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: