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VOL. 4/ISSUE 36
THURSDAY, JULY 7, 2016
Seminole Battle on an Wars mapped unimaginable scale the way to blue-green algae bloom Patrick McCallister FOR VETERAN VOICE
pmccallister@veteranvoiceweekly.com
It’s all over Florida news — freshwater blue-green algae is washing up on Martin County beaches. Interestingly, the Seminole Wars played a role. Back in the 1877 a fella named Hamilton Disston — a Union Army volunteer from Pennsylvania — visited Florida and looked over military surveying records from the wars that wrapped up in the late 1850s. The Army was trying to figure out where the impetuous Seminoles were heading during South Florida’s annual floods, so it had extensive topographical maps. What the maps told Disston is that it was possible to dry out much of the state. More about Disston in a moment. Put a finger on an Orlando map at Sand Lake Road and South John Young Parkway. That’s pretty much where the blue-green algae problems on the Treasure Coast begin, according to Marty Baum, executive director of Indian Riverkeeper. He’s a Vietnam-era Navy submariner. More accurately, the about 100 miles and 135 years of development between south Orlando and Lake Okeechobee are where the problems begin. “It all begins in the 1880s with Hamilton Disston,” Baum said. That finger on the Orlando map will cover Shingle Creek. Most who know a lot about these sorts of things say that’s where the headwaters of the Everglades begin — way up in Orlando with Shin-
See ALGAE page 4
Photo by Gary Dee The Serre Cemetery in Somme, France, is the last resting place of tens of thousands of soldiers who lost their lives in the bloodiest battle of World War I.
Mary Kemper STAFF WRITER
mkemper@veteranvoiceweekly.com
In the “war to end all wars,” it should have been the battle to end all battles. Sadly, it was only the beginning of bloodshed beyond anything that had come before — except for the American Civil War. The Battle of the Somme began on July 1, 1916, and ended in November. More than 1 million men lost their lives. On July 1 alone, 57,000 British, Canadian and other Commonwealth soldiers were killed. That’s an entire mid-size town. On one single day. Why? How? Part of the answer lies in the fact that World War I was a war of technology wedded to outdated tactics. So many new weapons were developed by then
— but no one updated the 19th-century “each side lines up and slugs it out” tactic. Trench warfare was just more of the same. Another part of the answer is that tactics using the new technology was simply too new. And the technology itself, while lethal, was inefficient. Air power, for example, was proving an invaluable weapon in terms of air-to-air and air-to-ground combat, as well as reconnaissance. Everyone knows about Manfred von Richthofen, the famous “Red Baron,” who became the “ace of aces” in the war with 80 kills to his credit. (America’s Eddie Rickenbacker became an ace with 26 kills, but didn’t serve the same length of time.) Bombing missions were conducted, but the early planes could only handle one bomb at a time, and targeting was basically the pilot’s best guess. Plus, there weren’t enough planes to bomb
See SOMME page 7