On the evening of September 20, 1938, there were news reports from Europe that Hitler was preparing to invade Czechoslovakia (The Czech Republic and Slovakia on today's maps). WWII's European theater was opened by the German invasion of Poland 19 days earlier. Poland would fall in roughly 2 weeks.
My mother was living in West Haven, CT at that time. She was 17 when the eye wall went over her parent's house the next day, September 21, 1938, providing a temporary reprieve before the storm surge flooded the residence.and
Because it occured on September 21st, the autumnal equinox, the tide was already six feet higher than normal, a phenomenon known as neap tide. The storm struck at high tide. There were no satellites in those days for early detection.
The hurricane brushed the east coast of Florida and North Carolina and was presumed to have gone out east, harmlessly into the Atlantic. There hadn't been a hurricane which struck Long Island in over a generation at that time. People had built their houses on the sand expecting they would always be safe.
Entire streets were wiped off the map and the people in the houses along with them. Death estimates vary between 500-800. My mother would talk about the sheer devastation around the area. The hurricane landed on Suffolk County, Long Island with winds of 121mph, or a category 3 storm today. The New York Times forecast was "Cloudy with Rain, high around 60," no mention whatsoever of an impending disaster.
If West Haven, New Haven, and Milford weren't bad enough, parts east like Mystic, New London, and Providence took an even greater hit. A 20 foot storm surge rolled right into downtown Providence, RI in the light of day.
My father was born and raised in West Haven, but he was safely tucked away in Durham, NC at Duke University where he was an electrical engineering student. His parent's house was also devastated by the storm. Property damage estimates of the same storm moving through the same area today exceed $40,000,000,000.
Thankfully, insurance companies actually paid for damage in those days without wailing and gnashing of teeth, so my grandparents were able to rebuild.
Today, we are fortunate to have an array of forecasting and weather technologies at our disposal to warn, forecast, and track major hurricanes. We can only heed the warnings we are provided. Ignorance is not bliss.