COBI LCVP Higgins Boat Set 4849

COBI's LCVP Higgins Boat is a 1:35 model built from 715 blocks, 36 cm long, carrying the official logo of the 80th anniversary of D-Day. The front ramp raises and lowers on a working cable mechanism, the hull is modelled in full, two machine guns with covers move, and the rudder, turbines and an opening hatch over the engine are reproduced. A large US flag is printed on both sides. Two figures are included, an infantryman and a boat crewman, with a display stand and a nameplate. Prints only, no stickers.

Eisenhower said this boat won the war

His words, in an interview years afterwards, were that Andrew Higgins was the man who won the war for the Allies — that if Higgins had not designed and built the LCVP, the whole strategy of landing on hostile shores would have been impossible.

That is a large claim about a plywood boat, and the reasoning holds up. An amphibious invasion needs to put infantry onto a beach in numbers, and before the LCVP the only way to do it was to ferry men in ships' boats and have them wade or climb ashore over the side — slow, chaotic, and lethal under fire.

It came from the Louisiana swamps

Higgins was not a naval architect. He built boats in New Orleans for oil prospectors, trappers and fur traders working in the bayous — people who needed a vessel that could run up onto a mud bank, unload, and reverse off again under its own power.

That is exactly the problem an assault landing presents. His Eureka boat had a flat bottom, a protected propeller in a tunnel so it would not strike the ground, and a shape designed to be driven deliberately aground. Adding a hinged bow ramp — suggested by the Marine Corps after seeing Japanese landing craft — turned it into the LCVP.

Over 20,000 were built. Mostly plywood, which made them cheap, light and fast to produce, and offered no protection from gunfire at all — which is why the ramp going down is the image everyone has of that morning.

A boat for Louisiana trappers, carrying 36 men, designed by a man with no naval training.

In the COBI range

Sets 2048 and 2055 are D-Day figure sets with sailors and infantry sized for this deck, and 4825 is the PT-109 at the same scale.

Specifications

Pieces: 715 · Figures: 2 · Scale: 1:35 · Working ramp mechanism · Display stand and nameplate · No stickers
Model dimensions: 36 × 9.5 × 9 cm (14.2 × 3.7 × 3.5 in)