Hurricanes wash up all sorts of interesting finds.
One resurfaced a long-lost link to the past.
And a Florida mom discovered one shocking message in a bottle after a hurricane.
World War II message in a bottle discovered after hurricane
Hurricane Debby brought high winds and torrential rain to the Gulf Coast of Florida.
Suzanne Flament Smith was cleaning up trash and debris after the storm in Safety Harbor, Florida, a small city in the Tampa area.
She happened to see something that caught her eye while filling a bag of trash, a glass bottle with a faded handwritten note inside of it.
“There was sand in it, but you could clearly see the writing [through the glass],” Smith told People. “You could see the beautiful penmanship, The letter was almost rolled outside, so you could see the writing. It stood out.”
Smith took the bottle home where she removed the cork to inspect the contents.
Inside the bottle was a bullet casing, sand, shells, and the letter.
“We opened the letter,” Smith recalled. “and you could see it was really faded. So, some of it you can make out and you could see the letterhead on it.”
The letterhead was marked United States Navy, Amphibious Training Base in Little Creek, Virginia and is dated “3/4/45.”
A message from the past
Time had caused portions of the letter to fade away.
“Dear Lee, Received your letter yesterday, was glad to hear from you,” the letter begins.
The author mentions that he is in radio school at the base located in the Norfolk, Virginia area.
“It appeared to be a navy military to a friend of some sort, because it mentioned how he wants to see him soon, and things like that,” Smith explained.
She shared a copy of the letter on Facebook with the hope that someone could find out more information about it.
The base now goes by the name Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story.
Navy public affairs officer April Phillips said the base is looking to verify the letter and find the author.
“We were established because with World War II going on, they needed a place to train amphibious forces like the folks who landed on D-Day on Normandy 80 years ago,” Phillips said.
“We’re going to some sleuthing and see what we can track down and I can’t wait for this journey to discover what we are going to learn,” Phillips added.
The lack of a last name on the letter makes it hard to pin down the author.
“Unfortunately, we will be unable to accurately authenticate this letter. Since we don’t have any last names, we don’t have a way to find out information about Lee or James(?) or able to confirm that James(?) worked at the base. However, based on what we could find it is possible for a letter head such as this to have existed in March of 1945,” the Navy said.
Smith hopes that eventually the mystery surrounding the letter can be solved.
“Well, I try to tell my kids if you do good, good things happen,” Smith said. “There is a sense of excitement, and also like a story, a story that hopefully we can find its home.”
Floridians truly never know what will wash up after a hurricane.
DeSantis Daily will keep you up-to-date on any developments to this ongoing story.
