Blog Entry 5 - Fort Myers Beach

I have lived in Fort Myers ever since I was born, and had visited Fort Myers Beach more times than I can remember. Until recently, I thought I had known everything there was to know about the little island. There's a beach (with a pier), a bunch of restaurants, and a lot of stores. There are also parking spots, but never seemingly enough of them to keep up with the huge amount of people that are always there. But when I was walking on the boardwalk among the mangrove trees, I came to a realization: I never knew this particular area even existed. I was literally walking in an area that the Calusa indians, and perhaps even Ponce de Leon had walked through hundreds of years ago. I was also surprised at the amount of fairly recent history that area had, particularly during the second world war. I had already known about the air bases that were here, since my grandfather actually got his flight training at the bomber base at Page Field during the war (he flew the B-25). What really took me by surprise were the stories about the Nazis. When you think of the war against them, you think of it taking place in Europe and North Africa, but not this close to home. But sure enough, U-boats would supposedly scout right off the shore of Fort Myers beach! It's pretty scary to think about. It's even more scary to wonder if Germany ever had plans of taking the war to the US, and perhaps using south Florida (which was largely undeveloped, at the time) as a place to start an invasion. The story about the Nazi uniform being found in the mangroves with a ticket stub (presumably from a local play) found in the pocket was incredible, almost too incredible to be true I think. After I got back home, I tried to do some research regarding the story, but all I could find were links to blogs from people that had mentioned the story from the past colloquium classes! I'm starting to wonder if the story might just be an urban legend.