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MARK STEIL: There is something majestic about a winter storm with its power to transform familiar landscapes. The armistice blizzard changed not only landscapes, but lives. It was an event which endures a moment frozen forever in memory.

WENDELIN BECKERS: It was 1940, November 11. Man, that just doesn't seem like 60 years ago. My god, where does the time go?

MARK STEIL: The fall of 1940 was a warm one. The war in Europe was front page news. In Minnesota, the Gophers football team was number one in the nation again. With gardens still producing vegetables well into October, winter seemed far away. By midday November 11, some areas of southeast Minnesota topped 60 degrees. But a huge storm was just to the west.

PAUL DOUGLAS: It was a classic blizzard.

MARK STEIL: WCCO meteorologist Paul Douglas has been talking about and studying the Armistice Day storm for years.

PAUL DOUGLAS: It hit the Pacific Northwest with near-hurricane force gusts. And usually, storms weaken somewhat as they cross the Rockies. But this storm did not weaken. In fact, as it tapped moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and cold air lurking just north over Canada, the two combined into an explosive pattern. And the storm system really became what meteorologists call a bomb.

MARK STEIL: By early afternoon on November 11, Sunny Ehlers and his hunting partner, Norman Roloff, were on the Mississippi River near Winona, ready to hunt ducks. Roloff says they got in a small boat to cross a slough.

NORMAN ROLOFF: I recall it being quite warm. It is so warm, when I rowed the skiff across, I took my hunting jacket off because it was actually that warm.

MARK STEIL: But the warmth didn't last long. Skies darkened. Winds picked up and sprinkles of rain fell-- perfect hunting weather. Thousands of ducks funneled into the Mississippi River Valley. But in their excitement, Roloff and the other hunters missed a clue.

NORMAN ROLOFF: Apparently, the weather pattern had moved ducks from various parts of the state. They were looking for shelter in view of what they apparently knew that was happening, more so than us who didn't at the time.

MARK STEIL: His partner, Sonny Ehlers, says shotguns echoed everywhere.

SUNNY EHLERS: There was just a lot of birds moving. Ducks-- there was ducks all over. It was a fantastic, fantastic day.

MARK STEIL: 30 miles downstream, Dick and James Bice, brothers from LaCrosse, look forward to a short school day. James decided the warm weather signaled a bluebird day, too nice to hunt ducks. He stayed home. However, brother Dick left with a friend for the river. What began as a short sleeve day turned bad quickly.

DICK BICE: That wind came up so darn fast, all of a sudden. But boy, we thought, gee, this is twice as good because it's going to be-- ducks will be blowing around all over, which they were.

MARK STEIL: Bice faced the storm alone. His partner took their boat to retrieve some ducks, but was swept helplessly to a nearby island. As the storm grew more intense over the Mississippi River, the blizzard brought death to central Minnesota.

JAMES BICE: We were playing cards, and all at once, we heard a bang, like a thunderbolt that was close by. And the ground just trembled.

MARK STEIL: 20-year-old Wendelin Beckers was on duty at the Mobil station in Watkins. He half-stumbled, half-crawled through the storm to see what happened.

WENDELIN BECKERS: I felt my way. I knew the area so good that I followed the side tracks up to the depot. And when I got there, I saw the awful truth. My god, two of those iron horses, like they had years ago-- those steam engines-- were smashed right head on together.

MARK STEIL: A passenger train loaded with duck hunters and a freight train collided in front of the Watkins Depot. Unable to see in the whiteout, the passenger trains crew missed a trackside signal. An engineer and fireman were killed. Watkins residents formed a human chain to lead the passengers to safety, while an eerie cry mingled with the roar of the storm.

WENDELIN BECKERS: One of the whistles in one of the engines got jammed, and it let out the most mournful tone. And all day and part into the night, like it was crying over the accident that happened.

MARK STEIL: Meteorologist Paul Douglas says as daylight ended, duck hunters all over the Midwest knew they were in serious trouble.

PAUL DOUGLAS: It tracked from about Des Moines to Eau Claire. The central pressure was down around 29 inches of mercury, and it just doesn't get much stronger than that. It allowed moisture from the south to interact with this fresh Canadian air mass to the north. And those two converged to produce this incredible intensification to the point where you really did have what you could call an inland hurricane.

MARK STEIL: In the Mississippi River Valley, near Winona, the end of the day crystallized the crisis. The hunters' low-slung duck boats were no match for 70 mile an hour winds and 5-foot waves. Hunters abandoned cherished guns as they search for a way out of the Valley. Norman Roloff's 19-year-old eyes took it all in.

NORMAN ROLOFF: There was panic, certainly, among a number of them, and almost to the point where one man was almost crying because he saw this body of water, which was getting worse condition by the hour.

MARK STEIL: Sunny Ehlers knew they had to act fast.

SUNNY EHLERS: We thought death was on our way. The snow and the wind was blowing so bad, and it was getting so cold, and we didn't have enough clothes on. We just had our regular old hunting coat. And they were starting to soak up, and we were starting to get cold. And I said, Norm, we've got to make it. There's no alternative, or we're going to be dead.

MARK STEIL: A backwater slough blocked their path home. They found a tree protected portion of the water, but Norman Roloff remembers it was still a treacherous crossing.

NORMAN ROLOFF: The waves were pretty substantial, probably about 2.5-feet high, maybe 3 at places. We started paddling-- not rowing, but paddling across, and it took us a substantial amount of time to get over. And by the time we got over, the boat was at least half full of water because of the waves.

MARK STEIL: They survived, where others drowned or froze to death. With their soaked clothes freezing on their backs, they made it to a nearby town. About the time Ehlers and Roloff made it to safety, a young pianist began a concert at the College of St. Teresa in Winona. The world would come to know him by his last name, but on this stormy night, he was still Walter Liberace from Milwaukee. Published reports say the roar of the wind almost drowned out his music. But when Liberace surrendered to the storm and began to leave the stage, the audience urged him to continue. As an ode to the blizzard, he ended the concert with a piece called "The Night Winds."

[LIBERACE, "THE NIGHT WINDS"]

It may have been then that Dick Bice was getting cold. Trapped on a small island in the Mississippi near LaCrosse, he knew he had to move to keep warm and stay alive.

DICK BICE: The wind kept getting stronger and stronger and stronger. I'd call it kind of vicious, and I just kind of fell into the routine. I knew I had to do something. And so I'd just run around the circle for maybe 15 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever and try and keep warm. And I never reached the point where I thought, well, I'll never make it alive.

MARK STEIL: While Bice ran, his father, brother, and friends tried to rescue him, but their small boat was no match for the hurricane winds. Before abandoning their search, they saw a fire and two figures on a nearby island. Certain this was Dick Bice and his companion, the rescue party waited out the night in their cars.

On Tuesday, November 12, the winds of hell brought a deadly reckoning. The Armistice Day storm cut 1,000-mile wide path through the middle of the country. On Lake Michigan, three freighters and two smaller boats sank. 66 sailors died. In Minnesota, 27 inches of snow fell at Collegeville. The Twin Cities recorded 16 inches. 20-foot drifts, forced searchers to use long probes to find missing cars. Passenger trains were snowbound, and along the Mississippi River, the first bodies of duck hunters were brought in.

NORMAN ROLOFF: And the City of Winona, as I remember, turned their city garage into a makeshift morgue and were bringing in those that were frozen. And they thawed them out there and later for identification.

MARK STEIL: Norman Roloff remembers when stories of how people died began circulating. He realized just how lucky he'd been.

NORMAN ROLOFF: I recall one man that they found-- he was frozen upright in the water. And, for some reason, he had held on to a branch. And the rescuers just cut the branch on either side of his hand, and so he was brought in that condition, branch still in his hand.

MARK STEIL: One young man survived because his hunting dogs kept him warm. Some bodies were bruised as hunters hit themselves in a desperate effort to stay warm. On the shores of the Mississippi River that morning near LaCrosse, the Bice family got ready for a happy reunion. There was activity on the island where a fire had burned through the night. Two hunters began walking across the now-frozen water, pulling a boat. But when they arrived, James Bice was shocked to find out it was not his brother and his friend.

JAMES BICE: Yeah, I've told a lot of people, it was one of the worst moments of my life. We thought we'd lost them.

MARK STEIL: But on a tiny island not far away, a well-worn footpath circled a scrubby tree. Dick Bice had run all night to stay alive.

DICK BICE: I never thought I was very smart, but I was actually doing pretty well by myself. Then, on that small island, I'd just keep running in circles.

MARK STEIL: Later that day, Dick's father and a friend managed to reach him by walking over the thin ice. His hunting partner was also found alive on a nearby island. In St. Paul, state officials were scrambling to meet the emergency. Workers mobilized to help stranded motorists and plow lanes through rock-hard drifts. Farmers were hard hit. 1 million Thanksgiving turkeys died.

In the days and weeks after the storm, the US Weather Bureau responded to criticism that it failed to predict the blizzard. Officials said they knew a storm was coming, but missed its strength and scope. But the most embarrassing revelation was that no one was watching the storm's explosive development in the predawn hours of November 11. A retired government forecaster says the Midwest headquarters in Chicago was not staffed overnight. The uproar led to several changes. The Chicago office went to around the clock operation, and the Twin Cities branch was upgraded so it could issue forecasts. Meteorologist Paul Douglas says the armistice storm still resonates today.

PAUL DOUGLAS: Meteorologists shudder when the Armistice Day blizzard subject comes up. I think technology has helped, but certainly, there can still be scenarios where we are surprised, where we are caught. And that's why this can be such a humbling profession.

WENDELIN BECKERS: I'm 80 years old now, and this is the first storm I've ever witnessed in this area. Never saw one like that again, and I hope I never do. My god.

MARK STEIL: Time is taking its toll on people like Wendelin Beckers, who survived the armistice blizzard. As the Armistice generation fades, so does the power of their story, the strength of their Warning. Their words still carry a healthy dose of fear and wonder, something which could come in handy if the winds of hell return. Mark Steil, Minnesota Public Radio.