_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 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.