Most of my life I’ve lived just a few miles away from Florida beaches. Never have I felt or seen sand quite like the sand on Carrabelle Beach. The texture of the sand was so fine I felt as if I was walking on flour. The stunning sugar-white beaches are composed of fine quartz eroded from granite in the Appalachian Mountains. Carried seaward by rivers and creeks, currents deposit the sand along the shore. The sand is so fine that wind blowing overnight covered all the footprints that were on the beach yesterday evening. Tiny little waves of sand caused by the wind now covered the beach.
I used to think the sand at Clearwater Beach was the nicest I’d ever seen. While the sand is very nice there, it is almost impossible to get to Clearwater Beach anymore, and if you can get there, find a place a to park. And if you find a place to park, thousands of people surround you. This morning there were just a handful of people on the beach.
Reading the following on a historical marker on Carrabelle Beach sent chills up and down my spine. I realized that this place was one of the last places many of these soldiers ever saw the United States. These boys and men sacrificed their lives to save our country and the world.
“In late 1943, Carrabelle Beach and Dog Island, while they were a part of Camp Gordon Johnston, were used by the U.S. Army 4th Infantry Division to train for the Normandy Invasion on D-Day, June 6th, 1944. The Amphibious Training Center had been officially closed, but it was reopened and staffed for the purpose of training for this important mission. Although the troops had trained for over three years, the amphibious training conducted on this site was the last step before shipping out to England for the invasion. On D-Day, the first amphibian infantry assault teams to arrive on French soil were from the 4th Infantry Division at Utah Beach. On June 6, 2000, the Camp Gordon Johnston Association extracted a small amount of soil from this site and delivered it to the National 4th Infantry Division Association to be placed in the Association’s monument in Arlington, VA. The U.S. Department of Defense’s World War II Commemoration Committee in 1995 named the Camp Gordon Johnston Association an official ‘Commemorative Community.'”