Northeast Florida may be widely thought of as Navy territory, but that wasn’t always the case.
Today, Camp Blanding in Clay County is primarily the home of the Florida National Guard, but during World War II, it was one of the largest Army training facilities in the country.
The Camp takes shape
Just outside of the main gates at Camp Blanding, visitors will see relics and machinery of wars past.
At the center of the public park is the Camp Blanding History Museum, which occupies one of the last remaining original structures of the base’s heyday.
“I think part of the reason Blanding was so attractive was, a number one, you had a lot of available land around it, but it was in Florida,” the museum’s curator, Greg Parsons, said. ”And so, the Army looked at it as, ‘Hey, we can train year-round in Florida. We don’t have to worry about providing a lot of heat or cold-weather clothing to the troops because it’s Florida. It doesn’t get cold there in the winter.’”
Parsons explained that Camp Blanding was obtained by the National Guard in an exchange with the Navy.
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The Guard gave up the 900 acres of land now occupied by NAS Jacksonville, and received 30,000 acres of land in rural Clay County.
“In about August of 1940, the state gets word from the Army that they’re gonna federalize the camp to use it to train troops for the war,” Parsons said. ”Although, officially we weren’t in the war yet, but they were trying to get ready for it.”
Once the Army took over, it purchased an additional 40,000 acres, bringing the base up roughly to its modern footprint of 73,000 acres.
It also leased an additional 80,000 acres of land around the base, making it among the largest Army training facilities in the country at the time.
Camp Blanding’s contributions to World War II
“So, it’s main training purpose during the war was to train infantry men. That’s what they did here,” Parsons said.
And despite the appeal of the Florida climate, the 17 weeks troops endured at Blanding were far from a walk in the park.
“Supposedly at one point General MacArthur, who was leading Army forces in the Pacific, made a comment that he was tired of getting replacements from Camp Blanding because they were wore out by the time they got to him,” Parsons said.
Throughout the war, Parsons estimates the base churned out roughly 850,000 soldiers who would go on to see combat in every theater in World War II.
Some of those soldiers, like Sergeant Leonard Funk of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, would go down in history.
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Funk fought in the Normandy invasion and went on to win the Medal of Honor for his efforts in the battle of the Bulge.
“He and four other paratroopers take on a group of 80 German soldiers by themselves, kill 21, wounded several more and then capture the rest,” Parsons said. “And the five of them walked away uninjured.”
Parsons said Funk came just one medal away from tying the record for the most decorated soldier of the war.
After his passing in 1992, a memorial was erected outside the base in his honor.
During the war, Camp Blanding served a dual mission, becoming the home of hundreds of German prisoners of war.
“And we held 1,000 German Army and about 200 German Naval prisoners,” Parsons said.
Even after the war, Camp Blanding would continue training troops for occupational duty until the end of 1945, and it served as an out processing facility for troops returning home and leaving the armed forces through 1946.
It was officially returned to the National Guard in 1948.
Camp Blanding’s post-war mission
While Camp Blanding’s role as a major Army training facility may have been significantly down scaled following WWII, it still serves as critical and versatile training grounds for a wide variety of combat scenarios.
Colonel Todd Hopkins has served as base commander at Camp Blanding Joint Training Center for the past two years.
“Our customer base is really 60 percent National Guard. The remainder, the other 40 percent, serves our state and local partners as well as national agencies, multi-national partners,” Hopkins said.
Hopkins explained the base currently boasts an impressive 81 firing points and ranges capable of training soldiers on a wide-array of weaponry.
“Everything from 9 millimeter handguns to HIMARS rockets and everything in between,” Hopkins said.
Exercises carried out at Camp Blanding range from water survival and combat training, sniper training and airborne operations, just to name a few.
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“We have what I would consider world-class training facilities for infantry platoons and squads. Our current battle course has got everything from a 180-foot-long live-fire trench, to bunkers, to battlefield effects, to drones access,” Hopkins said. ”You name it, we have it. We could throw it at those soldiers to make training as realistic as possible.”
Beyond the military, Hopkins noted Camp Blanding also serves a critical role in operations like hurricane response.
“During times of natural disaster or natural emergencies Camp Blanding is a post that is used for receiving and integrating forces that come from other states to support the citizens of Florida, as well as a staging area for lots of commercial enterprises that are doing repair work for electrical lines, etcetera,” Hopkins said.
And thanks to recent upgrades and investments from the State of Florida, the base continues to expand its capabilities, most recently hosting the largest-ever counter-drone destruction event in the nation’s history.
“That includes $110 million invested in additional bed space for soldiers coming through, as well as a significant amount of money invested in modernizing our range capabilities, which has allowed us to do things like you mentioned earlier, support the United States National Drone Association and their crucible event that took place last week,” Hopkins said.
And even to this day, Camp Blanding stands ready for reactivation, should it ever be called upon as it was in the dawn of World War II.
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