the financial crisis began to extend to larger developers. The Miami Hurricane of 1926, with the highest sustained winds ever recorded in the state of Florida, was the final blow. Fort Lauderdale suffered extensive damage from the hurricane, which killed 50 people and destroyed an estimated 3500 structures in the city. In February 1928, Port Everglades was opened. The city had just begun to recover from the 1926 hurricane when another devastating hurricane struck, this time to the north, in Palm Beach County. The 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane only slightly damaged Fort Lauderdale, but the enormous death toll contributed to the perception that Florida was not the paradise that had been promoted by developers. When the Great Depression struck in 1929, it had little effect on the city, which was already in a depression from the real estate bubble burst three years earlier. While the collapse of the land boom and the depression had reversed the sharp growth of 1925, the population of the city began to grow at a moderate pace. In 1930, there were 8666 people in the city. That number had risen to 17,996 by 1940. The United States did not enter World War II until 1941, but Fort Lauderdale felt the effect of the war sooner than most of the rest of the country. In December 1939, a British cruiser chased the German freighter Arauca into Port Everglades, where she remained until the US seized her in 1941, when Germany declared war on the US. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States' subsequent entry into the war had almost immediate effects on the city. Blackouts were imposed, and several allied vessels were torpedoed by German U-boats, including at least one ship within sight of the shoreline. The first Medal of Honor recipient in World War II was a graduate of Fort Lauderdale High School; Second Lieutenant Alexander R. Nininger Jr. was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor on 29 January 1942 for his actions on 12 January 1942 in Abucay, Bataan, Philippines, during the Japanese invasion. By mid-1942, the United States Navy had converted Merle Fogg Field into Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale, and had constructed two satellite landing fields, one at West Prospect Field, and the other in Pompano Beach (which later became Pompano Beach Airpark, home of one of the Goodyear Blimps). By the end of the war, the station had trained