The Best Hunting Day in Years
November 11, 1940 fell on a Monday. It was Armistice Day, a federal holiday marking the armistice that had ended the First World War. Factories and schools were closed. Across Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Michigan, tens of thousands of men had the day off. Many of them had been planning this for weeks. The peak of the autumn waterfowl migration was running late that year, and the ducks were still moving south in extraordinary numbers.
The morning temperature in the Twin Cities was around 40 degrees Fahrenheit. In La Crosse, Wisconsin, it reached 52. In Chicago and Davenport, the thermometers climbed into the mid-50s. Men left for the river in light jackets and shirtsleeves. Some had been watching the forecasts. What they read was not alarming: colder temperatures, a few flurries possible, nothing more. The U.S. Weather Bureau, operating out of its regional office in Chicago, had issued its twice-daily forecast and moved on.
Along the Mississippi River corridor, from Minneapolis south through Winona, La Crosse, Prairie du Chien, and Dubuque, hunters launched their boats by mid-morning. The ducks were everywhere. Jack Meggers, a 16-year-old from the Harpers Ferry area of Iowa, watched the sky turn and said later that the birds were moving so thick you couldn't count them. Near Ventura, a high school senior named Max Christensen skipped class and reached his marsh to find the water completely hidden by a mass of mallards. The hunting was unlike anything most men had ever seen.
That was, in part, the reason so many of them were still on the water when the front arrived.
The Front
The meteorological record shows what the Chicago office did not fully detect until it was too late. A low-pressure system had been developing rapidly over the northern Great Plains. It was deepening at a rate of one to two millibars per hour over a 24-hour period. That is catastrophic intensification by any standard, the kind of explosive development that the twice-daily observation schedule in 1940 was never designed to catch.
Before dawn on November 11, the system was already a significant storm. But no additional warnings had gone out. The Chicago bureau's last forecast remained the operative word across the Upper Midwest: colder temperatures, a few flurries. Nothing in the language suggested what was coming.
The change arrived without a gradual build. On the Mississippi River at La Crosse, the temperature stood at 52 degrees at 11 a.m. By 4 p.m., it had dropped to 28. By dawn the next morning, it was 6 degrees and still falling. In parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin, the temperature dropped 50 degrees in the space of a single afternoon. In some locations it dropped 30 degrees in two hours. The winds came with it. Sustained gusts of 40 to 50 miles per hour drove swells five and six feet high across rivers and lake surfaces. Along the Lake Michigan shoreline, the Weather Bureau measured gusts of 80 miles per hour at Grand Rapids.
The barometric pressure at La Crosse reached 28.72 inches of mercury. Near Collegeville, Minnesota, 26.6 inches of snow fell before the storm was done. Drifts reached 20 feet.
Stranded on the Islands
The Mississippi River between Minneapolis and Prairie du Chien is braided and shallow, threaded with sandbars and small wooded islands. Duck hunters knew these islands well. They made excellent blinds. On the morning of November 11, hundreds of hunters had paddled, rowed, or motored out to them and set up their decoys in the calm, warm air.
When the storm hit, the river became impassable in minutes. Six-foot waves swamped flat-bottomed skiffs. Men who tried to row back to shore drowned in water that was already near freezing. Those who stayed on the islands had no shelter and no fuel. The cottonwood and willow trees that fringed the sandbars provided almost no windbreak. Temperatures dropped below ten degrees overnight.
Oscar Gerth was 24 years old and hunting near Winona, Minnesota. He made it to a sandbar but could not get off. With no firewood available, he burned through his supply of handmade cedar duck decoys one by one, feeding them into a small fire and crouching over the smoke to stay alive. He was afraid to walk more than fifteen steps in any direction for fear of becoming disoriented in the whiteout. He watched another hunter die slowly in the water nearby, the man's arms hooked around a willow branch, his body gradually encased in ice.
Near the same stretch of river, Ted Bambenek was one of 17 hunters stranded together on an island in Straight Slough. The group built a communal fire and took turns scavenging wood and keeping each other alert. When the dead branches were exhausted, some of the men resorted to shooting down living limbs from the trees overhead with their remaining shotgun shells.
"I saw one friend sitting against a tree. He was frozen to death."
— Duck hunter survivor account, Winona area, November 1940
Along a 50-mile stretch of the Mississippi near Winona, at least 20 duck hunters died. Between Red Wing, Minnesota and Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, the total was estimated at the same number. When rescuers began reaching the islands on the morning of November 12, they found men suffering from advanced frostbite, men dead at their blinds, and boats sunk or drifted away.
Max Conrad, a pilot from Winona, took a Piper Cub up into 50-mph headwinds at first light on November 12, flying low over the islands to locate survivors. He dropped packets of sandwiches, whiskey, and matches to men he could see below, then radioed their positions to rescue boats on shore.
The Death Count on Land
The hunters were the most visible victims. But the storm killed across a much wider geography and in every possible circumstance.
In Minnesota, 49 people died. Duck hunters made up roughly half of them. The others included motorists caught in blizzard conditions, farmers trying to reach their livestock, and people who simply could not get home in time. One million turkeys destined for Thanksgiving tables died across Wisconsin, Minnesota, and surrounding states. Thousands of cattle perished in Iowa. Apple orchards were destroyed across the region. Snowdrifts buried cars and stranded trains.
In Wisconsin, 13 died. In Illinois, 13 more. Across Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, and Michigan, the combined toll added further to a total that conservative estimates placed at 154. Some accounts, incorporating indirect deaths and those from smaller incidents, put the figure at closer to 160.
In two days, a storm that arrived with almost no warning had killed more people in the Upper Midwest than any single weather event in living memory.
Lake Michigan: Three Ships Down
The worst single concentration of deaths was not on the Mississippi at all. It was on Lake Michigan.
By the time the storm reached Lake Michigan's eastern shore, it had generated sustained winds of 75 miles per hour and waves measuring 20 feet. Three commercial freighters operating on the lake that day were overwhelmed. All three sank within miles of each other off the small town of Pentwater, Michigan. Between them, 59 sailors died.
The SS William B. Davock was a 420-foot steel bulk freighter owned by the Interlake Steamship Company, built in 1907 and carrying a crew of 32. She was loaded with coal and running along the Michigan shoreline when her rudder broke and jammed against the propeller, disabling both steering and propulsion at once. With no way to hold her bow into the waves, the Davock fell into the troughs. The 20-foot swells broke over her repeatedly. She sank 1.9 miles off Little Sable Light in 210 to 240 feet of water. All 32 men aboard were lost. No distress signal was ever received.
The SS Anna C. Minch was a 380-foot Canadian vessel carrying 24 crew. She went down approximately 1.5 miles south of Pentwater in just 35 to 45 feet of water. The exact sequence is unknown because no one survived. Post-storm investigation suggested the Anna C. Minch may have struck the Davock before sinking, or may simply have been overpowered by the sea conditions. She lies in two pieces, debris spread across 60 feet of lake bottom. All 24 hands were lost.
The SS Novadoc was a smaller Canadian vessel, 253 feet, running from Chicago to Quebec Province. She grounded off Juniper Beach near Pentwater and broke in half on impact. Two of her crew were washed overboard and drowned. The remaining 15 were stranded on the wreck for 36 hours in wind and spray before help arrived.
The U.S. Coast Guard station assessed the seas as too dangerous for a rescue attempt. A 47-year-old commercial fisherman named Clyde Cross disagreed. He took his fishing tug Three Brothers, with crew members Gustav Fisher and Joe Fountain, through the surf and pulled all 15 survivors off the wreck. The Canadian government later recognized all three men for their actions.
The Warning That Did Not Come
How did the Weather Bureau miss a storm of this magnitude on a day when so many Americans were outdoors?
The answer was structural. In 1940, weather forecasting for the Upper Midwest operated on a twice-daily cycle. Observations were collected at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. and transmitted by telegraph to the Chicago office, which then issued brief, regional forecasts. There was no continuous overnight monitoring. No one was watching the data streams in the pre-dawn hours of November 11 when the low-pressure system was deepening at its most explosive rate.
The forecasters in Chicago did know a storm was coming. They said so in their public statements afterward. They were wrong about its strength and scope. The forecast issued that morning predicted colder temperatures and a few snow flurries. It said nothing about 80-mph winds, 26-inch snowfalls, or a temperature drop of 50 degrees by nightfall. There were no advisories to stay off the rivers. There was no indication that this was a dangerous day to be in a boat.
The bureau's defense was that the data available to them, given the observation schedule and communication technology of the era, did not fully show what was coming until it was already there. That was true. It was also inadequate.
In the months after the storm, the bureau faced a severe public reckoning. Survivors and families wanted to understand how no adequate warning had been issued. Congressional attention followed. The Chicago office's forecast record for November 11, 1940 became a case study in institutional failure.
What Changed
The Armistice Day Blizzard became the event that reorganized American weather forecasting in the Upper Midwest.
Prior to 1940, all regional forecasts originated from Chicago. Forecasts were brief, general, and issued on a schedule that assumed gradual weather change. The 1940 storm demonstrated that an explosive low-pressure system could develop and intensify in the hours between observations, producing catastrophic conditions with almost no lead time under that system.
Two changes followed directly. The Chicago office was placed on round-the-clock staffing, so that overnight intensification events could be caught in real time. Forecasting responsibilities were also decentralized. The Twin Cities branch of the Weather Bureau was upgraded to issue its own independent regional forecasts, rather than relay Chicago's. Smaller branch offices gained similar expanded authority. The thinking was that local offices could respond faster to local conditions.
Neither change would have guaranteed adequate warning on November 11, 1940, given the speed of the storm's development. But together they represented the first systematic effort to address the gap that had killed over 150 people in a single day.
The Legacy
The Armistice Day Blizzard is not well remembered outside the Upper Midwest. It produced no iconic photograph, no single image that anchored it in popular memory the way other disasters have. What it left behind was more diffuse: the absence of sons and fathers, the decoys that burned in place of wood, the rusted bolts on sandbar willows where men tied their boats and did not come back.
Communities along the Mississippi River built memorials in the years after 1940. La Crosse established a warning system using train whistles and church bells, to be activated in future emergencies when people might be on the water. The practical lesson was simple. People on open water in November had to be warned faster than a twice-daily bulletin allowed.
In 2015, the state of Michigan installed a historical marker in Ludington, near the coast where the Davock, Minch, and Novadoc went down. It acknowledges the 59 sailors lost on Lake Michigan as the largest single component of the storm's death toll.
The duck hunters are harder to memorialize. They were spread across hundreds of miles of river and marsh. Many were young men in their teens and twenties. Some were veterans who had survived the first world war and found themselves caught by weather on a holiday named for its end. Their deaths received front-page coverage in Minneapolis and St. Paul for a week, then receded as the war in Europe pressed closer.
What remains is the facts of the storm itself. The temperature at 52 degrees in the morning. The temperature at 6 degrees by dawn the next day. The three freighters under 200 feet of cold water off Pentwater. The ducks that were flying so thick that morning that men couldn't count them. The cedar decoys that Oscar Gerth fed into his fire, one at a time, through a night that lasted twenty hours.
What the Record Shows
The Armistice Day Blizzard killed approximately 154 people across six states and two Great Lakes, over 36 hours. Duck hunters made up roughly half the deaths in Minnesota. The three Lake Michigan freighters accounted for 59 of the total. The Weather Bureau had issued no warning adequate to the storm's severity.
The storm's meteorological signature was not, in retrospect, impossible to detect. A low-pressure system deepening at one to two millibars per hour over 24 hours is a significant event by any measure. The problem was that the observation and forecasting infrastructure of 1940 was not designed to catch it in time. Data was collected twice a day. No one was watching through the night. By the time the Chicago office could issue an updated forecast, men were already dying on the river.
The reforms that followed were real. Weather forecasting in the Upper Midwest improved substantially in the years after 1940. The 24-hour staffing model that became standard across the National Weather Service has its direct roots in the institutional failure of November 11, 1940.
That does not make the deaths easier to account for. The hunters on the Mississippi River islands that Monday morning had done what hundreds of thousands of Midwesterners did on Armistice Day: they went outside. The day was warm. The ducks were flying. The forecast said a few flurries. There was no reason not to go.