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An 80-foot Elco boat, PT-109 was operating in the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific and joined 14 other PT boats for a nighttime ambush of four enemy destroyers and supply ships of Japan’s “Tokyo express.' Most of the PT boat attack force fired their compliment of torpedoes and headed for home, but three boats stayed behind including the 109. Perhaps the best known PT was skippered by Lieutenant and later U.S.

Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. Kennedy sitting in the cockpit of World War II Motor Torpedo Boat PT-109. PT boats were used for harassing enemy shore installations, supporting friendly troop landings, destroying floating mines, sinking enemy shipping targets, destroying enemy landing barges, rescuing downed pilots, landing partisans behind enemy lines, and attacking enemy island outposts. They were used to support the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944. Most World War II historians often equate the beach landing crafts used at Normandy and Iwo Jima simply as “Higgins boats.' The first Higgins PT boats were used against the Imperial Japanese forces in the Battle for the Aleutian Islands and in the Mediterranean against Nazi Germany and her allies. Along with Elco, Higgins Industries made a strong impression with its PT boats in the “plywood derbies.'īased in New Orleans, Higgins Industries was a small boat company owned by Andrew Jackson Higgins. They produced, on average, one PT boat every 60 hours. At the height of its PT boat production, Elco employed more than 3,000 men and women working three shifts a day six days a week.

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Over the next two years, PT-9 and subsequent Elco-improved PTs won a series of comparison “plywood derbies” In 1939 Elco doubled the size of its plant and tripled its capacity in order to build PTs.

Dubbed PT-9, America’s first PT boat was subjected to numerous sea trials, alone and against other PTs in prototype stages. Higgins built 199 or 205 PTs, depending on which figures are used.Įlco answered the call to design a PT boat by purchasing a new Scott-Paine motor torpedo boat from England and having it shipped to Electric Boat’s Groton plant. By the end of World War II, 399 Elco PTs had been built. Two basic and distinctly different types of PT Boats were built for combat with the predominant PT, the 80-foot long 'Elco' boat, and the slightly smaller 78-foot long 'Higgins” boat. Navy standardized the design and construction of the PT boat. Eventually Elco (Elco Motor Yachts) with a factory located in Bayonne, New Jersey and Higgins Industries in New Orleans, Louisiana were the dominant two builders with Elco producing the largest number. entry into the war, there were roughly a dozen separate manufacturers of PT boats from the United States, Canada and Great Britain supplying the US Navy. Prizes were awarded for the winning PT boat designs. In 1938 the US Navy sponsored a design competition to small boat builders with a challenge to create a highly mobile attack boat. From Design Competition to Home Front Production

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