By CHRIS KRIDLER

Florida’s transformation into a vital center for training soldiers and shipping them off to World War II led the state away from agriculture, segregation and the Depression that hit it hard after the 1920s housing boom, as described in a new book.

Historian Nick Wynne of Rockledge, along with co-author Richard Moorhead of Winter Park, chronicles the heroic and the horrible, from the surge in military bases to the rise in venereal disease, in “Florida in World War II: Floating Fortress.”

Even in the year or two before the war, German U-boats torpedoed up to 100 ships off Florida’s coast, Wynne says. There were many more as war began.

One was the La Paz, torpedoed May 1, 1942, off Cocoa Beach.

“It had cargo of china, fertilizer and about 750 cases of Johnny Walker Scotch,” says Wynne, who heard the story from people who remembered the salvage operation. High school boys recruited to help got the idea that no one would miss a bottle or two as the scotch came ashore.

“There was so much glass hidden under the sand that you couldn’t walk without the sand shifting and hearing the tinkle of glass,” Wynne recounts.

Attacks were “so easy that the German U-boat crews referred to this as ‘the happy time’ because there wasn’t any trick to doing it,” he adds.

Locals also recall seeing Germans who came ashore to buy eggs and fresh fruit, though their visits were not recorded in U-boat logs. Nazi saboteurs who came ashore near Ponte Vedra and buried explosives for future attacks were caught when they were betrayed by fellow spies who’d come ashore in Long Island.

Locally, the Banana River Naval Air Station (now Patrick Air Force Base) and the Melbourne Naval Air Station (site of the Melbourne airport) were important hubs. The book describes population explosions at places like Camp Blanding, and the “Hell by the Sea” soldiers experienced at Camp Gordon Johnston in the Panhandle.

African-American soldiers who served had to fight for equal treatment and often had fewer privileges than German prisoners of war. The authors cite Camp Blanding, where, Wynne says, “the black support troops were located between German POWs and the white troops, so if any trouble broke out, they had to come through the black camp first.”

Officials went so far as to blame the increase in VD on black soldiers, when Wynne says that, based on research, it’s more likely the “young, underage girls who thought sleeping with a soldier was a patriotic duty.”

More tales abound, from the seductive crooks who married multiple soldiers to get their paychecks and, if they really cashed in, their death benefits, to the women who excelled at jobs from ship-welding to pilot-training.

“It was a remarkable generation who stepped up and did things they wouldn’t have done normally,” Wynne says, “and who did it willingly and who sort of rolled the dice and said, ‘Maybe I’ll be back, maybe I won’t, but it’s worthwhile.’ The generation of World War II you’d have to call one of America’s most courageous generations.”