World Business

RALEIGH, N.C. A vintage World War II debarking craft was hauled across a coastal North Carolina court end Wednesday and is set to be restored and preserved - one of only touching a dozen of its kind believed to be left.

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The North Carolina Maritime Museum moved the rare Higgins boat to its Watercraft Center in Beaufort, where restoration be is to begin Thursday.

“There are only four left in the United States, including this one, so it’s a highly unique boat,” museum spokeswoman Michelle McConnell said. “We be under the necessity the opportunity to restore one of these, that is restoring history.”

Few of the ligneous boats remained about the war, and more were significantly modified.

The Higgins boat traveled from England to Baltimore to Beaufort before it was transferred from the museum’s expansion site at Gallants Channel, museum officials before-mentioned.

Workers had to fabricate and weld a tongue and axle to move the 10-ton, 36-foot boat a mile and a half through the downtown area, she said. It took 45 minutes to awaken it early Wednesday morning, she said.

The shallow-draft, barge-like boat could transfer troops directly from larger vessels to a beach, structure amphibious assaults possible.

According to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Higgins boats were used in each major American amphibious operation in Europe and the Pacific, including D-Day in Normandy, and were deemed crucial to the success of those operations.

About 36,000 of the boats were manufactured during the war, but the museum believes its boat is among only a dozen still in existence.

“Chances are, given that it was in Europe, it was used by means of either British or American forces for the period of World War II, otherwise it wouldn’t have been sent there,” said Paul Fontenoy, the North Carolina museum’s curator.

He said the boat will be restored in the same manner with near as feasible to its original condition. First, workers will have to deal with decay and rot.

The museum believes the boat is in the midst of only a dozen still in existence. McConnell aforesaid she believes two of them are in Florida and Washington, D.C. She did not know where the overseas boats were being kept.