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 ............