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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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-mâché. 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 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.