“Panicked men flailed blindly, their limbs tangling with those of others clawing just as wildly in return,” he wrote. “As best we know, no one drowns with dignity.”
Farther south, the veteran camps — the closest settlements to where the eye passed over Long Key — simply washed away as sustained 185 mph winds hammered the flimsy tents. Soldiers later recounted lashing themselves to trees or hanging on to railway tracks. Some sought cover in trenches where rock for the highway bridge had been quarried, only to drown when the storm surge filled them.
“In the dark, if they knew what was going on five feet away from them, they were lucky,” said Wilkinson, who has spent four decades compiling documents and thousands of photos for an online museum for the Historical Preservation Society of the Upper Keys.
Of the 695 vets still working in the camps, which had run out of money and were expected to close in two weeks, 257 were confirmed dead. Another 228 civilians died in the storm.
The ravaged landscape quickly turned gruesome. Bodies were tangled in mangroves. Some washed across Florida Bay to Cape Sable. When Hemingway arrived by boat from Key West three days later, he found corpses floating in the ferry slip at Lower Matecumbe.
“You found them everywhere and in the sun all of them were beginning to be too big for their blue jeans and jackets that they could never fill when they were on the bum and hungry,” Hemingway wrote at the time.
A national horror
Outrage quickly spread across the country.
Roosevelt ordered the vets returned to Arlington for burial. But in the hot, humid weather, bodies rotted quickly. Knowles said FBI experts sent to help identify the dead had trouble even finding fingerprints — the skin on corpse fingertips kept slipping off. The crew of a Coast Guard cutter that retrieved 75 bodies and stashed them on its top deck later reported sharks banging against the hull, attracted by the leaking bodies, Knowles wrote.
Hastily built coffins did little to contain the smell. Hoping to speed burial, the government purchased 110 plots at Woodlawn cemetery in Miami, Wilkinson said. But the sickening conditions in the Keys — authorities increasingly worried about the spread of disease —prompted the decision to burn many of the bodies.
That decision, for a country still troubled by the gruesome combat of World War I, only caused more outrage.
“It became a national thing,” Knowles said. “They’re burning the bodies of World War I vets down in the Keys. They tried to give them some kind of burial rite with an honor guard that would play at the pyres. But bodies found … out in Florida Bay, they’d just burn them right there.”
In the end, a massive service — accounts put attendance at 20,000 — was held at Miami’s Bayfront Park after 81 vets, nine civilians and 19 unidentified bodies were buried at Woodlawn in wooden caskets lined with copper, by Bareford’s count.
Anger over the failed rescue sparked a congressional hearing that remains a frank reminder of how powerless government can be in the face of a monster storm. After an initial report blamed God, a lengthier probe concluded three Florida officials acted negligently. The American Legion also investigated, blaming the deaths on “inefficiency, indifference, and ignorance.”
The congressional hearing lasted more than a month, but came to the same conclusion as the initial investigation: God, not man, betrayed the soldiers.
“Sometimes there are catastrophes that are simply accidents,” Standiford said. “I think this was one of them.”
Forgotten men no more?
Today, a granite marker — Bareford believes it went up in 1936 or 1937 — is the only official sign of who is buried in Woodlawn’s northeast corner. Flat headstones, probably placed by families, identify five soldiers. Two bodies were exhumed and buried elsewhere.
But 74 others, identified in the Veterans Administration documents with last names like Beganski, Stone, McGuire and even a Kjar — lie in a state no more distinct than the dirt that surrounds them.
Bareford has written repeatedly to VA officials, appealing to have the graves marked but finding his efforts tangled in a bureaucratic rule change.
For decades, anyone with knowledge of a soldier’s grave could petition the VA for a marker. The rule successfully allowed for hundreds of Civil War graves to be marked, Bareford said. But over the years, disputes arose over what the agency calls an “emblem of faith” — the religious icon etched into markers. Sometimes families fought over whether the emblem should be a Star of David or a cross. Some started requesting Wiccan symbols or emblems for Scientology, he said.
In 2009, the VA changed its rule to allow only direct descendents to apply for markers.
“In trying to solve one problem, they created another one,” Bareford said. “That brought everything to a screeching halt.”
Last spring, the agency began again revising rules to allow cemetery directors to make such requests. While the rules are still being reviewed, the VA in May 2014 agreed to allow Woodlawn to make an application. But Woodlawn director Gabriel Romanach hit another roadblock: Cemetery lawyers told him he could not place markers on plots owned by somebody else. American Legion Post 29 owned the plot, and Romanach had trouble contacting its commander.
This spring he finally got permission, and he said last week that he is working hard to identify the plots and put in the application.
“It’s no fault of anyone,’’ he said. “It’s just the way the forms were created.”
In the meantime, Wilkinson said he still receives inquiries from families asking if a relative might be among those buried. At 86, he worries time for him to get markers on the long-neglected graves may be running out.
One day last month, he walked around the granite monument with a legal description he obtained from the 1936 congressional hearings, pointing to where he thought trenches were dug and bodies buried, mystified that after all these years, soldiers forsaken in life remained forgotten in death.
“I could spend the rest of the day here,” he said, “trying to figure out the politics of what they did.”