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.