black it stood as night,
fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell.
—milton
kappler’s hurricane was one of the most violent of history. it got its name from a weather officer, a second lieutenant in the army air corps named bernard j. kappler. the story includes the vivid personal reactions of a number of men who explored this tremendous storm as it built up its energy while crossing fifteen hundred miles of tropical and subtropical sea surface and finally ravaged parts of southern florida, including the outright destruction of the big richmond naval air base.
the fact is that this storm seems to have had its birth over western africa. there were signs of it there and near the cape verde islands on the first two days of september. later there were some indications of its winds and low pressure in radio reports from ships but eventually it was lost for the time being, far out in the atlantic.
kappler discovered it on september 12, 1945. he was on a regular weather-reporting mission to the windward 133 islands. every day one or more b-25’s took off from morrison field at west palm beach and explored the atmosphere on flights to antigua, british west indies, returning via the open atlantic to florida. on that day there was nothing unusual until the plane in which kappler was flying was about two hours from antigua. here, he noted a black wall of clouds to the east and at his suggestion the pilot, first lieutenant d. a. cassidy, took the plane down to fifteen hundred feet and they looked around.
without any doubt, a tropical storm was in the making. its winds already were blowing around a center with gusts at about seventy miles an hour. there was moderate turbulence, with stretches of rain, but they had no particular difficulty in flying through it. they reported it to headquarters and were told to land at coolidge field in antigua and be prepared to take another look and report in the morning.
this operation was known as “duck fight,” consisting of five b-25 aircraft and five crews made up of twenty officers and fifteen men. this particular group had been at british guiana but had moved up to florida in may for the new hurricane duty. it was their job to explore this region twice daily, looking for weather trouble when no storm was known to be in progress. if a suspicious area was found, they were deployed and used in accordance with directives from the hurricane center at miami. the navy also had planes assigned to similar missions.
after breakfast on the thirteenth kappler’s crew took off again. about two hours out of antigua, they encountered winds up to about eighty knots (a little above ninety miles an hour) but flying was smooth. the crew made a few jokes on the general subject of how easy it was to fly through hurricanes. the co-pilot, lieutenant hugh crowe, had the controls. he turned toward the center and the wind picked up to 120 knots. soon they were in trouble, with severe turbulence 134 and heavy rain. the air speed fluctuated between 160 and 240 miles an hour and cylinder temperatures began to fall rapidly. crowe fed power to the engines, but the plane began getting out of control. cassidy had to help him keep the ship level. kappler shouted that the pressure was dropping rapidly—the pressure altitude was seventeen hundred feet but their actual height was only nine hundred. crowe said the turbulence was the most severe he had ever experienced. the plane yawed fifteen degrees on either side of the heading. the navigator, lieutenant redding w. bunting, said dryly, “in my opinion a hurricane is not the place in which to fly an airplane.”
by the fourteenth, it was obvious to all concerned that they had a really big storm on their hands. its center had been north of puerto rico on the thirteenth, and on the fourteenth, moving rather rapidly, it was passing north of haiti. the first plane took off from borinquen field, puerto rico, in the morning, cassidy at the controls, and within an hour the crew were getting into it. at the end of this flight, co-pilot crowe said, “my respect for hurricanes has increased tremendously!”
first, the right engine was not running smoothly and after a little it almost stopped. cassidy asked bunting where the nearest land was and when he said cuba, they turned 90° and made for it. after twenty minutes the engine was doing better, so they had a brief conference and decided to try for the hurricane center. turning back, they saw gigantic sea swells and a white boiling ocean ahead. soon they hit the worst turbulence cassidy had ever seen, and with it there were intervals of torrential rain. it was terrific. the cockpit was leaking like a sieve. most of the time it took full rudder and aileron to lift a wing. the plane got into attitudes they had never dreamed of. it was impossible to hold a heading, for the ship was yawing more than 30° and taking a terrible 135 side buffeting. maybe this lasted three to five minutes but it seemed like hours. suddenly they passed through the edge of the center, it was smooth for about a minute, and then they were in the worst part again. bunting noted a piece of advice, “when you are near the center, about all you can do is brace yourself and hold on to something that won’t pull loose.”
bunting reported afterward that it took both pilot and co-pilot to control the ship and at times the rpm set at 2,100 would drop to 1,900 and then rise to 2,200, due to the terrific force of the wind. kappler kept phoning the correct altitude to the pilot at short intervals because of the enormous changes in pressure. it was impossible to write in the log book so he scribbled as best he could on a piece of paper and copied it afterward. he noted that before entering the eye it was very dark. inside it was cloudy but the light was better, indicating that the upper clouds were missing. when the flight was finished the crew was glad to be back at morrison field—to put it mildly!
another plane at morrison field had been out the day before and soon was taking off again, at 2:00 p.m. the pilot was lieutenant a. d. gunn. he flew a direct course to the center of the storm—he hadn’t realized the day before that he was elected to go through it again today, so he wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. these two days had provided his first such experience. one cylinder head slid to a very low temperature in the heavy rain and gunn dropped the landing gear and tried to keep it up to 100°, but one engine died. the turbulence was so bad that neither he nor the co-pilot could tell which engine was out. the severe turbulence lasted for a full thirty minutes, about ten minutes of this being flown on one engine, with the crew desperately working on the other while they bounced around. the flight engineer, sergeant harry kiefaber, had to leave his seat because 136 of water pouring down his back and the tossing up and down, with his head repeatedly hitting the top of the plane. he tried to go back to join the navigator but the plane started to fall off to the right and he had visions of ditching in a mass of white foam. the pilot got it under control but it seemed that they were being tossed around like popcorn in a popper. gradually the turbulence ceased, the other engine began running smoothly and they headed straight for morrison.
but the conditions on the fourteenth were just an introduction to what happened on the fifteenth. the first crew took off at 7 a.m., with the edge of the hurricane causing rough weather at the field. here is the story told by the navigator, lieutenant james p. dalton:
“frankly speaking, throughout my entire life i have been frightened, really frightened, only three times. all of this was connected intimately with weather reconnaissance. i think i can truthfully and without exaggeration say that absolutely the worst time was while i was flying through kappler’s hurricane on september 15, 1945. we were stationed at morrison field, west palm beach, florida, at the time. everyone except the duck flight recco squadron had evacuated the field for safer areas the day before.
“hurricane reconnaissance being our business, we of course stayed on, in order to operate as closely as possible to the storm. we were to take off at 7:00 a.m. local time and by then several thunderstorms had already appeared, thoroughly drenching us before we could climb into our plane. but each crew member was keenly alert, for he knew what to expect. i’ve flown approximately fifteen hundred normal weather reconnaissance hours; that is, if you can call going out and looking for trouble ‘normal flying.’ i have covered the atlantic completely north of the equator to the 137 arctic circle, flying in all kinds of weather and during all seasons but never has anything like this happened to me before.
“one minute this plane, seemingly under control, would suddenly wrench itself free, throw itself into a vertical bank and head straight for the steaming white sea below. an instant later it was on the other wing, this time climbing with its nose down at an ungodly speed. to ditch would be disastrous. i stood on my hands as much as i did on my feet. rain was so heavy it was as if we were flying through the sea like a submarine. navigation was practically impossible. for not a minute could we say we were moving in any single direction—at one time i recorded twenty-eight degrees drift, two minutes later it was from the opposite direction almost as strong. but then taking a drift reading during the worst of it was out of the question. i was able to record a wind of 125 miles an hour, and i still don’t know how it was possible, the air was so terribly rough. at one time, though, our pressure altimeter was indicating twenty-six hundred feet due to the drop in pressure, when we actually were at seven hundred feet. at this time the bottom fell out. i don’t know how close we came to the sea but it was far too close to suit my fancy. right then and there i prayed. i vouched if i could come out alive i would never fly again.
“by the time we reached the center of the storm i was sick, real sick, and terribly frightened, but our job was only half over. we still had to fly from the center out, which proved to be as bad, if not worse, than going in.
“mind you, for the first time, and after flying over fifteen hundred hours, i was airsick; and i wasn’t alone. our radio operator spilt his cookies just before we reached the center.
“after a total of five hours we landed at eglin, the entire crew much happier to be safely back on the ground. at the time of our take-off we really didn’t think it possible to fly 138 safely through a hurricane. personally i still don’t. and i say again, i hope never to be as frightened as the time i flew through kappler’s hurricane. it isn’t safe.”
lieutenant gunn, the pilot who had been in it the day before, was a man who took things calmly. he reported his experience:
“this morning the storm was only an hour and a half from the field. the usual line of squalls around the edge of the storm was hitting morrison field about every hour and a half. of course this trip was to take us through the very center.
“we left morrison at one thousand feet. the entire flight was turbulent and rainy. we circled the storm counterclockwise again and ran into the same turbulence and rain as before. this time the clouds must have been as low as five or six hundred feet, as even though we were only at one thousand feet, we could seldom get a glimpse of the ocean, which was churned up to such an extent that it seemed to be one big white cap. the altimeter was off one thousand feet at one point placing us at five hundred feet; then we could see the water. i believe even the fish drowned that day. as we entered the northeast quadrant, it got so rough that both pilot and co-pilot were flying the ship at the same time. the winds were so great at this point one could actually see the ship drifting over the sea. i think we had a drift correction of thirty-five to forty degrees at times.
“i don’t think anyone will form a habit of this particular job. prior to taking off i tried to take out hurricane insurance but it seems that they have no policies covering b-25 planes. anyway, all the insurance salesmen had evacuated to some distant place like long beach, calif.”
sergeant robert matzke, the radio operator, put it this way:
“september 15 was the day that i was picked on a crew 139 to fly the hurricane. having been forewarned by several of the boys who had returned from the hurricane the day before, i set myself for something a little rougher than a weather mission with occasional turbulence. i figured that we had flown through what could well be considered rough weather while flying reconnaissance out of the azores and maybe the boys were trying to throw a little scare into us as new men to the morrison initiation.
“it seems that we had no sooner left the ground when we encountered rain and turbulence. this made me sort of leery of what was to come and i figured that if i were to send weather messages while in a hurricane, i’d have to send blind as the receivers were noisy already, and to hear and answer to a call would be almost an impossibility. as we proceeded toward the storm the rain became more intense and things were getting quite ‘damp’ in the ship. there was a leak right over my table and the steady downpour of water through this opening made it necessary for me to write with the log tablet braced against my knee to keep it from getting wet.
“the awful bouncing was getting my stomach and when we actually entered the hurricane it took all my strength to reach for the key to send a message. after a while i called to lieutenant schudel, our weather observer, and told him that i was sick and would have to rest my head on the table for a while. i had felt bad in a plane before but this was the first time that i was deathly sick. after a few minutes it was with all the strength that i could muster that i rolled my head to one side of the table and lost a few cookies.
“after i vomited a while i felt one hundred per cent better and i went to work pounding out the messages that had accumulated. it was impossible for me to hear any signals on the receivers due to atmospherics, so i sent blind, repeating myself over and over, in the hopes that someone would copy 140 and relay to miami for me. our ships were vacating to eglin field that day and sergeant le captain was standing watch on the frequency i was using. he came through with a receipt when i got to where i could hear in my receivers again.
“the flight that day was the roughest i have ever been on and a lot of my time was taken up just holding on for dear life and watching the b-4 bags bouncing up and down en masse like a big rubber ball. i was glad when the wheels hit the runway at eglin field and hungry, too, for my breakfast had stayed with me for a very short time. i imagine i looked rather beat up when i stepped from the plane but the ground felt so darn good under my feet and i didn’t care who knew that i had been sicker than a dog.”
each member of the crew saw a little different part of the picture. boys who flew these missions regularly became matter-of-fact in their reports and it was only when they were involved in a really big storm that they talked frankly about their feelings. here is the story of the flight engineer, sergeant don smith, in kappler’s hurricane on september 15:
“the morning of the fifteenth loomed dark and formidable. this was our day to take a fling at the hurricane the other boys were telling us so much about. as a matter of fact it doesn’t make you feel as though you were going on a sunday school picnic. from the time we took off until we hit the storm we encountered turbulence and white caps were dashing around like mad but they were mild compared to what was coming.
“we circled the storm before heading for the center. we were hitting rain and moderate turbulence all this time. all at once we broke through the overcast and for a few seconds i wondered if it were letting up, but only for a second. one instant everything was peaceful and the next instant we 141 were getting slapped around like a punching bag with joe louis on the prod. i looked at the bank and turn indicator and the rate of climb, and they both looked as if they were going all out to win a jitterbug contest. now it was really raining. you’ve never seen it rain until you’ve been in a hurricane. i couldn’t even see the engines from the cockpit window. i knew our right engine was the least bit rough before we started out and all i could think of was ‘for gosh sakes, don’t be cutting out now.’ before we were out of it, the engine sounded like a one-cylinder harley motorcycle but really she never missed a beat. it was about this time that our cylinder head temperature dropped down to about 90° and the pilot dropped the wheels to bring it back up. and it was also about this time that we started for a milder climate.
“don’t ask me if i was scared or not. it would only be a fool or a liar who would say he wasn’t worried. one thing about it is that you’re so busy hanging on and trying to keep from getting thrown on your face that there isn’t much time to think whether you’re scared or not. it’s really rough but there are no words to describe it. you’d have to go along to get the picture.”
lieutenant kappler, for whom the hurricane was named, was due to go to eglin field with the crew that penetrated the hurricane on the fourteenth, but he wanted to stay over and see more of it. so they took him on, and although they already had a weather officer, lieutenant howard schudel, kappler was allowed to go as photographer. schudel made the weather report from which the following is extracted:
“the rain was moderate at a distance from the center but already i was drenched because of a leaky nose in the ship. we flew almost completely around the center with nothing especially spectacular. at about twenty miles from the center we encountered severe turbulence which lasted only 142 until the center was hit. during this time is when i found myself trying to code two weather messages at once and not doing a very good job on either. i actually was too busy to get very scared as to whether or not the plane would hold together. between the severe turbulence and the water which by then had covered the entire desk, i could hardly read my own writing a half hour later when i was able to send the messages to the radio man. the turbulence near the center was of a nature i had never experienced previously. it was not a sharp jolt as experienced in a cumulus cloud but more of a rhythmic up and down motion. but on top of this there was a motion from side to side that made it especially rough.
“to me the most unwelcome sight of the whole trip was the swelling, churning sea. from nine hundred feet, which seemed to be our average altitude, the height of the spray above the ocean could not be determined. in places the surface was covered with sharp white streaks. if one thought for very long about what would happen to him if he were forced down upon this boiling ocean, he would be cured of hurricane flying for some time to come.
“the center was very welcome. the turbulence there was only light and the intense rain stopped completely. this gave me a momentary ‘breather’ so that i could swallow my stomach, assure myself that i was not sick, and code up a few back messages.”
the morning crew went to eglin field and only one ship and crew was left at morrison as the big storm closed in. the weather officer on this last flight was lieutenant edward bourdet. he said:
“the weather during the entire morning at morrison was bad. there were numerous thunderstorms with heavy rain showers that reduced visibility at times to less than one-quarter 143 mile. our flight took off at 10 a.m. we went just east of miami where the wind was easterly at about fifty knots. we circled the storm center according to instructions and the wind went around from east to north and then through west to south. we experienced not only vertical currents but shearing horizontal currents. it is surprising that an airplane can hold together under such punishment. i found that there is no dry place in the nose of a b-25 in hurricane rain and i had to sit on the papers to keep them fairly dry, but i was also troubled in trying to keep myself from being battered against the side of the plane. we did not enter the eye of the storm but were in the northeast corner. the pilot later remarked, ‘our left wing tip may have been in the calm, but we sure as hell weren’t.’ it was here that i experienced the worst turbulence and the heaviest rain i have ever seen. the noise was terrific.”
lieutenant bourdet added:
“the worst part of flying hurricanes is the fact that if there should be some trouble, structural or otherwise, that would force the plane down, the crew would not have a chance of getting out alive. the best part is the fact that you know that you are instrumental in providing adequate warning to all concerned and in saving lives and property.”
during the time when these crews were flying into kappler’s hurricane and sending reports to the miami center, on september 15, the people of florida were making last-minute preparations. windows were boarded up, streams of refugees filled the highways, the radios were full of warnings, and the venturesome stood on the street corners as the gales began roaring in the wires and big waves came booming against the coast. palm trees bent nearly double and debris began to fill the air. there was great damage at the richmond naval air base. three big lighter-than-air hangars were destroyed. they collapsed in the wind at or near 144 the peak of the hurricane and intense fires, fed by high octane gasoline, consumed the remains.
an investigating committee found that the winds must not have been less than 161 miles an hour to account for the bending of the large steel doors. weather records recovered from the base indicated a two-minute wind of more than 170 miles an hour and as high as 198 miles an hour for a few seconds.
the center of the hurricane crossed the southern tip of florida and moved up the west coast on the sixteenth as it turned north-northeastward, and then swept over georgia and the carolinas. its center lay on the georgia coast on the seventeenth. the boys who flew to eglin field had to take it again as its center came near and some of them flew into the hurricane after it passed eglin. among these was another weather officer, lieutenant george gray, who had seen this storm in several different places and now viewed it from the air as it whipped the georgia coast. his report is worth reading:
“riding through ‘kappler’s hurricane’ was as rough a trip as i ever care to take. admittedly, i know very little about flying from a pilot’s point of view—how hard it is to keep a ship steady, the gyro, the cylinder head temperature, and all the rest that had the boys so worried. my criterion for roughness has always been how hard it is for me to hold on and how much the air speed fluctuates. we up front had to hold on with both hands when the going got bad. some of the boys in back, we heard, with close to a thousand hours reconnaissance flying, actually got sick. the thing, though, that really frightened us was not the turbulence so much, because we had had to hold on with both hands before—it was the rain and the white sea below us.
“we saw the rain first from aloft. it looked absolutely black, as if a sudden darkness had set in in that part of the 145 sky. the blackness seemed to hang straight down like a thick dark curtain from a solid altostratus deck at about fifteen thousand feet. how much further above this layer the build-up extended, i do not know. i kept thinking, ‘we’re not actually going into that.’ we did though, and somehow with all the rush, we didn’t have so much time to worry and become frightened as we expected. the rain was really terrific. it leaked in the nose and ran in a flood down the crawlway. the nose usually leaks and a soaking on a trip is not at all unusual, but this was different. i have never seen the water pour in and spurt so before. where the plexiglass meets the floor section there was a regular fountain about six inches high that flooded the whole area. the noise was terrific. it pounded and crushed against the top and sides till we thought it would all collapse in upon us. i didn’t notice any particular temperature change in the heavy rain though the pilots afterward all reported enormous cooling in the engines. writing was almost impossible. the forms and charts on the table were like so much papier-maché. there was no place that we could put them out of the water’s way.
“we noticed the ocean particularly on the last day when the storm swept out to sea again off the georgia coast. the day before on our way back to morrison field from eglin where we rode out the blow, we flew low over the everglades and saw roofless homes and millions of uprooted palmettos. the next day as we flew up the coast, we could see other remnants of the storm—huge pieces of timber, trees, roofs of outbuildings, and maybe even houses. the interphone was busy all the while as first one and then another of the crew saw something also afloat. as we got nearer the storm but still only in the scattered stratocumulus which is typical of almost any over-water flight, the rubbish seemed to disappear. whether it was simply that the water itself was too 146 rough for the timber to stand out or whether everything lay below the seething whiteness, i don’t know. on our first trip into a tropical storm, the navigator kept repeating over the interphone, ‘that water gives me the creeps.’ it did. i kept thinking about ditching in it and floundering around in a ‘mae west’; i guess we all did. the waves were huge. every now and then one would crest up and just as it was about to crash, the wind would grab hold of the foam and mist and crash it back into the sea. i took several pictures of the gradually heightening sea, though i doubt that its seething, alive look could be transposed to paper.
“we saw the storm hit the carolina cape. it was easy to see how trees in the florida swamps without much root to grasp the earth were uprooted. trees along the carolina and georgia coasts—big ones, taller than the houses in the vicinity—were bending before the blow the way wheat seems to ebb and flow in a summer’s breeze. the seas were very high and in occasional breaks in the lower clouds we could catch glimpses of yellowish breakers and a littered beach. it looked as if the rain and thrashing surf had churned up the bottom, and mud had mixed with the foamy water. the shore was littered with debris, big trees, and blackened seaweed, mostly. as a sort of aside, on the matter of stirring up the bottom, we found several conch shells and bits of coral on the beach after the storm that are not considered native in these parts.
“whether this next is typical of hurricanes or merely evidence that the storm had spent itself, i don’t know, but i do think it worthy of mention. we noticed occasional breakups in the clouds—not large areas, just a few seconds when everything brightened and when the firm outlines of a large cumulus could be seen through thin low scud. this was not in the center but as much as forty miles away where the stuff should have been most solid and where the sea was near its 147 roughest. i have seen the ‘eye’ of a hurricane on land as a weather forecaster. at that time we noticed a real breakup with stars and moonlight visible. the wind and noise stopped for a while and we could see an occasional bulging cumulus through the night. whether this phenomenon is due merely to less energy available over land than over water, i wouldn’t even guess. in any event we noticed no such complete break in the eye at sea. in the center, so-called calm, though for my money it was mighty rough, about all that we noticed was that the pounding rain stopped for a minute or so. the clouds did not break clear through. there was a slight breakup to perhaps five thousand feet. there were bases of cumulus and several indefinite layers below this overcast though. the terrific bouncing around also stopped. we were out of the place in just a minute or two, so the eye couldn’t have been much more than five miles in diameter. some of the other ships circled in the center, saw a flock of birds milling around there, and noted violent up and down drafts near its edge. we were in and out of the thing so fast that, frankly, we hardly had time to notice anything. i think we could have fallen the seven hundred feet to the water without my knowing it, we were so busy with the camera, papers, and instruments.
“i might say a little more about the cloud formations we noticed since it was my job on this day to note them and take pictures of them while the other observer tried to compute pressure. ahead of the storm here at morrison field on the morning of the sixteenth, we got a good picture of pre-hurricane thunderstorms. squalls with forty-mile gusts swept across the runways. the rain came down in sheets so that we could watch it move toward us like a dark wall. some of the boys out loading one of the ships for evacuation saw one of these terrific showers bearing down on them and 148 they started to run for cover. the water was moving faster than they could run and before they’d moved fifty feet they were soaked to the skin. on the morning of the seventeenth, it lay just off the georgia coast and had started to re-deepen. we flew up the eightieth meridian though it was hard to hold any steady course. as some of the navigators have probably mentioned, we could see our own drift. after we noted a good windshift into the east to assure us that we were in the northeast quadrant, we headed across current for the center and once there headed roughly for the great outside to the west. with such terrific drift, i don’t see how anyone knew where he was going.
“heading north: the usual over-water five-tenths stratocumulus bases at two thousand, tops at thirty-five hundred, gradually began to lower at about one hundred twenty-five miles from the center to roughly eight hundred feet, and a fairly solid lower layer of clouds. flying above this layer at about forty-five hundred feet we could see tall bulging cumulus and thickening altostratus at about fifteen thousand ahead. there were other thin layers of stratocumulus and altostratus, but it wasn’t until we got within fifty miles or so of the center and the rain really began to come down and the cumulus were as thick as trees in a forest that these intermediary layers began to thicken and thatch in between the tall cumulus the way they do in any well-developed storm system. by fifty miles out we were in solid cloud and heavy rain. picture-taking became impossible except in the occasional breaks mentioned above. even these breaks, if they should come out, would show little because continuous instrument weather, to me at least, looks pretty much the same whether it’s part of a violent hurricane or smooth circulation stratus over a seaboard town. you can see the wing tips and not much more.
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“if a general conclusion is necessary, mine would simply be that i’d just as soon not tempt fate in any more such storms.”
sometimes birds such as lieutenant gray describes are carried hundreds of miles before they escape from the hurricane. species from florida have been found as far north as new england.
