Apalachicola National Forest: The Largest in Florida and the War It Trained For

The Apalachicola National Forest covers approximately six hundred thirty thousand acres west of Tallahassee, making it the largest national forest in Florida and one of the largest blocks of longleaf pine ecosystem remaining in the southeastern United States. The forest is not the tourist Florida. There are no beaches, no theme parks, no condominiums visible from the fire roads. What there is, in the right season, is a flatwoods landscape of longleaf pine and wire grass that has been maintained by prescribed fire, where the red-cockaded woodpecker drills nesting cavities in living pines and where carnivorous pitcher plants grow in the boggy seeps between the pine ridges.

During World War Two, a substantial portion of the forest and the surrounding area became Camp Gordon Johnston, a training base for amphibious warfare. The Army selected the Apalachicola Bay coastline in nineteen forty-two because its shallow, wave-exposed waters closely resembled the conditions of Pacific island landings. Approximately a quarter of a million soldiers trained here for amphibious assault operations. Some of them went on to land at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Okinawa. The camp was decommissioned after the war and the land returned to federal management.

The Bradwell Bay Wilderness, in the forest's interior, is one of the more unusual designated wilderness areas in the eastern United States: a four-hundred-year-old swamp accessible only by trails that spend much of their length under water, requiring thigh-deep wading through tannin-stained blackwater. The cypress trees in the bay's interior have been growing since before European contact. The wilderness designation, established in nineteen eighty, protects them from any management intervention except the flooding that has sustained them across four centuries.