ODAY, FAMILIES RENT beach homes, visit the St. George Lighthouse, and kayak at Bald Point State Park, located on the Gulf of Mexico on Florida’s panhan- dle. In the 1940s, though, the area served as a dress rehearsal for D-Day.
Kevin Patton, manager of Bald Point State Park,
gestures along the long stretches of sand in both di- rections. “This was Camp Gordon Johnston,” he says. “About a quarter of a million amphibious soldiers prac- ticed their landing at Normandy, under [the command of Gen.] Omar Bradley.” Patton helps set the scene in which young men in uniform surge ashore. Originally called Camp Carrabelle, after a nearby
town, the training facility was open from 1942-46 and covered 165,000 acres and nearly 40 miles of coastline. Only a few miles inland, the land was a tangled subtropi- cal swamp. This made it a perfect location for training servicemembers to invade both the beaches of Europe and the island jun- gles of the Pacifi c. The camp
sprouted up in about 60 days using prefabricat- ed barracks with no fl oors. Mess halls, a hospital, classrooms, cargo- net towers, and obstacle courses were constructed with some furni- ture and ward- robes built by Italian and German POWs. “It was very crude,” says en- listee Howard Frum of Lake Placid, Fla., who arrived in 1943. “You jumped out of bed onto the sand.”
6 8 MI L I T A R Y O F F I C E R O C TO B E R 2 0 1 0
“ ‘Hell on the Bay,’ they called this place,” says Linda Minichiello, curator of the Camp Gordon Johnston (CGJ) Museum. Between 60,000 and 75,000 troops were in training at any time, she says.
Exercises varied and were performed in the swamps, on beaches, and on nearby islands. The drivers of DUKWs (or ducks), wheeled amphibious land- ing craft used in the invasion of Iwo Jima, trained here. For those missions, draftees who had never driven were pre- ferred as drivers because they didn’t have to be retrained. Support per-
sonnel such as engineers also practiced building bridges, docks,
and harbors. An engineer before he went into the ser- vice, Frum, a Marine Corps engineering warrant offi cer, recalls his duties: “We were involved with landing craft,
PHOTO: COURTESY CAMP GORDON JOHNSTON MUSEUM
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