“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.
“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 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 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.
“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.