Fort Pierce: Seminole Wars, Navy SEALs, and the Treasure Coast
Florida
Fort Pierce takes its name from a military post built here in January of eighteen thirty-eight, during the Second Seminole War. Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Pierce commanded the position. He was the brother of Franklin Pierce, who would become the fourteenth president of the United States fifteen years later.
The fort served as the Army of the South headquarters while General Thomas Jesup launched operations into the interior. It was a grim campaign. The Seminoles refused to be moved, the terrain was punishing, and the war dragged on until eighteen forty-two. The fort was deactivated that year and largely forgotten. Permanent civilian settlement began around the old fort site in the eighteen sixties, growing slowly as a fishing village and oyster canning community. The city was incorporated in nineteen oh one.
But Fort Pierce's most consequential military role came a century after that first fort. In the summer of nineteen forty-three, the United States Navy established the Naval Combat Demolition Unit training school here, on this same coastline. The environment was ideal: shallow sandbars, mangrove swamps, variable surf, every kind of difficult approach a wartime amphibious landing might face.
The men trained here learned to swim into enemy beaches before dawn, survey obstacles, and blow pathways clear for landing craft. Their first major test was the beaches of Normandy on June sixth, nineteen forty-four. Naval Combat Demolition Units cleared the lanes that allowed the D-Day landings to proceed. Without their work on the beach obstacles the German army had planted, the casualties on Omaha Beach would have been far higher than they already were.
The Fort Pierce program became the direct ancestor of the Navy SEALs, established in nineteen sixty-two. The National Navy UDT-SEAL Museum stands here today, the only museum in the United States dedicated to the history of naval special warfare. The lineage runs directly from this quiet stretch of Florida coastline to every special operation the Navy has conducted since.
