The camp opened in September 1942 as Camp Carrabelle, an unremarkable name for an unremarkable stretch of sand and pine forest. But by January 1943, the Army renamed it for Colonel Gordon Johnston, a soldier whose biography reads like a catalog of American conflicts at the turn of the century. Johnston had ridden with Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, fought in the Philippine-American War where he earned the Distinguished Service Cross for leading a small detachment of scouts under fire, and served as chief of staff for the 82nd Infantry Division during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in World War I. He died in 1934 from injuries suffered during a polo match at Fort Sam Houston. The camp that bore his name would prepare men for a kind of warfare he never lived to see -- the massive amphibious operations that defined the second half of World War II.

The training area sprawled across more than 100,000 acres of coastal terrain, including the barrier islands of Dog Island and St. George Island, which stood in for the hostile beaches soldiers would eventually storm. The camp housed around 10,000 troops at a time, with Engineer Special Brigades, Harbor Craft companies, Amphibious Truck units, and the 22nd Infantry of the 4th Infantry Division among the dozens of units that cycled through. By June 1943, the Navy took over the bulk of amphibious training, and Camp Gordon Johnston shifted to a specialized role as a U.S. Army Special Forces Training Center, focusing on port construction, harbor craft operation, and other logistics of invasion. German and Italian prisoners of war arrived in March 1944, eventually making the camp the second largest POW base camp in Florida, with branch camps scattered across the region.

When the war ended in 1946, the Army sold off buildings, facilities, and land as surplus. The officers' quarters found a second life as the retirement community of Lanark Village, a quiet postwar transformation from military barracks to civilian homes. But the sand held secrets the buyers did not expect. Live munitions had been used alongside dummies in training exercises, and unexploded ordnance lay buried across acres that had passed into private hands. In 2001, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers determined that specially trained technicians were needed to clear certain parcels -- a stark reminder that the camp's legacy was not merely historical but physically present, embedded in the landscape decades after the last soldier shipped out.

Today, the Camp Gordon Johnston WWII Museum in downtown Carrabelle preserves the story of the quarter million men who trained on these beaches. The museum houses artifacts, photographs, and personal accounts from the soldiers who sweated through Florida summers in full gear, waded through Gulf surf with heavy packs, and practiced the amphibious landings that would shape the course of the war. Carrabelle itself remains a small Gulf Coast town on what tourism boards have branded Florida's Forgotten Coast -- an apt description for a place where one of the war's most critical training operations unfolded far from public attention. The beaches where soldiers once rehearsed for Normandy and Okinawa now draw fishermen and beachcombers, the military footprint largely invisible beneath the sand and live oaks.