Florida's Role in WWII

A crowd of 190 attended Eliot Kleinberg’s presentation, War in Paradise: World War II in Florida, on Thursday, January 11, at the Marco Island Historical Museum. But not one of them was a Florida native. 

Kleinberg warmed up his audience, which was just 10 people short of Rose Auditorium’s capacity, by asking how many in the audience were born in Florida. "I always ask this,” Eliot Kleinberg said, "because I'm a Florida native. So now you can say you've seen one.”

Kleinberg then challenged his audience after declaring that the soldiers who fought in Europe and in the Pacific "pretty much saved the world.”

“Anybody want to fight me on that?” Kleinberg asked rhetorically.

But Kleinberg, who spent 33 years as a reporter at The Palm Beach Post, was on Marco to talk about the war at home - specifically in Florida.

“You probably think, ‘Well, there was no war at home. We just sent our guys off, and that's it,” Kleinberg said. “That's it if you lived in Chicago or Kansas, or Utah, that's what you thought. But not if you lived in Florida.”

For the better part of an hour, Kleinberg peppered the audience with an arsenal of well-deployed statistics and fascinating facts.

“During World War II,” Kleinberg asked, "what was the fourth largest city in Florida?” Kleinberg paused for a moment, then informed the crowd that they’d never guess the correct answer. “I’m going to stump you already," he said. “Camp Blanding.” Camp Blanding was located about a half-hour southeast of Gainesville.

Who knew that there was a German POW camp in Florida during WWII? And that German U-boats were sinking U.S. merchant vessels at an alarming rate in the Gulf and the Atlantic? And that military bases began springing up throughout the state shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941?

Kleinberg also asserts that Florida’s population boom is directly tied to its role in WWII.

“The war ends, and they all go back up north,” Kleinberg said. "They say, ‘Honey, we're going to take a vacation to Florida.' And it repeats itself so many times. In World War II, all these guys trained down here. I know people personally. How'd you get here? I trained down here and then went back up to New York or Philadelphia or whatever, and they said, ‘Honey when this GI Bill happens, we can buy a house. We're going to move to Florida.’"

Kleinberg points out that Florida had two million people in 1940. By 1950, that number had increased to three million. By 1970, there were seven million people in Florida. Now, there are 23 million people.

He left the audience with a quip. 

“Do I wish all of you guys had moved here?” he asks. "I don't think you want me to lie. It's not the quality. It's the quantity. We have 23 million people here. But if you want to know how we got here, it starts with World War II."