fortified port
and dock the ships, and it just didn't work out.
-Got stuck.
-So that's why the Higgins boats were so important,
but then how do you get all these supplies ashore?
So when we invaded Normandy, we made this portable harbor
that we sent out there, and they were called mulberries,
and you'll read about it in the handout Chrissy
is going to send you, and they made these piers.
They drove these hollow piers into the sand
and then stuck sections on them.
They sank old boats around to slow the tide
and the waves down,
and then they made this temporary harbor
that stretched a mile out into the ocean.
-See if we maybe have some... Where's that picture?
Is that a good one? -Yes.
That's part of a mulberry. Yeah.
So they stretched a whole mile out into the ocean,
and they just offloaded things onto it, tanks, trucks
and just sent them ashore, and they lasted about a week,
and then one of the biggest storms
ever to hit the English Channel came through,
so D-Day was on June 4th,
and about the 12th to the 19th,
this big storm came through and just destroyed the whole thing,
so the British designed these mulberries,
and the Americans came up with
a really kind of different solution with pontoons,
and a pontoon is a big floating thing,
so it's a big empty thing.
You may have seen...
Like, if you go boating on a lake or a river,
we use pontoon boats, and they just have big floats
and a platform across the top of them,
and so we made these big pontoons,
and if you go back a couple slides,
you'll see a pontoon boat right there.
That's called a Rhino, and the Americans made these,
and it had some big floats underneath
with a heavy platform on top,
and they could put motors on it and send it as a ferry,
or they would just connect a whole series of them
together to make a big dock or a harbor or a bridge.
They made that bridge across the rivers in Germany
using pontoons, so your design challenge is...
-Let's get into that. Yeah. -...to build your own pontoon.
Oh, go back one.
I meant to show you how far this thing stretched.
-Oh, yeah. There it is. I was looking for that.
-So look how far that thing stretched, a long ways,
and there were some that were longer than that.
All right.
So you're going to make your own pontoon boat,
and so there's a list in the handout
that Chrissy is going to send you.
-Yeah. And, actually, you see the teacher guide.
If you look in that files pod, there's that PT-305 FAQ
I was telling you about earlier and teacher guide
with this challenge in it, so you do it yourself.
-So you're going to make it, and it's just ordinary,
regular, everyday materials.
There's some cardboard, some tape, some string,
some washers, some drink bottles,
and you're going to try to see
if you can make something that'll hold a vehicle, okay,
and keep it from capsizing.
Now, one of the tricks with a pontoon,
one of the challenges to that design
is that you're floating on top of the water,
so if you get up too high, they like to flip over,
and so you can weigh it down, so that's what they do sometimes,
and that's why we let you have some washers and string
because you might want to hang a weight
down into the water below the pontoon boat
to lower its center of gravity,
but you can make the whole thing, you know,
and we're going to test to see how much weight
can your pontoon boat make,
so you're going to compete against other classrooms
to see how much weight you can hold
and also how long it can stay up in the water.
-So you can see the details on there.
What we want you guys to do
is take a picture of your best design
and also your best trial,
so, you know, how much it held
or how long your pontoon floated before it sunk
or maybe it didn't sink at all, which would be awesome.
-That'd be awesome.
-And so you're going to record all of that data
and what we've provided,
and then you're going to take a picture of it
and snap it and actually e-mail it over to me,
and the e-mail is included in there too, teachers,
and then what Rob and I are going to do,
we're going to go through it.
We're going to cull through all the results,
and then we're going to pick the winners,
and the winners will be featured...
Tell them a little bit about your blog.
-So I have a blog every 2 weeks called Sci-Tech Tuesday.
It's on the museum site, and we just talk about stuff
that's going on around anniversaries
in World War II or something else.
This week, I wrote about the Nobel Prize for medicine
that was announced on Monday,
went to some folks who studied parasites and diseases
to fight parasites like malaria or elephantiasis,
and it's kind of interesting
because we've been fighting that battle
since World War II.
I mean, we still haven't come up with a great cure for malaria,
and so I wrote about that,
so it may be around an anniversary
or it may be around something that's happening in the world
that connects to the technology of World War II.
-So what we're going to do is we're going to,
as I said, look at all your results
and then publish the winners in that blog,
sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas,
and then the winning classes will be sent a prize.
We're actually going to send you guys some classroom
posters to hang up, propaganda posters
and some from our robotics competition.
So you can decorate your classroom
if you win our design challenge,
so all the details are in there.
We actually... You know what?
We did really well on time,
and so we actually have a few more minutes,
and I know that...
-Can I talk about a question I'm surprised nobody asked?
-Yeah. Yeah. Go for it.
-Why did they make these PT boats
out of wood instead of metal?
-Well, do you want to answer that,
or should we bring in our PT boat experts
one more time, so yeah.
Mr. Johnny talked about that too,
about these boats being made out of mahogany,
whether it's a Higgins boat or a PT boat,
so actually, you know, Kali, Josh,
you want to close it out and talk about --
I'm going to scooch over one more time --
and talk about, you know, why boats are made out of...
-Change chairs. -Yeah.
We're doing a little musical chairs here, so yeah.
Why are boats made out of wood, not metal?
-Well, the Higgins boats in particular,
Josh kind of mentioned that metal
was an important strategic material during the war,
so one of the things you can see when you visit the museum here
is that families would collect all their scraps,
and even extra razor blades or lipstick tubes
could be used to make bullets
or, you know, anything that we needed to use,
and so steel was too heavy,
and so they tried to make these boats...
They actually did make the first boats out of aluminum,
but they couldn't go as fast as the Navy wanted, so...
-Because they fell apart when they went that fast.
They weren't strong enough. -No. They were fine.
That's a really strategic material.
Aluminum, you use aluminum for airplanes.
-Yeah. -So it's just better to save it
for a P51 than a boat. -Right.
-And all the thousands of bombers
that were needed to drop bombs
over Germany and Japan,
so one of the other reasons that mahogany was used in
Higgins boats
is because Andrew Higgins actually bought a huge shipment
of mahogany from the Philippines before the Japanese invaded,
so it was a material that he had plenty of to use,
and then down here in Louisiana, unfortunately,
we did cut down a lot of our trees,
but a lot of the cypress and the spruce
and the fir was a readily available material
that wasn't needed for other areas of the war,
so you can use it to build almost 600 PT boats,
and you're not taking away from vital materials
needed to make bombers and fighters and Liberty ships.
Now, Higgins did make some metal boats.
There's one called LCM, so it's a landing craft mechanized,
and it is a steel boat.
It was needed... They needed it to be sturdier
so that they could put tanks
and larger land equipment on that,
and then he did build Liberty ships,
but the metal went to things like that that were vital,
and wood was just a surplus material
that also made a very light boat.
You want to tell them the weight of our boat?
-Our boat weighed around 53 tons,
so maybe take 53 cars in the parking lot,
and that's about as much as the boat weighed,
which is pretty heavy.
A lot of the weight was in those torpedoes.
The picture of that torpedo we showed you earlier,
that thing weighs 2,000 pounds.
That thing weighs as much as a pickup truck,
so, you know, there's...
It's amazing that all of this really big,
heavy stuff fits on this wooden boat
who's got, you know, inch-thick walls around it.
-And even with the wood, they had to find ways
to make it lighter,
and one of the things that Higgins did is,
in some of the big pieces on the side of the boat
that are called bulkheads, he cut holes,
and it would stay structurally intact,
but you could take out a section of wood
and make it even lighter.
The Navy originally told him,
"Hey, your boats aren't fast enough.
We want these boats to go at least 40 knots."
A knot is how you measure speed on the water,
so 40 knots is about 45 miles an hour.
It's not the same as miles per hour,
and so that's one of the things
Higgins did, was trying to figure out how he could continue
to build these boats where they were sturdy,
but they were light, and they could go much faster.
-Another funny thing that we actually just found out
last week is that in the galley, in the kitchen,
they had glass plates on one of the first boats,
and the Navy was telling Higgins,
"We need your boats to be a little bit faster,"
and so Kali here found out
that they took all the glass plates out,
and they put plastic plates in to make it lighter,
so it's every little pound counts.
-We thought they took the glass out
because it would break on the heavy seas,
but it's because it added a lot of weight.
-Yeah. Just a little bit more speed.
-So those are the things our historic research tells us about
restoring the boats, so we can do that accurately,
and that's a fun thing as a historian,
to get to work on something like this
because you don't always realize
there's opportunities to help restore
a boat that... And we haven't mentioned.
It is going to be on the water. -Oh, yeah.
-It's going to be on the lake here in New Orleans.
-How much longer, you guys think, ish?
-Within the next year... -Yeah.
-...she should be back on Lake Pontchartrain
where they originally tested these boats,
so it's a really cool coming-home story
for the 305, that she was built here.
She served in the Mediterranean.
She was all along the East Coast for decades after the war.
Now, she's back here where she was built, so she's come home,
and she's going to be on the lake again
where she first got into the water,
and you'll be able to come down and see the boat
and see what we've done with it.
It's going to be really special. -Yeah. Watch her speed by.
-Yeah.
And it's going to be loud, so bring your earplugs.
-It's going to be very loud.
We've already tested the engines,
and they're pretty noisy, so...
-So I've actually...
I have two questions for you guys in like
the 5 minutes we have left,
so first question kind of relating...
you know, you guys are talking about
both being historians and restorers,
and this is a great example,
everybody who's watching, about careers in history,
so, like, what got you interested...
You know, how did you end up where you did,
and what got you interested in history, and, you know,
how did you get to this point in your life right now,
being able to research this boat and help rebuild it?
-Well...
-I've been doing this for a long time.
I actually... I was 15 years old
when I first came to the museum.
They were restoring a landing craft,
and I saw the crew working on them,
and I said, "Oh, I want to do that,"
so I went and did that,
and I was going to school at the same time.
I was in high school then, and so just kind of...
I followed that path while I was going to high school
and then into college,
and then I got my master's degree in history
at the same time I was working
on the restoration projects here,
and so it's a dual interest.
School gave me the ability to learn how to research
and do all this academic work and write articles
and really think about it in a different aspect, but...
And then working on the boat has been valuable experience
because I've been able to learn
how to work with my hands and tools
and make an actual connection with something
instead of just reading about it,
and so I like to put both of those together,
and now you're here talking to me.
-And I met Josh in grad school,
and we were all introducing ourselves
and saying things we did, and he said,
"Well, I volunteer restoring this boat at the WWII Museum,"
so I have to be a part of that,
so I've been working on it for almost 5 years now,
and like Josh said, it's a great way to take the history
and the facts and actually apply it and get hands-on,
and we've had one or two occasions
where we've had PT boat veterans that have come to see the boat,
and to see their reaction when they step on deck
and what it means to them,
that's why we give up our Saturdays.
Every Saturday, that's what we do.
Bright and early, we're at the museum to work on it,
and after work, we're thinking about things,
and we've researched at the National Archives,
so we use death logs and all these things that, you know,
normally people would take that research and just write,
and we take this research and apply it to restore,
and it's areas in history that everybody says,
"Oh, you study history. You're going to be a teacher,"
and that's a wonderful thing,
but there's so many things that you can do with history
and that, you know, people don't always realize,
so restoring is another thing that you can do with history.
-Yeah. -All right.
And kind of on that note of your job
and working with your hands and being very involved
in the rebuilding of PT-305,
so these students are going to build a pontoon.
Do you have any advice for them to have their pontoon float
the longest or hold the most...
Any strategies?
-Measure twice, cut once.
-Yeah. [ Laughter ]
-That's really...
-Yeah. There you go.
-Well, you know, water outside the boat
is usually the best thing to have.
You know, it's... -Yeah.
-You got a fun challenge ahead of you.
That's for sure. -Yeah.
-All right. Well, you know, thank you guys for,
you know, hanging out with us for this past hour
and for your advice to see, you know,
whose pontoon can float the longest here.
We're just so glad to have you here today,
and I'm actually going to kind of close it all out,
so say bye, everyone. -Bye.
-Say bye to Kali and Josh, and so I want to tell you all,
before we close and off
you go to your pontoon design challenge,
our next webinar,
so this is also probably for you teachers
too listening out there.
We are doing a webinar commemorating
the 74th anniversary of Pearl Harbor,
and it's going to be super cool
because we are connecting with the World War II Valor
in the Pacific National Monument.
Those are the folks that take care of the USS Arizona,
so we'll be talking with an educator there
and even a witness to the attack,
and we're also going to show you
all a little bit of the behind the scenes of our newest gallery
opening here at the museum called "Road to Tokyo,"
so it should be another kind of whirlwind webinar
like this one.