The Hurricane Hunters (2024)

Copyright, © 1955 by Ivan Ray Tannehill
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher

Published November, 1955
Second Printing, February, 1956

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 55-9480

Printed in the United States of America
by The Cornwall Press, Inc., Cornwall, N. Y.

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To my daughter and son-in-law,
Doris and Bill

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Acknowledgment

At appropriate places in the book the narrative serves as anacknowledgment by giving the names of a large number ofmen who furnished information in personal interviews, bycorrespondence, or in their reports which were included inthe voluminous files searched in the last year.

In writing this book I had unstinted cooperation fromthe Air Weather Service and its Commander, Brigadier GeneralThomas Moorman, from the Aerological Branch of theNavy Department and its Head, Captain C. J. S. McKillip,and from the Chief of the Weather Bureau, Dr. F. W. Reichelderfer,and his associates in the field and the central office.In particular, Major William C. Anderson and associates inthe Office of Information Services of the Air Weather Serviceand Captain Robert O. Minter of the Fleet WeatherCentral at Miami and his associates there in Airborne EarlyWarning Squadron Four at Jacksonville were extremelyhelpful. Of the associates of these men I wish to mentionespecially the assistance of Lieutenant Commander R. W.Westover and Air Force Captain Ed Vrable, both of whomare seasoned hurricane hunters.

Others not mentioned in the book who contributed to theviiiwarning service and indirectly to the material used herewere Isaac M. Cline and Charles L. Mitchell of the WeatherBureau. Their writings supply much of the background forany work on tropical storms.

The Air Force, Navy and Weather Bureau kindly suppliedofficial photographs used here, except the wave breaking onthe sea wall by the Miami Daily News and the drawings ofsailing ships in hurricanes which are credited to ColonelWilliam Reid who published them in 1850 in his book on the“Law of Storms.”The Author

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CONTENTS

1. Monsters of the World of Storms 1

2. The Saddler’s Apprentice 19

3. At the Bottom of the Sea 32

4. Storm Warnings 45

5. Radio Helps—Then Hinders 59

6. The Eye of the Hurricane 75

7. First Flight into the Vortex! 90

8. The Hammer and the Highway 103

9. Wings against the Whirling Blasts 117

10. Kappler’s Hurricane 132

11. Tricks of the Trade 150

12. Trailing the Terrible Typhoon 167

13. Guest on a Hairy Hop 185

14. The Unexpected 202

15. Fighting Hail and Hurricanes 224

16. Carol, Edna, Hazel or Saxby! 237

17. The Gears and Guts of the Giant 250

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ILLUSTRATIONS

(Photographic supplement follows page 50)

The English warship Egmont in the “Great Hurricane” of 1780.

The Calypso in the big Atlantic hurricane of 1837.

A tremendous wave breaks against the distant seawall on Florida coast at the height of a hurricane.

Typhoon buckles the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Bennington and drapes it over the bow.

Winds of hurricane drive pine board through the tough trunk of a palm tree in Puerto Rico, September 13, 1928.

Looking down from plane at the surface of the sea with winds of 15 knots.

Sea surface with winds of 40 knots.

Sea surface with winds of 75 knots.

Sea surface with winds of 120 knots.

Superfortress B-29 used by Air Force for hurricane hunting.

Neptune P2V-3W used by Navy for hurricane hunting.

Navy crew of hurricane hunters.

Air Force crew being briefed by weather officer before flight into hurricane.

Conditions at birth of Caribbean Charlie in 1951.

Part of a spiral squall band, an “arm of the octopus.”

Through Plexiglas nose, weather officer sees white caps on sea 1,500 feet below.

Navy aerologist at his station in nose of aircraft on hurricane mission.

Radar operator and navigator.

Maintenance crew goes to work on B-29 after return from hurricane mission.

City docks at Miami after passage of Kappler’s Hurricane in September, 1945.

Positions of crew members in B-29 on hurricane mission.

Part of scope showing typhoon by radar.

Looking down into the eye of Hurricane Edna on September 7, 1954.

Looking down at the central region of Typhoon Marge in 1951.

Weather officer in nose of aircraft talking to pilot and radar operator.

The engineer in a B-29 on hurricane reconnaissance.

The two scanners ready to signal engine trouble the instant it shows up.

The new plane (B-50) to be used by the Air Force for hurricane reconnaissance.

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THE HURRICANE HUNTERS

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1. MONSTERS OF THE WORLD OF STORMS

A stiff breeze, now and then with a hard gust, swept rainacross the Navy airfield. The place was gloomy and deserted,except for one Privateer standing behind the air station, allother planes having been evacuated the night before. A tallyoung airman came out of a building down at the other sideof the field. He looked nervously at the blackening morningsky as another squall came by, hurried over to the plane andstood between it and the protecting station. In a few minutes,eight men followed him. They climbed aboard the craft.The tall airman was last, taking a final look at the sky overhis shoulder as he crawled in. The roots of his hair feltelectrified, his spine tingled and his knees turned to rubber.In a few moments the plane took off into the darkening sky.

In those anxious moments as he had glanced upward atthe wind-torn clouds with driving rain in his face, many2thoughts passed through his mind. In training for this job hehad read about aircraft carriers having their flight decks tornup by typhoons, about battered destroyers sunk by hurricanes,big freight ships tossed out on dry land, upper storiesof brick buildings sliced off, timbers driven endways throughthe tough trunks of palm trees. The idea of sending a planeinto one of these monsters seemed fantastic. He could imaginethe wings being torn off and see vividly in his mind thebroken craft rocketing downward into the foam of gale-sweptwaters far below. He leaned over on the radio table andmuttered a prayer, hoping that God could hear him abovethe tumult of winds, seas and engines. To most of the menthis was “old stuff.” Flying into hurricanes had been goingon for two years. To him it was a strange adventure.

He was the radio man and this was to be his first flightinto a hurricane. And it would be no practice ride. This wasa bad storm, getting too close to the coast to suit him. He hadbeen told that after nightfall its center would strike inlandand there would be widespread damage and some loss of life.He tried to remember other things they had told him in thebriefing session and some of the instructions he had beenreading for three days now. Well, such is life, he thought.His father had been the master of an oil tanker for the lastfifteen years. He had told his growing son a lot about thesebig storms of the Caribbean. What would his father say nowwhen he learned that his son was one of the men assigned tothe job of flying into them? His thoughts were interrupted byviolent agitation of the plane and the roar of the wind. Thenavigator said something about the turbulence.

He remembered asking one of the men what it would belike in the hurricane, and the fellow laughed and said, “Likegoing over Niagara Falls in a telephone booth.” He recalledthe burly fellow who pointed to the map and told themwhere the center of the hurricane was located and how to3get to it. In answer to his last question, one of the men hadtold him that all he had to do was hold on for dear life withboth hands until the weather officer handed him a messagefor the forecast office and then he should send it as quicklyas possible, without being thrown on his ear. Now the planewas bumping along in the overcast and the rain had becometorrential. The wind was on the port quarter and water wascoming through the nose and flooding the crawlway. It waspouring on him from above somewhere. Rivers were runningdown his back.

He asked the weather officer what he thought about it, andhe replied, “Oh, this is the usual thing. Sometimes it gets agood deal worse.” Well, he thought it was getting a lot worse.Maybe the pilot and co-pilot could see but he could see nothingoutside the plane. He hit his head on something, a hardcrack, and he started to feel sick. Finally, he put his headdown on the edge of the table and began to lose his breakfast.

Up and down the coast the Air Force bases were deserted.All planes but one had been flown inland and the last one, aB-17, was poised on Morrison Field for the final hop into thebig winds, to return before nightfall.

In Miami, one of the senior men in the Weather Bureauoffice was called to the telephone. Somebody insisted on talkingto him and nobody else. It was long distance. A womansaid in a frightened voice that her son had gone out to lookafter a neighbor’s boat and she wanted to know whether sheshould try to go out to find him and bring him in. He wasonly twelve years old. “Yes, by all means,” was the answer.The forecaster didn’t know how she was going to reach theboy or how far she had to go, but he recalled that other menand boys had lost their lives doing the same thing. They werehaving hundreds of calls and they were unable to go intodetails. He paused just a moment, his mind running regretfully4over this poor woman and her problem. Then he starteda radio broadcast.

Down the street, a merchant was pacing up and down onthe sidewalk, bossing three men who were nailing framesover his plate glass windows. He went into the store to histelephone and, after dialing for about ten minutes, finallygot the forecaster on the line. “What’s the latest on thestorm?” he asked in a strained voice. “Nothing new,” camethe tired voice of the forecaster. “A Navy plane went outhalf an hour ago. We’ll have a report pretty soon now. Butthe hurricane’s going to hit us, that’s sure. Be a bad night.”

Three miles south of the city, two fishermen stood lookingat a pole on the pier. Two red flags with black centers wereflapping in the wind. “Aw, nuts,” growled the big man.“Guess I’ll go home and nail up the windows again. This isthe third time this year.” The little man started off, pullinghis raincoat up around his ears as a squall came over. “Well,we can’t complain, I guess. The other times the flags wentup we got storms, didn’t we? Looks like this will be the worstof the lot.” By that time the big fellow was running in a dog-trotand disappearing around a building. His father had beendrowned in the big storm at Key West in 1919.

Even on the other side of the State the people wereworried, and for good reason, for it might be over theretomorrow. The forecaster was wanted again on the telephone.A man said in an anxious tone that he had one thousandfive hundred unfenced cattle near the shore and whatshould he do? Without hesitation, the forecaster said, “Getthem away from the water and behind a fence. This stormwill go south of you. There will be strong offshore gales andthe cattle will walk with the wind and go right out into thewater and drown if there is no fence.”

Out in the Atlantic, a merchant ship was wallowing in5heavy seas, with one hundred miles an hour winds rakingher decks. The third mate struggled through the wind andsea and into the radio room. He handed a wet weather messageto the radio operator. A hundred miles away, in theBahamas, an old Negro was reading his weather instrumentsand looking at the sky. He was pushed around byfurious winds but they had died down a little since earlymorning. The roof was off his house. Trees were uprootedall around him. He went into a small, low-slung radio hutand attempted to send a weather message to Nassau. He wasbadly crowded in the hut. His wife, daughter and two grandchildrenwere huddled in the corners. His son-in-law hadbeen killed in the night by a big tree that fell on the porch.His daughter and her two children were sobbing. He raisedthe Nassau radio station and sent a message for the forecastoffice in Miami.

All up and down the Florida coast, many thousands hadheard the radio warnings or had seen the flags flying andwanted to know more. The highways here and there werefilling with people, leaving threatened places on the coast.By night the roads would be jammed. Out on the Privateer,the tall young radioman, sopping wet, raised himself in hischair, and took a soggy message from the weather officer.After the plane settled a little, he put on his head phonesand listened to the loud, almost deafening static. He still felta bit sick. But he began to pound out the weather message,with the hope that somebody would get it and pass it on tothe forecaster.

In these and other ways, it has come about that a pair ofred flags with black centers strikes fear into the hearts ofseafaring men and terrifies people in towns and cities in theline of advance of the big winds. The warning brings totheir minds raging seas and screaming gales, relatives and6friends lost in other great storms that have roared out of thetropics, ships going down and buildings being torn apart.

Ahead of the storm, the sea becomes angry. Huge rollersbreak on the beaches with a booming sound. In the distance,a long, low, angry cloud appears on the horizon. If the cloudgrows and puts out scud and squalls, spitting rain, the warningflags flutter in the gusts and the big winds will strike thecoast with terrible destruction. If the distant cloud is seen tomove along the horizon, the tumult of wind and sea on thebeaches will subside. The local indications in the sky andthe water tell a vital story to the initiated but the warningthey give does not come soon enough. It is necessary toknow what is going to happen while the hurricane is wellout at sea. This depends on the hurricane hunters, and sothe messages they send ashore while fighting their way byair into the vortices of these terrible whirlwinds are awaitedanxiously by countless people.

Tracking and predicting hurricanes is an exciting job,often a dangerous one. But it is not a one-man job; it requiresthe co-operation of many people. A tropical storm of hurricaneforce covers such a vast area that all of it cannot beseen by one person. Its products—gales with clouds and rain—andits effects—destruction of life and property and bigwaves on the sea—are visible to people in different parts ofthe disturbance. But before we know much about it, the littlethat is seen by each of many people on islands and ships atsea must be put together, like clues in a murder case. Theweather observers who get the clues and the experts whoput them together are the hurricane hunters.

For at least five hundred years it has been known thatthese terrible disturbances are born in the heated parts ofthe oceans. Down near the equator, where hot, moist windsare the rule, something causes vast storms to form and growin violence, bringing turmoil to the ordinary daily round of7gentle breezes and showers. They have come to bear thegeneral name of tropical storms, though known locally ashurricanes, typhoons, or cyclones.

Most of them occur in the late summer or early fall. Atthat season, on the islands in the tropics where the natives inother centuries took life easy, depending on nature’s lavishgifts of fruit and other foods, the tropical storm came as anoccasional catastrophe. Trees went down in howling gales,rain came in torrents, flooding the hilly sections, big wavesdeluged the coasts, and frail native houses were swept awayin an uproar of the elements. The survivors thought they haddone something to displease one of the mythical beings whoruled the winds and the waters. In the Caribbean region, itwas supposed to be the god of the big winds, Hunrakan,from which the name hurricane originated. His evil faceseemed to leer from the darkening clouds as the elementsraged.

In time, Europeans settled in the islands and on the southeasterncoasts of America. They dreaded the approach of latesummer, when copper-colored clouds of a tropical stormmight push slowly upward from the southeastern horizon.What they learned about them came mostly from the natives,who had long memories for such frightening thingsand reckoned the time of other events from the years ofgreat hurricanes. Strangely enough, although during themore than four hundred years that have passed since then,man has finally mastered thermo-nuclear reactions capableof permanent destruction of whole islands, he still probesfor the secret of storm forces of far greater power.

It is hard to say who was the first hunter of storms. Columbusand his sailors were constantly on the lookout and actuallysaw several West Indian hurricanes. Luckily, they didn’trun into one on their first voyage, or the story of the discoveryof America would be quite different, for the ships8sailed by Columbus were not able to stand up against thesebig winds of the tropics. They would have been sunk in deepwater or cast ashore as worthless wrecks.

If Columbus had been lost in one of these monstrousstorms—and he didn’t miss it by very much—it might havebeen many years before another navigator with a stout heartcould have induced men to risk their lives in the unchartedwinds of the far places in the Atlantic Ocean. Out theretoward the end of the world, where increasing gales draggedships relentlessly in the direction of the setting sun, sailorswho ventured too far would drop off the edge of a flat earthand plunge screaming into eternity—so they thought. Onlyin Columbus’ mind was the earth a sphere.

By the time Columbus had made his third voyage to theWest Indies, he had learned a good deal about hurricanesand how to keep out of them. He got this information by hisown wits and from talking with the natives in the islandsbordering the Caribbean. They told him of storms muchmore powerful than any that were brewed in Europeanwaters. After listening to their tales, he was afraid of them.In 1494 he hid his fleet behind an island while a hurricaneroared by. The next year, an unexpected one sank three ofhis vessels and the others took such a beating that he declared,“Nothing but the service of God and the extension ofthe monarchy would induce me to expose myself to suchdangers.”

In 1499, a Spaniard named Francisco Bobadilla was appointedgovernor and judge of the Colony on Hispaniola(Santo Domingo). He sent false charges back to Spain, accusingColumbus of being unjust and often brutal in his treatmentof the natives. Columbus was ordered back to Spain inchains. Here he remained in disgrace until December, 1500.By that time the true nature of Bobadilla’s treachery had becomeknown.

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By the spring of 1502, Columbus had been vindicated andwas on his way back to the West Indies with four ships and150 men. During his earlier voyages he had become deeplyrespectful of these big winds of the New World. When hearrived at San Domingo on this last voyage, his observationsmade him suspect the approach of a hurricane. At the sametime, a fleet carrying rich cargoes was instructed to takeBobadilla back to Spain. It was ready to depart. Columbusasked for permission to shelter his squadron in the river andhe sent a message, urging the fleet to put off its departureuntil the storm had passed.

Bluntly, both of Columbus’ requests were denied. Hefound a safe place in the lee of the island but the fleet carryingBobadilla departed in the face of the hurricane and allbut one vessel went to the bottom. Bobadilla went downwith them, which seemed to be a fitting end for the scoundrelwho had been guilty of hatching up false chargesagainst Columbus.

After the time of Columbus, better ships were built andthe fear of storms diminished. Seafaring men today are likelyto get the idea that modern ships of war and trade are immuneto hurricanes. They have a brush or two with minorstorms or escape the worst of a larger one and cease to beafraid of the big winds of the West Indies. Now and thenthis attitude leads to disaster.

In September, 1944, the Weather Bureau spotted a violentstorm in the Atlantic, northeast of Puerto Rico. It grew infury and moved toward the Atlantic Coast of the UnitedStates. The forecasters called it the “Great Atlantic Hurricane.”Being usually conservative, Weather Bureau forecastersseldom use the word “great” when warning of hurricanesand when they do, it is time for everybody to be on guard.In this case, the casualties at sea included one destroyer, twoCoast Guard cutters, a light vessel and a mine sweeper. This10should have been sufficient evidence of the power of thetropical storm to destroy modern warships, but just threemonths later a big typhoon caught the Navy off guard in thePacific and proved the case beyond the slightest doubt.

Typhoons are big tropical storms, just like West Indianhurricanes. They form in the vast tropical waters of thePacific, develop tremendous power, and head for the Philippinesand China, sometimes going straight forward andsometimes turning toward Japan before they reach the coast.Like hurricanes, they are often preceded by beautifulweather, allaying the suspicions of the inexperienced untilit is too late to escape from the indraft of the winds and themountainous seas that precede their centers.

It was hard to keep track of typhoons in World War II.In large areas of the Pacific there are few islands to serve asobservation posts for weathermen. Before the war, merchantmenon voyages through this region had reported by radiowhen they saw signs of typhoons. But many of the weather-reportingvessels had been sent to the bottom by enemytorpedoes and the remainder had been ordered to silencetheir radios. Thereafter, the only effective means of findingand tracking tropical storms was by aircraft, but reconnaissanceby air had just begun in the Atlantic and was notorganized in the Pacific until 1945.

Late in 1944, our Third Fleet, said to be the most powerfulsea force ever assembled, had drawn back from the battle ofLeyte to refuel. The Japanese Navy had received a fatalblow from the big fleet. Nothing more terrible was reservedfor the Japanese except the atom bomb. Far out in the Pacific,a typhoon was brewing while valiant oil tankers waitedfive hundred miles east of Luzon for the refueling operationso vitally needed by our warships after days of ranging theseas against the Japs.

It was December 17 when the refueling began. By that11time, the winds and seas in the front of the typhoon werebeing felt in force. Battleships, cruisers, destroyers and a hostof other vessels rode big waves as the wind increased. Thetyphoon drew nearer and the smaller ships were bouncedaround so violently that it became impossible to maintainhose connections to the oilers. Before nightfall, the refuelinghad stopped completely and the fleet was trying to run awayfrom the typhoon.

It was almost a panic, if we can use the word to describethe desperate movements of a great battle fleet. Messagesflew back and forth, changing the ships’ courses as the windchanged. They ran toward the northwest, then toward thesouthwest, and finally due south, in a last effort to escapethe central fury of the great typhoon. But all this did nogood.

The lighter vessels, escort carriers, destroyers, and such,top-heavy with armament and equipment and with little oilfor ballast, began the struggle for life. Each hour it seemedthat the height of the storm had come, but it grew steadilyworse. Writhing slopes of vast waves dipped into canyon-likedepths. The crests were like mountains. The wind camein awful gusts, estimated at more than 150 miles an hour.The tops of the waves were torn off and hurled with theforce of stone. Ships were buried under hundreds of tons ofwater and emerged again, shuddering and rolling wildly.

On the eighteenth of December, one after another of theships of the Third Fleet lost control and wallowed in thetyphoon. Time and again thousands of men faced death andescaped by something that seemed a miracle. There was nolonger any visible separation between the sea and the atmosphere.Only by the force with which the elements struckcould the men aboard distinguish between wind-drivenspume and hurtling water. Steering control was lost; electricpower and lights failed; lifeboats were torn loose; stacks12were ripped off; planes were hurled overboard; three destroyersrolled too far over and went to the bottom of thePacific.

Altogether, nearly 150 planes were destroyed on deck orblown into the sea and lost. Cruisers and carriers sufferedbadly. Battleships lost planes and gear. The surviving destroyershad been battered into helplessness. Almost eighthundred men were dead or missing. As the typhoon subsided,the crippled Third Fleet canceled its plans to strikeagainst the enemy on Luzon and retreated to the nearestatoll harbor to survey its losses. More men had died andmore damage had been done than in many engagementswith the Japanese Navy.

A Navy Court of Inquiry was summoned. It was said thatthis typhoon of 1944 was the granddaddy of all tropicalstorms. But a study of the records shows that it was just afull-grown typhoon. There have been thousands of hurricanesand typhoons like this one. Down through the centuries,these terrible storms have swept in broad arcs acrosstropical waters, reaching out with great wind tentacles tograsp thousands of ships and send them to the bottom.Pounding across populous coasts, with mountainous seasflooding the land, they have drowned hundreds of thousandsof people, certainly more than a million in the last threecenturies, and untold thousands before that.

After the typhoon disaster, the Commander-in-Chief ofthe Pacific Fleet declared that his officers would have tolearn forthwith about the law of storms. Really there wasnothing new in that idea. It had been voiced by navigatorsof all maritime countries of the world from the earliest times.The so-called “law of storms” is merely the total existingknowledge about storms at sea—how to recognize the signsof their coming and how to avoid their destructive forces—and13it has taken four and a half centuries to develop ourpresent understanding of hurricanes.

This experience of the Third Fleet made it plain that asailing vessel had very little chance of survival in the centralregions of a fully developed tropical storm. The only hopewas that the master would see the signs of its coming andmanage to keep out of it. Once he became involved, theforce of the wind was likely to be so great that his vesselsoon would be reduced to an unmanageable hulk. The galesseemed to have unlimited power. Even today, we don’tknow accurately the speed of the strongest winds. It seemslikely that the highest velocities are between two hundredand two hundred and fifty miles per hour. Wind-measuringinstruments are disabled or carried away and the towers orbuildings which support them are blown down.

Long after the time of Columbus, it was generally believedthat a storm was a large mass of air moving straightahead at high velocities. A ship might be caught in theseterrible winds and be carried along with them, to be dashedon shore or torn apart and sent to the bottom. Every marinerwanted to know how to avoid these dangers but, strangelyenough, few wanted to avoid them altogether. If a sailingvessel circled around a storm, it took longer to get to the portof destination and how could the master explain the timelost to his bosses when he got home, if he had no record ofa storm in the log book to account for the delay?

From this point of view, some of the things that happenedseemed very strange. Two or three hundred years ago, itwas not uncommon for a sailing ship to be caught in a hurricaneand scud for hours or days under bare poles in highwinds and seas, and finally come to rest near the place whereit first encountered the storm. A sailor on board would imaginehe had traveled hundreds of miles and yet he might14survive the wreck of his ship and find himself tossed ashorenear the place where he started!

Up until about 1700 A.D., nobody could offer a reasonableexplanation of these curious happenings and most peoplebelieved they never would be accounted for. For example,it was often claimed that “the storm came back.” After blowingin one direction with awful force until great damage hadbeen done, it would suddenly turn around and blow in theopposite direction, perhaps harder than before, wreckingeverything that had not been destroyed in the first blow. Toadd to the mystery, many ships were never heard from again.They became involved in hurricanes and disappeared, leavingno trace of any kind.

Men might try to explain what had happened to the shipswhich were tossed on shore near the places where they hadstarted from, but there was a general feeling that these caseswere the exceptions to the law of storms and that the trueunderstanding of these fearful winds would come only withthe discovery of what happened to the great numbers ofships and men that were never seen again. And yet it isamazing to find how near some of these men came to theright answer. There were seafaring men in the seventeenthcentury who knew or suspected the truth but none of themhad both the knowledge and the ability to put it in writingin a convincing manner. They were the buccaneers whoseoperations were centered in the Caribbean Sea, mostly fromabout 1630 to 1690. They were English, Dutch, Portugueseand French, all at one time or another opposed to Spanishcontrol in the Carribbean. On various occasions they seizedone or another of the smaller islands and used it as a basefrom which to prey on Spanish shipping and settlements.

During these years, the islands were devastated by at leastthirty hurricanes of sufficient power to earn a place in history.Doubtless, there were many more not recorded. A great15number of vessels went down in the seas and harbors aroundSt. Kitts, Martinique and Jamaica, where the buccaneerssought haven from the Spaniards.

One of the most intelligent but least successful as a buccaneerwas William Dampier. He was born in England in1652, became an orphan at an early age and was put in thehands of the master of a ship in which he made a voyage toNewfoundland. Afterward, he sailed to the East Indies andthen fought in the Dutch War in 1673. The next year hewent to Jamaica and became a buccaneer. Soon he was familiarwith the harbors, bays, inlets and other features of theCarribbean coasts and islands. At times, he and other buccaneersranged as far as the South American coast, plundering,sacking and burning as they went. Eventually, theyraided the Mexican and Californian coasts and crossed thePacific to Guam, and then to the East Indies.

At intervals, Dampier wrote the accounts of his voyageswhich ultimately took him over most of the world. But hedied poor, just three years before he was due to share innearly a million dollars’ worth of prize money.

Being a genius at the observation of natural phenomenaand having the ability to put this in writing, Dampier distinguishedhimself from the other buccaneers by earning aplace in history as a writer of scientific facts in a clear andeasy style. In his writings, we find our earliest good first-handdescriptions of tropical storms that are really good.Among other things, he said of a typhoon in the China Seathat “typhoons are a sort of violent whirlwinds.” He saidthey were preceded by fine, clear and serene weather, withlight winds.

“Before these whirlwinds come on,” wrote Dampier, “thereappears a heavy cloud to the northeast which is very blacknear the horizon, but toward the upper part is a dull reddishcolor.” To him, this cloud was frightful and alarming. He16went on to say that it was sometimes seen twelve hours beforethe whirlwind struck. The tempest came with greatviolence but after a while the winds ceased all at once anda calm succeeded. This lasted an hour, more or less, then thegales were turned around, blowing with great fury from thesouthwest.

These stories by Dampier and others might have clearedup some of the mysteries of these furious storms, especiallythose that “turned around and came back.” They might haveexplained the fact that sailors were carried long distancesand then cast ashore near the places from which they started—forthey were huge whirlwinds, as Dampier suspected—butnobody seemed to be able to put “two and two together”and prove it. For one thing, no one knew then that weathermoves from place to place. Everybody seemed to have avague belief that the weather developed right at home andblew itself out without going anywhere. With these ideas invogue, the eighteenth century came to an end and there wasno useful law of storms. But we can put William Dampierdown as one of the first “hurricane hunters.”

As cities and towns on southern coasts and islands grewin population, storm catastrophes became more numerous.Now and then, a hurricane seemed to appear from nowhereand caused terrible destruction on land. New Orleans wasdevastated in 1722 and again in 1723. Charleston and othercoastal cities were hit repeatedly. Coringa, on the Bay ofBengal, was practically wiped out by a furious storm inDecember, 1789, and there was another disaster at the sameplace in 1839.

Tropical storms that form in the Bay of Bengal and strikethe populous coasts of India are known as cyclones. They arethe same kind of storms as West Indian hurricanes and thetyphoons of the Pacific. The worst feature is the overwhelming17flood of seawater that comes in big waves into the harborsas the center of the storm arrives. If there is insufficientwarning, thousands of the inhabitants are drowned.

Coringa is a coastal city of India which had a populationof about 20,000 in 1789. In December, there was a strongwind, “seeming like a cyclone.” The tide rose to an unusualheight and the wind increased to great fury from the northwest.The unfortunate inhabitants saw three huge wavescoming in from the sea while the wind was blowing with itsgreatest violence. The first wave brought several feet ofwater into the city. All the able-bodied ran for higher groundor climbed to the rooftops to keep from drowning. The secondwave flooded all the low parts of the city and the thirdoverwhelmed everything and carried the buildings away.All the inhabitants, except about twenty, disappeared.

In cases of this kind, a warning less than an hour in advancewould have saved the lives of thousands, but disasterslike this were repeated here and in other parts of the worlddozens of times before the hunters, trackers and forecastersof hurricanes learned to cheat these terrible storms of theirtoll of death and injury. Progress was slow in the nineteenthcentury, which saw some of the world’s worst storm disasters.In 1881, three hundred thousand people died in onetyphoon on the coast of China.

We now come to the stories of the men who tried to dosomething about it—the storm hunters. At first, early in thenineteenth century, the hunters were men engaged in someother work for a living. They put in their spare time gatheringinformation, getting reports from sailors who had survivedthese terrible storms at sea and from landsmen whohad seen them come roaring across harbors and beaches, tolay waste to the countryside. We go with some of themthrough these awful experiences. Then, after the middle ofthe century, first under Emperor Napoleon III of France and18later under President Grant in America and Queen Victoriain England, storm hunting became a government job andspread slowly around the world.

Here we see a bitter uphill battle. The hurricane provedto be an enormous whirlwind, hidden behind dense curtainsof low-flying clouds, tremendous rains, and the thick sprayof mountainous seas torn by earth-shaking forces of themonster. Its mysteries were challenging. Out of this work awarning system grew, and slowly the losses of life were reducedfrom thousands to hundreds, and then to dozens. Wego with the storm hunters into Congress and the WhiteHouse, to argue about it. Then we come to World War IIand the desperate need for information while submarinesattack shipping and hurricanes threaten airfields and navalbases.

And here we find stories of big four-engined bombers flyinginto the centers of these furious storms. In these storieswe go along. We see what the weather crews saw and learnwhat they learned. And we see how the hurricane warningservice works today—far better than a few years ago—butwith a part of the great mystery still unsolved. So we go withthe hunters in shaking, plunging planes, from the surface ofthe sea to the tops of the biggest hurricanes, looking for thefinal answers to this great puzzle of the centuries.

19

2. THE SADDLER’S APPRENTICE

“All violent gales or hurricanes are great whirlwinds.”—Redfield

In recent years, when men were first assigned to the alarmingduty of flying into hurricanes and they began to studythe old records, one question bothered them very much.Why did it take so long to prove without doubt that thesebig tropical storms are whirlwinds? The main reason, ofcourse, is the huge size of the wind circulation. The windsspiral in such a broad arc around the storm center that thereis no noticeable change in the wind direction within a distanceof many miles. It was like the curvature of the earth.Any circle around the full body of the earth is so enormousthat it seems to be a straight line, and men were deceivedfor centuries into believing that the earth is flat.

The crews of fast modern aircraft can fly through the mainpart of a hurricane in two or three hours, at most, and theycan immediately see changes of the wind as they go along.They have no reason to question it. In earlier times, therewas no means of travel fast enough to get the facts in thisway. Then, too, there was no means of sending messages20fast enough to show what the wind was doing at the sameinstant in different parts of the storm. Also, the entire windsystem was in motion and if the various reports were notsent at the same time, the results, when they were charted,failed to make sense. This fact alone was the cause of muchconfusion, even as late as the first part of the nineteenthcentury.

A definite answer to the whirlwind question came suddenlyand unexpectedly in a most peculiar manner.

In the autumn of 1821, a young saddler was walkingthrough the woods of central Connecticut with his inquiringmind on scientific matters of the day when he discovered astrange fact that led to the first “law of storms” and eventuallymade him the most illustrious of the hurricane hunters.His name was William Redfield. His ideas were first publishedin 1831 and, together with the work of a few men whofollowed on his trail, were the mainstay of sailors in stormyweather for nearly a hundred years.

Hurricanes were not only extremely dangerous to the sailingships of that day but were becoming more destructiveto the growing cities along the American coast. In the firstquarter of the century, the population of the countrydoubled. In 1800, there were five million people. In spiteof the War of 1812, which lasted for three years, and thetemporary drop it caused in immigration, the populationincreased rapidly, mostly on and near the Atlantic Coast.The United States began to take a place in the forefront ofthe world’s commerce. But now and then a great storm fromthe tropics swept the entire seaboard and took a grievoustoll of ships and men and harbor facilities.

Up to that time, no one had learned enough about stormsto give warnings in advance. There were no really usefulrules to guide seamen around or out of a tropical storm.Weather prediction was not accepted as scientific work.21Storm disasters were called “acts of God” and the ways ofthe atmosphere were thought to be beyond human understanding.

Occasionally, a mariner with an inquiring mind likeDampier came to the conclusion that tropical storms arehuge whirlwinds which move from place to place. But noneof these inquirers came up with any real proof. After 1800,the destruction from hurricanes grew steadily worse. Thesummer of 1815 was remarkable for furious storms all alongthe Atlantic Coast. Newspapers were filled with the detailsof storm disasters and the destruction of life and propertyon shore and at sea. The crowning catastrophe was causedby a furious West Indian hurricane which struck New Englandon September 23 of that year. In the violence of itswinds and the height of its tides, this storm was about equalto the New England hurricane of 1938. Although the countrywas far less populous in 1815, and the buildings, ships,and wharves subjected to its fury were much less numerousthan in 1938, the destruction was so great and the loss of lifeso heavy that the newspapers did not have space enough togive all the details of the marine disasters in this instance.

At Providence, there was terrible destruction. The tiderose more than seven feet above the highest stage previouslyrecorded. Five hundred buildings were destroyed; the lossof life was never fully determined, but it was excessive. Thesame sort of tragic story came from New Bedford and othertowns on the coast. Many buildings and a tremendous numberof trees were blown down in the interior.

The most treacherous feature of these big storms was theirresemblance in the initial stages to the ordinary “northeasters”which came at about the same time of year—late Augustor September—and blew fitfully for a day or two. Theybrought rain and high tides along the coast and finally diedout without much damage. Tropical storms, like the big one22in 1815, begin much the same way in New England, butsuddenly become violent. Then, as now, they blew gustilyfrom the northeast in the beginning but went around thecompass and ended with shattering on-shore gales whichdrove engulfing floods into the harbors. Everybody wascaught off guard.

This storm and another which came six years later in thesame region set men to thinking seriously about ways toavoid these disasters. The violent hurricane of 1821 crossedLong Island and New England, leaving a path of destructionwhich lay somewhat to the westward of the hurricane pathof 1815. Again enormous numbers of trees were blown down,this time mostly in Connecticut. And here is where we cometo the story of the saddler’s apprentice.

In September, 1802, a sailor named Peleg Redfield, ofMiddletown, Connecticut, died, leaving a widow and sixchildren in very poor circ*mstances. The eldest child, William,thirteen years of age, had attended common schooland learned about reading, writing and arithmetic, but whenhis father died, he had to be taken out of school.

The next year William was apprenticed to a local saddleand harness maker. Boys as well as men worked long hoursin those days, and William Redfield was no exception. Afterhe had finished the day’s work and had done the choresaround the Redfield home, he had only a small part of hisevening to himself. Even then, he had a lot of discouragement—nobooks and no light to read by. The family couldnot afford candles. Nevertheless, William was so interestedin science that he studied by the light of the wood fire, readingintently anything on scientific subjects that he could gethis hands on.

A year later, William’s mother married a widower withnine children of his own, and in 1806 the couple moved toOhio, taking his nine children and five of hers, but leaving23William behind to look out for himself. He continued hisstudy of science, but with no indication that he wouldeventually find some of the answers so vitally needed inthe fight against hurricanes. His father, being a sailor, hadtold him about storms at sea and the boy was unable to getthis out of his mind.

Fortunately, there was a well-educated physician in thevillage of Middletown, William Tully, who had a good libraryand made it available to young Redfield. The first bookthe physician handed to William was a very difficult volumeon physics. The boy brought it back so soon the doctorthought he had been unable to understand it, but he waspleasantly surprised, for the lad had read it very thoroughlyand had come back for more technical works of the time.Soon William gained such an understanding of scientificmatters that an intimate friendship with the physiciandeveloped. During this time, however, young Redfield feltan increasing urge to visit his mother. But she lived morethan seven hundred miles from Middletown and he had verylittle money. So in 1810 he walked all the way to Ohio.

At that time, Ohio had a very small population; it was lessthan 50,000 at the beginning of the century. The territoryintervening between Ohio and Connecticut was pretty wild,with settlements only here and there. William followedprimitive roads and trails and at last reached the shores ofLake Erie, where Cleveland and other cities stand today.The next year he walked back to Connecticut.

Redfield was now past twenty-one. He had thought deeplyof many things while he trudged those lonely trails. He hada vision of a great railway extending from Connecticut tothe Mississippi River. Also, his mind kept running back overthe stories of storms his father had told him. From histhoughts on this lonely journey he devised and later executed24a plan for a line of barges which operated betweenNew York and Albany.

But when he arrived in Middletown, he had no coursefor the time being except to go into business in his trade ofsaddler and harness maker. To supplement his poor income,he peddled merchandise in the region around Middletown,trudging through the woods and stopping in the villageshere and there. The years went by and he kept on studyingscience in his spare moments.

And then, on the third of September, 1821, the centerof that vicious hurricane which crossed the eastern part ofConnecticut brought its dire evidence to the very door ofthe man who was still trying to master the sciences in hisspare moments. As Redfield trudged the countryside with hiswares, he passed among hundreds of big trees felled by thefurious winds. Near Middletown, he found that the trees laywith their branches toward the northwest and he rememberedthat the gale there had begun from the southeast. Lessthan seventy miles away, he found the trees lying with theirheads toward the southeast and here the winds evidentlyhad begun from the northwest.

Making inquiries as he went along, Redfield learned thedirections from which the winds had blown at various timesduring the storm. It became quite clear that the hurricanehad been a huge whirlwind which had traveled across thecountry from south to north. He gathered a lot of evidenceto prove it.

But Redfield was now past thirty years of age. Because hehad not gone very far in school, he did not see how he couldundertake to demonstrate these facts about hurricanes tomen of scientific learning. He kept turning the idea over inhis mind at intervals as the months and years went by. Inthe meantime, he had become interested in navigation onthe Hudson River and had made a reputation as a marine25engineer. By 1826, he was superintendent of a line of fortyor fifty barges and canal boats. But whenever he read of abad storm on the coast, he thought about the hurricane of1821 and the trees thrown down in different directions bythe opposing winds of a great whirling storm.

In 1831, Professor Denison Olmstead of Yale College wastraveling by boat from New York to New Haven. A strangerapproached him and began talking about some papers theprofessor had published in the American Journal of Science.The stranger said his name was William C. Redfield. (Actuallyhe had no middle name but used the C for “Convenience,”to keep from being confused with two other WilliamRedfields in the area.) In the course of the conversation,Redfield talked reservedly about his ideas regarding WestIndian hurricanes. The professor was amazed and urged himto publish his ideas in the American Journal of Science.

Redfield, who was now forty-two years old, began writingon the law of storms. He wrote well and his ideas were clearand convincingly expressed. A long series of articles followedhis first one in the American Journal of Science. Duringthese years he became a famous “hurricane hunter.” Hecollected reports of West Indian hurricanes—as many as hecould get from ships caught in storms and from othersources—and studied them at great length. He inspected thelog books of vessels in port, interviewed many shipmasters,and corresponded with others. His urgent purpose was todevise a law of storms and a set of rules to promote thesafety of human life and property afloat on the oceans andto afford some measure of protection for the inhabitants ofcities and towns on the coasts subjected to destructive visitsfrom these monsters of the tropics.

After the death of Redfield, in 1857, Professor Olmsteadsummarized his theory of storms as follows:

“That all violent gales or hurricanes are great whirlwinds,26in which the wind blows in circuits around an axis; that thewinds do not move in horizontal circles but rather in spirals.

“That the direction of revolution is always uniform beingfrom right to left, or against the sun, on the north side of theequator, and from left to right, or with the sun, on the southside of the equator.

“That the velocity of rotation increases from the margintoward the center of the storm. That the whole body of airis, at the same time, moving forward in a path, at a variablerate, but always with a velocity much less than its velocityof rotation.

“That in storms of a particular region, as the gales of theAtlantic or the typhoons of the China Sea, great uniformityexists with regard to the path pursued by these storms.Those of the Atlantic, for example, usually come from theequatorial regions east of the West India islands, moving atfirst toward the northwest as far as the latitude of 30°, andthen gradually wheeling toward the northeast and followinga path nearly parallel to the American Coast until they arelost in mid-ocean. That their dimensions are sometimes verygreat, as much as 1,000 miles in diameter, while their pathsover the ocean can sometimes be traced for 3,000 miles.”

These conclusions were in the main correct, but time hasproved that there are many exceptions. At any rate, Redfield’spapers became classics. He had demonstrated by collectionsof observations on shipboard that a tropical stormis an organized rotary wind system and not just a mass ofair moving straightaway at high velocities.

It happened that in 1831, the same year in which Redfield’sfirst paper appeared in the American Journal ofScience, there was a terrible hurricane on the island ofBarbados. Devastation was so great that the people on theisland firmly believed the storm had been accompanied by27an earthquake. More than 1,500 lives were lost. Propertydamage, considering values in that early day, was tremendousfor a small island—estimated at more than seven milliondollars.

Barbados had suffered so much that England sent Colonel(afterward Brigadier-General) William Reid of the RoyalEngineers to superintend the reconstruction of the governmentbuildings. He was appalled by what he saw.

Reid examined the ruins and made inquiries of many peopleabout the nature of the hurricane of 1831. He came tothe conclusion that there had not been an earthquake, butall the damage had been caused by the wind and sea. Oneof the residents told Reid that when daybreak came, amidstthe roar of the storm and the noise of falling roofs and walls,he had looked out over the harbor and saw a heaving bodyof lumber, shingles, staves, barrels, wreckage of all description,and vessels capsized or thrown on their beam ends inshallow water. The whole face of the country was laid waste.No sign of vegetation was seen except here and therepatches of a sickly green. Trees were stripped of theirboughs and foliage. The very surface of the ground lookedas if fire had run through the land.

Reid resolved to study hurricanes and see what he coulddo to reduce the consequent loss of life. He wanted to tellsailors how to keep out of these terrible storms and hethought it might be possible to design buildings capable ofwithstanding the winds. Soon afterward, he saw Redfield’sarticles in the American Journal of Science. He wrote to theauthor and they began a friendly correspondence whichcontinued until the latter’s death.

Neither Redfield nor Reid was actually the first to declarethat the hurricane is a great whirlwind. Many others hadsuggested this before them, and in 1828 a German namedH. W. Dove had confirmed it, but none of these had hunted28up the data and talked and corresponded with hundreds ofseamen to collect facts to prove their contentions. And nonehad presented the facts in a way that would serve as a lawof storms for seamen.

Following the lead of General Reid, an Englishmannamed Henry Piddington, on duty at Calcutta in India, becamea great hurricane hunter in the middle of the nineteenthcentury. He collected information from every source,talked to seamen of all ranks from admiral down, and addeda great deal to the law of storms. Because of the movementof violent winds around and in toward the hurricane center,he gave it the name cyclone, which means “coil of a snake.”This is the reason why tropical storms are now called cyclonesin the Bay of Bengal.

Piddington, who became President of the Marine Courtsof Inquiry at Calcutta, published numerous memoirs on thelaw of storms. Of all the accounts that he collected of experiencesof seamen in tropical storms, the outstanding case, inhis estimation, was that of the Brig Charles Heddles, in ahurricane near Mauritius, a small island in the Indian Ocean,east of Africa. Mauritius is south of the equator, where hurricanewinds blow around the center in a clockwise direction,the opposite of the whirling motion of storms in thenorthern hemisphere.

The Charles Heddles was originally in the slave trade butat the time that she was caught in the hurricane was mostlybeing employed in the cattle trade between Mauritius andMadagascar. Only the fastest vessels were engaged in thecattle trade, and the Charles Heddles was an exceptionallygood ship. Her master was a man named Finck, an ableand highly respected seaman.

On Friday, February 21, 1845, the Charles Heddles leftMauritius and in the early morning of the twenty-secondran into heavy weather, with wind and sea gradually increasing.29It became squally and the vessel was laboringgreatly by midnight. On the twenty-third it was worse, witha frightful sea and the wind very high, accompanied by incessantrain. The seas swept over the decks and the crewwas frequently at the pumps.

By this time Captain Finck had determined to keep thebrig scudding before the wind and run his chance of whatmight happen. The steady change of the wind around thecompass as the day wore on made it impossible for him toestimate his position, but he was sure he had plenty of searoom. The crew was unable to clue up the topsail withoutrisk of severe damage, so round and round they went.

Wind force and weather were always about the same.There was a terrifying sea, the vessel constantly shippingwater, which poured down the hatchways and cabin scuttle.The fore topsail blew away at 4 P.M. and they continuedscudding under bare poles, the ship’s course changingsteadily around the compass. By the twenty-fifth of February,the vessel was taking water through every seam, thecrew was constantly at the pumps or baling water out of thecabins with buckets. All the provisions were wet. The seasbroke clear over the ship.

On the twenty-sixth, the hurricane winds continued withoutthe least intermission. The ship was continually sufferingdamages, which had to be repaired as quickly aspossible by the exhausted crew. The seas were monstrous,water going through the decks as though they were made ofpaper. Still the ship was scudding and steadily changingcourse around the compass. By the twenty-seventh, theweather had improved but the ship persisted in going roundand round, veering and scudding before the wind. After allthis travel, Captain Finck succeeded in taking an observationand found, to his surprise, that he was not far fromport in Mauritius, from which he had set sail before the30storm, almost a week earlier, and on the twenty-eighth hemade for port there.

From the log kept by Captain Finck and the observationsmade on other ships caught in the same hurricane, Piddingtonlaid down the track of the storm and the course of theCharles Heddles. Now it was clear that the ship had beencarried round and round the storm center, at the same timegoing forward as the storm progressed. Its course at sealooked like a watch spring drawn out—a series of loops extendingin an arc from the north to the west of Mauritius.Here was vivid and undeniable proof, from the experienceof one ship, that hurricanes over the ocean are progressivewhirlwinds, like the storm which Redfield had charted fromtrees blown down in Connecticut in 1821.

Another fact was quite clear to Piddington and he publishedit with the hope that all seafaring men would profitby it. He could see now why a ship could be carried hourafter hour and day by day before the wind, apparently togreat distances, and then be cast ashore near the very placewhere the ship took to sea.

Inspired by this report of the Charles Heddles in the hurricane,Piddington suggested, for the first time in history(1845), that ships be sent out to study hurricanes. He wrote:

“Every man and every set of men who are pursuing theinvestigation of any great question, are apt to overrate itsimportance; and perhaps I shall only excite a smile when Isay, that the day will yet come when ships will be sent outto investigate the nature and course of storms and hurricanes,as they are now sent out to reach the poles or to surveypestilential coasts, or on any other scientific service.”

The prediction which Piddington put in italics was eventuallyverified, though nearly a century later.

“Nothing indeed can more clearly show,” Piddington continued,“how this may, with a well appointed and managed31vessel be done in perfect safety—performed by mere chanceby a fast-sailing colonial brig, manned only as a bullocktrader, but capitally officered, and developing for the seamanand meteorologist a view of what we may almost callthe internal phenomena of winds and waves in a hurricane.”

But this was only the beginning. Learning the secrets ofthe hurricane proved to be far more difficult than Redfield,Reid and Piddington had imagined. The world looked inamazement at the tremendous labors of a few men who collectedenormous quantities of reports, interviews, and observationsfrom mariners and tried to put the bits together,but there was a prevailing suspicion that the real facts werelocked in the minds of men who had gone to their doom inships sunk in the centers of these awful storms and the luckyones who came back had seen only a part of their ultimateterrors. In these days of relatively safe navigation at themiddle of the twentieth century, our minds are scarcely ableto grasp the seriousness of this scourge of tropical and subtropicalseas which destroyed so many ships and drove busymen, working long hours for a living, to such tremendouslabors, at night and at odd times, to learn the truth. We mayget some light from the stories of desperate sailors who, bysome strange fate, were thrown exhausted on the rocks thatfinally claimed the broken remains of once-proud vessels oftrade and war.

32

3. AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA

Two hundred years ago, scientists were beginning to chartthe winds over the oceans and the currents that thread theirway across the surface of deep waters. Until this work wasfinished, the mariner was almost completely at the mercy ofthe atmosphere and the sea. He would come to unchartedplaces where the winds ceased to blow and sailing vesselsmight be becalmed for weeks. Day after day, the burningsun climbed slowly toward the zenith and while the unbearableheat tortured the crew, descended with agonizing slownesstoward the western horizon. At night, relief came underunclouded skies but the stars gave no indication of betterfortunes on the morrow.

In these places it seldom rained. Drinking water, as longas it lasted, became putrid, but the crew preserved it as their33most precious treasure, drinking a little when they could gono longer without it—holding their noses. The food becameso bad that every man who had the courage to eat it wonderedif it wouldn’t be better to starve. This happened oftenin the North Atlantic in the days when sailing vessels werecarrying horses to the West Indies. If they were becalmedand fresh water ran short, the crews had to throw some orall of the horses overboard. In time this region becameknown as the “horse latitudes.” Because it lay north andnortheast of the hurricane belt, a long spell of rainlessweather for a sailing ship here could be succeeded suddenlyand overwhelmingly by the torrential rains of a tropicalstorm.

At long intervals, a slight breeze came along, barelyenough to extend a small flag, but it gave the ship a littlemotion and brought hope to the men who were worn outwith tugging at the oars. In this circ*mstance, it might happenthat a long, low groundswell would appear. Comingfrom a great distance, it would raise and then lower the vessela little in passing. Others would surely follow—low undulationsat intervals of four or five to the minute—bringinga warning of a storm beyond the horizon. Here was one ofthe ironic twists of a sailor’s existence. Even while he prayedfor water, the atmosphere was about to give it to him intremendous quantities, both from above and below. At thisjuncture the master was in a quandary. For the safety ofship and crew, it was vital that he know exactly what to doat the very instant when the first gusty breezes of the comingstorm filled the sails.

From the law of storms, the mariner eventually learned—andit was suicide to forget it at a time like this—that ifhe could look forward from the center of the hurricane,along the line of progress, the most terrible winds and waveswould be on his right. Here the raging demons of the tropical34blast outdo themselves. The whirling velocity is addedto the forward motion, for both in these few harrowinghours have the same direction. All the power of the atmosphereis delivered in this space, where unbelievablegales try to blast their way into the partial vacuum at thecenter. But the atmosphere is held back from the center bya still greater power, the rotation of the earth on its axis. Noshipmaster should ever be caught between these awfulforces with the huge bulk of the storm drawing toward him.

Here we find horrors that were never disclosed to theearly storm hunters. It is doubtful if any sailing ship or anyman aboard survived in this sector of a really great hurricane.But even more dangerous are the deceitful motionsof the sea surface, which can trap the mariner and drag hisvessel toward the dangerous sector, even while he thinks heis fighting his way out of it.

In those uneasy hours when the groundswell precededthe winds, the master had to watch his barometer and theclouds on the horizon, to get the best estimate of the storm’sfuture course. If it gave signs of coming toward him orpassing a little to the west of him, he had to run with thewind as soon as it began, every inch of canvas straining atthe creaking masts to get all the headway possible. Hewould do better than he thought, for the surface of the seawas moving with the winds and his vessel was plowingthrough the waves while the sea was swirling in the samedirection. It was a race for life, and if he was not unlucky,he would find himself behind the storm, sailing rapidly towardbetter weather.

If he made the wrong choice and tried to go around thecenter on the east side while the storm moved northward,he might have thought that he was making headway. Butthe sea surface was carrying him backward while the horribleright sector rushed forward to encompass the ship.35Now we see why Redfield, Reid and Piddington, when theycame to a realization of some of these facts in the logs ofsailing vessels, were so eager to give the world a law ofstorms. Their work was only a beginning, for the so-calledlaw is not as simple as they imagined. But some shipmasterstook their advice and survived, whereas any other coursewould have taken them to the bottom of the sea. And untoldnumbers had gone down in big hurricanes.

Among the logs and letters collected by Redfield and Reidin their work on the law of storms were many which referredto a fierce hurricane in 1780. For more than fifty years it hadbeen talked about as “The Great Hurricane.” But the storiesdidn’t all seem to fit together. The storm was said to havebeen in too many places at too many different times to suitRedfield. When he had finished putting the data from ships’logs on a map in accordance with his law of storms, he sawthat there had been three hurricanes at about the same timeand that they had been confused and reported as one.

In the year of these big hurricanes there were many warshipsin the Caribbean region. The American War of Independencehad started with bloodshed at Lexington andBunker Hill in 1775, and by 1780 England was in a state ofwar with half the world. Her battle fleets controlled mostof the seas along the American Coast and roamed the watersin and around the West Indies.

The first of the three hurricanes struck Jamaica on thethird of October. Nine English warships, under the commandof Sir Peter Parker, went to the bottom. Seven of hisvessels were dismasted or severely damaged. From the tenthto the fifteenth of October a second—and even more powerfulhurricane—ravaged Barbados and progressively devastatedother islands in the Eastern Caribbean. This one hasbeen rated the most terrible hurricane in history by manystudents of storms. It wreaked awful destruction on the36island of St. Lucia, where six thousand persons were crushedin the ruins of demolished buildings. The English fleet inthat vicinity disappeared. Neither trees nor houses were leftstanding on Barbados. Off Martinique, forty ships of aFrench convoy were sunk and nearly all on board were lost,including four thousand soldiers. On the island itself, ninethousand persons were killed. Most of the vessels in thebroad path of the storm as it progressed farther into theCaribbean, including several warships, foundered with alltheir crews. It drove fifty vessels ashore at Bermuda, on theeighteenth.

Before this terrible storm reached Bermuda another oneroared out of the Western Caribbean, crossed western Cubaand passed into the Gulf of Mexico, on October 18. Unawareof the approach of this hurricane, a Spanish fleet of seventy-fourwarships, under Admiral Solano, sailed from Havanainto the Gulf, to attack Pensacola. They were trapped in theeastern section of the Gulf and nineteen ships were lost.The remainder were dispersed, several having thrown theirguns overboard to avoid capsizing. Nearly all the otherswere damaged, many dismasted. The Spanish fleet was nolonger a fighting force.

Within three weeks most of the battle fleets in and aroundthe Caribbean had been put out of commission. Both Redfieldand Reid were impressed by the power displayed bythese hurricanes. In his search of the records, the formersucceeded in getting a copy of a letter written by a LieutenantArcher to his mother in England, giving an accountof the first of these terrible storms. The following story iscondensed from Archer’s letter.

Archer was second in command of an English warshipnamed the Phoenix. It was commanded by Sir Hyde Parker.Before the first of these three hurricanes developed, thePhoenix had been sent to Pensacola, where the English were37in control. Late in September, she sailed to rejoin the remainderof the fleet at Jamaica. On passing Havana harbor,Sir Hyde looked in and was astounded to see Solano’s Spanishfleet at anchor. He hurried around Cuba into the Caribbean,to take the news to the British fleet.

At Kingston, Jamaica, the crew of the Phoenix found threeother men-of-war lying in the harbor and they had a strongparty for “kicking up a dust on shore,” with dancing untiltwo o’clock every morning. Little did they think of whatmight be in store for them. Out of the four men-of-war notone was in existence four days later and not a man aboardany of them survived, except a few of the crew of the Phoenix.And what is more, the houses where the crews had beenso merry were so completely destroyed that scarcely a vestigeremained to show where they had stood.

On September 30, the four warships set sail for Port Royal,around the eastern end of Jamaica. At eleven o’clock on thenight of October 2, it began to “snuffle,” with a “monstrousheavy appearance to the eastward.” Sir Hyde sent for LieutenantArcher.

“What sort of weather have we, Archer?”

“It blows a little and has a very ugly look; if in any otherquarter, I should say we were going to have a gale of wind.”

They had a very dirty night. At eight in the morning, withclose-reefed topsails, the Phoenix was fighting a hard blowfrom the east-northeast, and heavy squalls at times. Archersaid he was once in a hurricane in the East Indies and thebeginning of it had much the same appearance as this. Thecrew took in the topsails and were glad they had plenty ofsea-room. On Sir Hyde’s orders, they secured all the sailswith spare gaskets, put good rolling tackles on the yards,squared the booms, saw that the boats were all fast, lashedthe guns, double-breeched the lower deckers, got the top-gallant38mast down on the deck and, in fact, did everythingto make a snug ship.

“And now,” Archer wrote, “the poor birds began to sufferfrom the uproar of the elements and came on board. Theyturned to the windward like a ship, tack and tack, anddashed themselves down on the deck without attempting tostir till picked up. They would not leave the ship.”

The carpenters were placed by the mainmast with broadaxes, ready to cut it away to save the ship. Archer found thepurser “frightened out of his wits” and two marine officers“white as sheets” from listening to the vibration of the lowerdeck guns, which were pulling loose and thrashing around.At every roll it seemed that the whole ship’s side was going.

At twelve it was blowing a full hurricane. Archer came ondeck and found Sir Hyde there. “It blows terribly hard,Archer.”

“It does indeed, Sir.”

“I don’t remember its blowing so hard before,” shoutedSir Hyde, striving to get his voice above the roar of the wind.“The ship makes good weather of it on this tack but we mustwear her (to turn about by putting the helm up and the sternof the boat to the wind), as the wind has shifted to the southeastand we are fast drawing up on the Coast of Cuba.”

“Sir, there is no canvas can stand against it a moment. Wemay lose three or four of our people in the effort. She’ll wearby manning the fire shrouds.”

“Well, try it,” said Sir Hyde, which was a great condescensionfor a man of his temperament to accept the advice of asubordinate. It took two hundred men to wear the ship, butwhen she was turned about, the sea began to run clear acrossthe decks and she had no time to rise from one sea untilanother lashed into her. Some of the sails had been torn fromthe masts and the rest began to fly from the yards “throughthe gaskets like coachwhips.”

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“To think that the wind could have such force!” Archershouted into the gale.

“Go down and see what is the matter between decks,”ordered Sir Hyde in a lull.

Archer crept below and a marine officer screamed, “Weare sinking. The water is up to the bottom of my cot!”

Archer yelled back, “As long as it is not over your mouth,you are well off.” He put all spare men to work at the pumps.The Phoenix labored heavily, with scarcely any of her abovewater except the quarter-deck and that seldom.

On returning, Archer found Sir Hyde lashed to a mast.He lashed himself alongside his commander and tried tohear what he was shouting. Afterward, Archer tried to describethis situation in his letter. “If I was to write forever,I could not give you an idea of it. A total darkness above andthe sea running in Alps or Peaks of Teneriffe (Mountains istoo common an idea); the wind roaring louder than thunder,the ship shaking her sides and groaning.”

“Hold fast,” shouted Sir Hyde as a big wave crashed intothe ship. “That was an ugly sea! We must lower the yards,Archer.”

“If we attempt it, Sir, we shall lose them. I wish the mainmastwas overboard without carrying anything else alongwith it.”

Another mountainous wave swept the trembling ship. Acrewman brought news from the pump room. Water wasgaining on the weary pumpers. The ship was almost on herbeam-ends. Archer called to Sir Hyde, “Shall we cut themainmast away?”

“Ay, as fast as you can,” said Sir Hyde. But just then atremendous wave broke right on board, carried everythingon deck away and filled the ship with water. The main andmizen masts went, the Phoenix righted a little but was in thelast struggle of sinking.

40

As soon as they could shake their heads free of the water,Sir Hyde yelled, “We are gone at last, Archer. Foundered atsea! Farewell, and the Lord have mercy on us!”

Archer felt sorry that he could swim, for he would struggleinstinctively and it would take him a quarter hour longerto die than a man who could not. The quarter-deck was fullof men praying for mercy. At that moment there was a greatthump and a grinding under them.

Archer screamed, “Sir, the ship is ashore. We may saveourselves yet!”

Every stroke of the sea threatened dissolution of the ship’sframe. Every wave swept over her as she lay stern ashore.

Sir Hyde cried out, “Keep to the quarter-deck, my lads.When she goes to pieces that is your best chance.”

Five men were lost cutting the foremast. The sea seemedto reach for them as it took the mast overboard and theywent with it. Everyone expected it would be his turn next.It was awful—the ship grinding and being torn away pieceby piece. Mercifully, as if to give the crew another desperatechance, a tremendous wave carried the Phoenix amongthe rocks and she stuck there, though her decks tumbled in.

Archer took off his coat and shoes and prepared to swim,but on second thought he knew it wouldn’t do. As secondofficer, he would have to stay with his commander and seethat every man, including the sick and injured, was safelyoff the ship before he left it. He wrote later that he lookedaround with a philosophic eye in that moment and wasamazed to find that those who had been the most swaggering,swearing bullies in fine weather were now the most pitifulwretches on earth, with death before them.

Finally, Archer helped two sailors off with a line whichwas made fast to the rocks, and most of those who had survivedthe storm got ashore alive, including the sick and41injured, who were moved from a cabin window by means ofa spare topsail-yard.

On shore, Sir Hyde came to Archer so affected that he wasscarcely able to make himself understood. “I am happy tosee you ashore—but look at our poor Phoenix.” Weak andworn, the two sat huddled on the shore, silent for a quarterhour, blasted by gale and sea. Archer actually wept. Afterthat, the two officers gathered the men together and rescuedsome fresh water and provisions from the wreck. They alsosecured material to make tents. The storm had thrown greatquantities of fish into the holes in the rocks and these provideda good meal.

One of the ship’s boats was left in fair condition. In twodays the carpenters repaired it, and Archer, with four volunteers,set off for Jamaica. They had squally weather and aleaky boat, but by constant baling with two buckets, theyarrived at their destination next evening. Eventually, all theremainder of the crew they had left in Cuba were saved exceptsome who died of injuries after getting ashore from thePhoenix and a few who got hold of some of the ship’s rumand drank themselves to death.

How many times this drama of death and narrow escapemay have been repeated in the three great hurricanes of1780 is not disclosed in the records. But hundreds of shipsand many thousands of men were lost. And at that time noone knew the true nature of these great winds. It was notuntil more than fifty years had passed and Redfield and Reidexamined all the reports that these tremendous gales werefound to be parts of three separate hurricanes. This ignoranceseems strange, for nearly three hundred years hadpassed since Columbus ran into his first hurricane.

As Reid worked at great length on these old records in logsand letters, he became confident that Redfield was rightabout the whirling nature of tropical storms. There were ten42hurricanes in the West Indies in 1837 and these suppliedReid with a great deal of added information. One of themost exciting was the big hurricane in the middle of Augustof that year.

This was a vicious storm which was first observed by theBarque Felicity in the Atlantic, far east of the Antilles, onAugust 12, 1837. The chances are that it came from theAfrican Coast, near the Cape Verde Islands, as many of theworst of them do. By the time these faraway disturbanceshave crossed the Atlantic and approached the West Indies,they are usually major hurricanes, capable of wreaking greatdestruction. This one was no exception, but its path lay alittle farther to the northward than usual and its most furiouswinds were not felt on land, even on the more northerlyislands in the group.

Ships in its path reported winds which appeared to be ofa “rotatory” nature when Reid plotted them on maps. Onthe fifteenth, the storm passed near Turk’s Island and on thesixteenth, was being felt on the easternmost Bahamas.

At this stage, the ship Calypso became involved in thestorm and was unable to escape. The master, a man namedWilkinson, wrote an account to the owners, from which thefollowing is taken:

“During the night the Winds increased, and day-lightfound the vessel under a close-reefed main-topsail, withroyal and top-gallant-yards on deck, and prepared for a galeof wind. At 10 A.M. the wind about north-east, the lee-railunder water, and the masts bending like canes. Got a tarpaulinon the main rigging and took the main topsail in.The ship laboring much obliged main and bilge-pumps tobe kept constantly going. At 6 P.M. the wind north-west, Ishould think the latitude would be about 27°, and longitude77°W. At midnight the wind was west, when a sea took thequarter-boat away.

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“At day-dawn, or rather I should have said the time whenthe day would have dawned, the wind was southwest, and asea stove the fore-scuttle. All attempts to stop this leak wereuseless, for when the ship pitched the scuttle was considerablyunder water. I then had the gaskets and lines cut fromthe reefed foresail, which blew away; a new fore-topmast-studding-sailwas got up and down the fore-rigging, but ina few seconds the bolt-rope only remained; the masts hadthen to be cut away.”

By this time the wind was even more furious and the seasso high none expected the Calypso to survive. The mastercontinued his story:

“My chief mate had a small axe in his berth, which he hadmade very sharp a few days previous. That was immediatelyprocured; and while the men were employed cutting awaythe mizenmast, the lower yard-arms went in the water. Itis human nature to struggle hard for life; so fourteen menand myself got over the rail between the main and mizenrigging as the mast-heads went into the water. The ship wassinking fast. While some men were employed cutting theweather-lanyards of the rigging, some were calling to Godfor mercy; some were stupified with despair; and two poorfellows, who had gone from the afterhold, over the cargo,to get to the forecastle, to try to stop the leak, were swimmingin the ship’s hold. In about three minutes after gettingon the bends, the weather-lanyards were cut fore and aft,and the mizen, main, and foremasts went one after the other,just as the vessel was going down head foremost.

“The ship hung in this miserable position, as if about todisappear (as shown in the accompanying reconstruction ofthe scene by an artist who worked under the direction ofthe master of the Calypso) and then by some miracle slowlyrighted herself.

“On getting on board again, I found the three masts had44gone close off by the deck. The boats were gone, the mainhatches stove in, the planks of the deck had started in manyplaces, the water was up to the beams, and the puncheonsof rum sending about the hold with great violence. Thestarboard gunwale was about a foot from the level of the sea,and the larboard about five feet. The sea was breaking overthe ship as it would have done over a log. You will, perhaps,say it could not have been worse, and any lives spared to tellthe tale. I assure you, Sir, it was worse; and by Divine Providence,every man was suffered to walk from that ship tothe quay at Wilmington.”

From such accounts the hurricane hunters gathered thefacts which led to a better “law of storms” and made life atsea safer for the officers and men who struggled with sailsand masts in tropical gales. But it is most likely that the experiencesof the crews of those sailing ships that were caughtin the worst sectors of fully developed hurricanes in theopen sea were never told. It is not probable that any survivedthe calamitous weather on the right front of the stormcenter, where the sea, the atmosphere, the rotation of theearth, and the forward motion of the hurricane are combinedin a frenzy of destructive power.

In one sense, all of the men who survived these terrors atsea were hurricane hunters. They had to be. Those who livedwere the men who were always alert to the first signs in seaand sky, who knew when one of the big storms of the tropicswas just beyond the horizon. They were learning and passingthe knowledge along to others. By the middle of the nineteenthcentury, the mariner had a “law of storms” that keptcountless ships out of the most dangerous parts of tropicaldisturbances.

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4. STORM WARNINGS

“I am more afraid of a West Indian hurricane thanof the entire Spanish Navy.”—McKinley

Strangely enough, government weather bureaus were notset up for the purpose of giving warnings of tropical storms.Maybe there was a feeling in the years before radio thatnothing could be done for the sailor on the open sea exceptto teach him the law of storms. And for the landsman thecase looked hopeless until the telegraph came in sight. Atany rate, most of the men who began to fly into hurricanesduring World War II were astonished to find that, up tothat time, the prediction of tropical storms had been a kindof side issue.

Although hurricanes are nearly always destructive andother kinds of storms—the “lows” on the weather map—aregenerally mild, once in a long time one of these others resultsin a catastrophe. Starting as a low which is spread weaklyover a wide area, with cloudy weather, rain or snow, andgentle winds, now and then the exceptional storm suddenlyfills newspaper headlines. Gales and winds of hurricane forcebring a blizzard, tornado, bad hailstorm, or torrential rain46and a damaging flood. If it really is a bad one, it finds itsway into the pages of history. In times past, these stormsoften struck populous districts, while hurricanes, in earlycenturies, hit on thinly settled islands or coasts.

So far as we know, the worst storm to devastate the BritishIsles was one of this kind. It was not a tropical cyclone. Itwas entirely unexpected, as were most of the big gales inEngland in the old days. Surprise was one of the elements ofdanger. The weather is seldom fine in the British Isles, overthe English Channel or in the North Sea. Gloom, with fog orlow-flying clouds, is the rule. Even on the best days, a damphaze hangs everywhere. It is like looking through a dirtywindow pane. Into this background of gloom many a bigstorm stole its way eastward from the Atlantic. The record-breakertore up the docks, wrecked shipping and crumbledbuildings in the year 1703.

Houses were ruined and big trees were blown down.Whole fleets were lost and more than nine thousand seamenwere drowned. The most violent winds came at night.Startled by the roar of the storm, Queen Anne got out of bedand found a part of the palace roof had been torn away.One prelate, Bishop Kidder, was buried beneath the ruins ofhis mansion. Awakened by the giant gusts, he put on hisdressing gown and made for the door, but a chimney stackcrashed through the ceiling and dashed out his brains. Hiswife was crushed in her bed. After the gales subsided, Londonand other cities looked like they had been sacked by anenemy. All over the south of England, the lead roofs ofchurches were rolled up by the wind or blown away in largesheets.

Though other gales almost as bad as this one came in lateryears, it was more than a century before the storm huntersmade much progress. Not long after 1800, several men withan inquiring mind began to get results. Redfield was one,47but he studied hurricanes and not the storms of higher latitudes,such as the one which devastated the British Isles.

Shortly after 1800, there were signs of the coming of fastermeans of travel and communications and they were destinedto be a vital factor in weather forecasting. In 1816 a “hobby-horse”with wheels was displayed in Paris by an inventornamed Niepice. It was propelled by a man or two sitting onit and pushing on the ground. Even with two men pushing,it went no faster than a man could walk. But strong claimswere made about its possibilities. At about the same time,several men were working on devices like the telegraph.

Whether it was this trend or not, something aroused theintense curiosity of a young professor, William HeinrichBrandes, of the University of Breslau, in Germany. He begana study in 1816, to see if the weather moved from place toplace and if it would be possible to send predictions aheadby means then available. Everybody at that time knew thatstorms moved but it was the general belief that ordinarychanges in the weather didn’t go anywhere. Brandes collectednewspapers from many places and searched them forremarks about the weather, which he put on maps. Here hewas amazed to see that all kinds of weather seemed to beconstantly in motion, quite generally from west to east. Butthe newspaper reports were rather poor for his purposes andhe couldn’t be too sure about the rate of travel.

Brandes knew that the French had set up weather stationsand collected observations for maps as early as 1780, but theterrible French Revolution had brought an end to this workand the data were lying in disuse. After some delay, he obtainedcopies of the observations for 1783 and put them onmaps. Sure enough, after he had drawn many daily maps,he saw clearly how the weather moved just as he had suspectedit did from the newspaper reports. But at the sametime he saw that it was hopeless. The weather moved so48rapidly that there was no way of sending the reports aheadfast enough for making predictions of what was coming. Thequickest way of sending the reports ahead was by horse or agood man on foot, and the weather would easily outrun them.In 1820, Brandes wrote an article about weather maps for publicationand then put his maps and newspapers in the trash.But in time his idea got around the world and as the yearspassed more and more scientists began drawing maps andtrying to predict the weather. And so it came about that thegovernment weather services in different parts of the worldwere set up to predict storms of higher latitudes rather thanhurricanes.

Redfield was mapping storms after 1830, but he was nottrying to make weather forecasts. He wanted only to learnabout hurricanes in order to give the mariner a law of stormsby which he could judge the weather for himself. Nobodyworried about the landlubber. It was the idea in those daysthat a man on land could get his weather out of an almanacor by watching the signs of the winds, clouds, birds, stars,or the rise and fall of the barometer. Scientists who believedthat it would be possible to predict the ordinary changes inthe weather were decidedly in the minority. One of thesewas James Pollard Espy, who became known as the “OldStorm King” of America.

James Espy was born in Pennsylvania, in the vicinity ofHarrisburg, but his father moved the family to Kentuckywhile James was an infant. It has been said in biographiesof Espy that the boy had no education and was seventeenyears old before he learned to read, but this was denied byrelatives who survived him. It seems that the elder Espysoon went to the Miami Valley in Ohio, to get established inbusiness, and left James with an older sister in Kentucky.At eighteen James registered at Transylvania University, inLexington, where he was much interested in science. In any49event, at various times he was a schoolteacher in Ohio,Maryland, and Pennsylvania, until he became fully occupiedin the study of weather.

In 1820, Espy joined the Franklin Institute, in Philadelphia,to teach languages and work on the weather. In anamazingly short time, he became an authority on meteorology.He was a pleasant, easygoing man, but very persistentin two matters. First, he was determined to have a governmentbureau established to predict storms; and, second, hedisagreed with Redfield in the latter’s whirlwind theory ofhurricanes. At times the two carried on a violent controversyin the press. Espy argued that the winds blow directly towardthe center of a storm or toward a line through thecenter. He was right with respect to storms of middle andhigher latitudes, as everybody knows today. He anticipatedthe modern idea of fronts, and he and other scientists of hisday sometimes referred to these lines as “like a line of battle.”In a way, Redfield also was right, for the typical hurricanein the tropics has no fronts.

In his efforts to set up a government weather bureau,Espy was successful in a small way. In 1842, he was appointedby Congress for five years as “Meteorologist to theU. S. Government” and assigned to the Surgeon General,where he worked for five years. This rather strange appointmentwas due to the fact that the Surgeon General had beentaking weather observations at Army posts since 1819 andhad much data for study.

In the meantime, Espy had visited England and France,where he was received with honor by renowned scientificassociations. On returning to the United States, he publisheda book, The Philosophy of Storms, in 1841. His weather mapsand storm reports were now famous and by this time he waswidely known as the “Old Storm King.” When his term as“Meteorologist to the U. S. Government” expired, he secured50an appointment as meteorologist under the Secretary of theNavy, to work with the Smithsonian Institution, where hemade an annual report to the Navy until 1852.

During these years, Espy was continually after Congressto do more about storm hunting. In Washington, he earnedthe title of the “Half Baked Storm Hunter” and in Congresshe was known as the “Old Storm Breeder.” In 1842 he wasgranted hearings and members of an appropriation committeesaid that he was a “monomaniac” and his “organ ofself-esteem was swollen to the size of a goiter.” They toldhim that they were not impressed just because “the Frenchhad indorsed all his crack-brained schemes.” Espy kept insistingfor several years and was looked upon as a nuisancein Congress until he died in 1860, having had very littlesuccess in getting the government to do anything about it,except to give him an appointment to study the weatherhimself.

As it finally worked out, Congress in 1870 established aweather service, to study storms on the Great Lakes and theseacoasts of the United States. This proved to be such atough job that, for the time being, the hurricane work, whichhad been neglected during and after the War between theStates, was dropped into second place.

The disturbances that kept the government service busyafter 1870 are those that begin in higher latitudes and movegenerally from west to east—the lows of the weather map—calledextratropical to distinguish them from hurricanes andother tropical storms. If they were as regular in their shapesand movements as the tropical variety, the forecasting jobwould be much easier. But the extratropical kind takes oddforms, elongated or in the shape of a trough, sometimes withtwo or more centers. Their movements are irregular. Rarelydoes one of them become extremely violent, but there is alwaysdanger of it and so the forecasters must always be onthe alert.

I

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AFT ENTRANCE HATCH

RADIO OPERATOR

RIGHT SCANNER (CREW CHIEF)

RADIOSONDE OPERATOR

LEFT SCANNER (DROPSONDE OPERATOR)

ENGINEER

COPILOT

WEATHER OBSERVER

NAVIGATOR

RADAR OPERATOR

FORWARD ENTRANCE HATCH

PILOT

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The two scanners ready to signal engine trouble the instant it shows up.

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Some of the most dangerous of the extratropical stormsbegin as small companions or secondary centers of huge disturbances,generally on the south side, where they growrapidly in fury and merge with the original cyclones to producewinds of tremendous destructive power. This oftenhappens in the so-called “windy corners” of the world. Oneof these, and a good example, is Cape Hatteras, on the easterncoast of North Carolina. It is a sort of way station for boththe tropical and extratropical varieties. Hurricanes headingnorthwestward from the Caribbean and curving to followthe coastline, sweep over the Cape, which juts into the oceanat the point where the northward-moving storms still retaingreat force. In winter, big extratropical cyclones passingeastward across the region of the Great Lakes tend to producesmall companions or secondaries in the southeasternstates and some of them develop gales of hurricane force bythe time they reach Hatteras. Here the cold air masses of thecontinent, guided by storm winds, are thrown againstthe warm, moist air from the Gulf Stream. In the reaction,there are towering seas and hazardous gales that are wellknown to seamen.

As these big storms roar past Cape Hatteras, the windsshift to northwest and the sky clears, unless you happen tobe on shipboard and the tops of big waves are being tornoff by the wind and thrown into the air, to pass overhead instreaks or splatter on the decks. In the days of the sailingship, the master was not surprised when he got into troublein the area between Bermuda and Hatteras. Here manymerchantmen from far places passed, en route to or fromNew York or other Atlantic ports. Slowed by cross seas anddirty weather hatched over the Gulf Stream, they were soonreduced to storm stay-sails. As the gales mounted, the crews52could see other ships rising on the billows in one instant beforeslithering into a great trough where, in the next instant,they could see nothing but jagged peaks of water and awelter of foam. On the Hatteras side, especially, the mastercould get into a rendezvous with death, for he often had onlytwo choices. He could run full tilt toward the west and tryto get around the front of a hurricane moving northward,but this maneuver would take him toward Hatteras, wherehe might find company in the wrecks of countless other shipsthat had failed in the effort and had been thrown against thecoast. The other choice was no better. He could make suchprogress as was possible toward the east and hope that hewould not be caught in the dangerous sector of the oncominghurricane, a course which more likely than not wouldlead to disaster.

As has been noted, however, it was the tragic losses causedby extratropical cyclones that induced governments to takeover the job of hunting storms and issuing warnings. InFrance, the first country to take positive action, the immediatecause was the catastrophe which struck the allied fleetsin the harbor at Balaclava in 1854, during the Crimean War.Ships of England and France were caught in this desperateposition because of jealousies and hatreds which haveabounded in Europe for centuries. In this case, the Tsar ofRussia seized a pretext to try to gain control of a part ofTurkey. This was not unexpected. Russia always has lookedwith covetous eyes at the Bosporus and the Dardanelles,which lead through the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Onthis score Europe is perpetually uneasy. France and England,who had been enemies, now joined forces and planneda campaign against Russia.

It was July, 1853, when the Tsar, Nicholas I, mobilizedhis armies. As his first overt act, he occupied the part ofTurkey which lay north of the Danube River. Soon afterward,53the Russian fleet destroyed a Turkish squadron in theBlack Sea. Now the Tsar became more cautious because ofthe threat of action by England and France, and especiallybecause of indications that Russia’s ally, Austria, woulddesert her. The Tsar took no further action. Now it requireda long time in those days to get a campaign under way, andit was a whole year later, July, 1854, when the allies wereready to start the invasion of the Crimean Peninsula. Meanwhile,Russia had withdrawn her troops from Turkey andthere was no real cause for conflict. But tempers had flared,the vast machinery of war had been put in motion, and theallies drew stubbornly nearer to disaster. They knew quitewell that the time might be too short to finish the campaignbefore the bitterly cold weather of the Russian winter wouldcreep out over the Peninsula. In fact, the Tsar had said thathis best generals were January and February, and that remarkshould have carried ample warning.

Actually, the allied attack began in September, 1854. TheBritish had taken possession of the harbor at Balaclava and,in the beginning, the invasion seemed to promise success.But in October the heroic but ill-fated “Charge of the LightBrigade,” made immortal by Tennyson, marked the turningpoint. It was clear then that the campaign would have to beresumed in the spring of 1855. By November, cold weatherhad arrived, land action had ceased, and the allies werefaced with the problem they had hoped so earnestly to avoid—thatof keeping their fighting forces intact during winterin a hostile climate.

To understand the dire predicament of the allies when thebig storm struck, it is important to note that the harbor atBalaclava had proved to be too small for a supply base.Many ships had to be anchored outside and there was delayand confusion in moving in and out of the harbor. Not onlywas there a difficult supply problem but the sick and54wounded were being transported across the Black Sea toScutari, near Constantinople, where hospital conditions wereabominable. By October, the plight of the army had becomea scandal in England. Florence Nightingale was sent toScutari with authority over all the nurses and a guaranteeof co-operation from the medical staff. She arrived on November4. The remainder of her story is well known as oneof the bright pages of history.

Now the stage was set for catastrophe. An obscure winterstorm blew its way across Europe without anything happeninguntil its southern center crossed the Black Sea, on November14. Suddenly, as secondaries often do, it came to life.There was rain turning to snow as the disturbance burstforth in gales of hurricane force. The congestion grew whilethe signs of the storm intensified. The ghostly mountainsaround Balaclava disappeared in the gloom, the near-byshore lines next were blotted out, and impenetrable darknesssettled down on the shuddering and grinding of the batteredremnants of the helpless fleet. Wreckage was strewn alongthe coast and around the harbor. All the men-of-war survived,although damaged, but nearly all of the vessels withessential stores were lost.

Misery, disease, and horror followed during the bitterwinter. The death rate in the hospitals reached forty-twoper cent in February. Meanwhile, in France, Napoleon IIIreceived news of the terrible gales at Balaclava and broodedover the catastrophe. He determined to learn where thisdeadly storm had originated, the path it followed, and to setup a plan for tracking and predicting others of its kind inthe future. And so he called in the famous astronomerLeverrier and asked him to carry out the investigation.

Urbain Leverrier, then forty-three years old, was knownthroughout the world as the discoverer of the planet Neptune,in 1846. He knew of the works of Redfield and Reid55on hurricanes and by 1854 had noted the efforts of otherAmericans and Britishers to track extratropical storms. Withtheir ideas in mind, he called on scientists in all Europeancountries to send him observations of the weather on thedays from November 12 to 16, preceding and following theday of the disaster at Balaclava. Information moved slowlybetween countries in those days and, though many scientistsco-operated, it was February, 1855, before Leverrier hadgathered the data he needed. In developing his plan, he wasencouraged by the invention and spread of the electric telegraphin the United States, and he hoped that the extensionof lines in Europe would provide fast-moving messages forhis purpose.

Before the end of February, Leverrier handed his reportto Napoleon III and recommended that a system of weathermessages and of issuing warnings be established at once.The Emperor approved this within twenty-four hours. Soonthe French government was mapping the weather and lookingfor storms. The British followed suit. Already JosephHenry, in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, wastrying a similar plan, but it was not until February, 1870,that the Congress of the United States appropriated fundsand established a government weather service in the SignalCorps of the Army.

The immediate reason for this legislation in the UnitedStates was similar to that in France. At that time there wasa rapidly growing commerce on the Great Lakes, but stormdisasters were all too frequent. In 1869, nearly two thousandvessels were beached or sunk by gales on the Lakes. On theseacoasts, the situation was almost equally bad. The newservice was soon in operation. The first storm warning bythe United States government was sent out in November,1870.

During the next twenty years, blizzards, hail storms, tornadoes56and sudden wind storms of other kinds gave the newweather service a great deal of trouble. They brought a vividrealization of the great variety of surprises that lay in waitfor the storm hunters. No sooner had they found rules forthe issuance of warnings than a new kind of peril camealong. The service had been in the Signal Corps of the Army,but in 1891 it was turned over to the Department of Agriculturebecause of its value to the farmers. The desperatestruggle against storms continued, with many experiencedweathermen feeling very discouraged about the whole business.And then on February 15, 1898, the Battleship Mainewas sunk in Havana Harbor and war with Spain loomed onthe horizon.

On April 25, the United States declared war. The Spanishfleet left the Cape Verde Islands for Cuba and Americanwarships departed for the West Indies, to prepare the wayfor the movement of troops for the coming campaign inCuba. It was June 29, however, before the transports arrivedat Santiago, carrying seventeen thousand officers and mento support the United States fleet. By that time, the commanderson both sides had begun to worry about storms, forthe first hurricanes had appeared as early as June in someyears, bringing destructive winds and torrential rains tosome parts of Cuba and the surrounding area.

Willis Moore was Chief of the Weather Bureau. He hadbeen a sergeant in the Signal Corps, transferred when theservice was put in the Department of Agriculture. He knewvery well the difficulties of tracking storms and especially inthe West Indies, where only scattered weather reports couldbe obtained by cable from some of the islands. A bad hurricanecould easily sneak up on the American forces throughthe broad waters of the Caribbean, a predicament likely toarise if the Weather Bureau depended on cable messagesfrom native observers.

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Moore carried his worries to James Wilson, Secretary ofa*griculture, who decided that they should go to the President.At the White House, they soon had an audience withMcKinley, and Wilson presented the case. Moore had maps,charts and data on hurricanes and the disasters they hadcaused in the West Indies. Also, he had sketched a plan fora cordon of storm hunters on islands around the Caribbean,to protect the American fleet. He said that armadas had beendefeated, not by the enemy, but by the weather. He thoughtit probable that as many warships had been sent to the bottomby storms as by the fire of the enemy. The Presidentlistened respectfully at first, then with impatience at thelengthy discussion. He had made up his mind. InterruptingMoore, he got up, sat on the corner of his desk and declared:

“Wilson, I am more afraid of a West Indian hurricanethan I am of the entire Spanish Navy. Get this service startedat the earliest possible moment.”

Moore ventured to say, “Yes, indeed, Mr. President, butthe Weather Bureau will need the authority of Congress toorganize a weather service on foreign soil.”

The President told Wilson: “Report to Chairman Cannonof the Appropriations Committee at once. They are preparinga bill to give me all necessary powers to conduct the warand this authority can be included.”

It was soon done. As a part of the plan, a fast cruiser wasstationed at Key West, to carry the news to the fleet immediately,in case the Weather Bureau predicted a hurricane. Inthat event, the fleet might have abandoned the blockade, toget sea room and avoid the center of the storm.

With this authority, the Weather Bureau moved swiftlyto station men and equipment on the islands. Letters had tobe written to European countries for permission to send observersinto their possessions. But although the bill containingthe authority only passed Congress on July 7, observers58arrived as follows: July 21—Kingston, Santiago, Trinidad,San Domingo, St. Thomas; August 11—Barranquilla; August12—Barbados; August 18—St. Kitts; August 29—Panama.

Land fighting continued in the West Indies until August12, but the Spanish fleet was destroyed on the morning ofJuly 3. They made a desperate effort to escape from theharbor at Santiago, were shelled by American warships, andall were disabled or beached. Up to that time there had beenno tropical disturbances in the region. A small one hit nearTampa on August 3. Another small but vicious hurricaneswept the coast of Georgia on August 31. The first big oneof the 1898 season raked Barbados, St. Vincent and St. Luciaon September 10 to 11, and disappeared east of the Bahamas.

The stations set up by the storm hunters in 1898 formedthe backbone of the hurricane warning service which existstoday as a greatly improved system, including squadrons ofaircraft that fly into tropical storms to obtain essential datafor the forecasters. Before storm hunting could be operatedon a practical basis, however, it was necessary to find newmeans of communication. Dependence on messages by cablefrom scattered islands was not good enough.

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5. RADIO HELPS—THEN HINDERS

“Make it clear that I would veto the bill again.”—F. D. R.

In the 1930’s there was a strange turn of affairs in hurricanehunting. It had long been the purpose to keep ships out oftrouble, first by giving the mariner a law of storms and thenby sending warnings by radio. One morning in August, 1932,an indignant citizen came into a Weather Bureau office onthe Gulf Coast and wanted to know where the hurricanewas. The weatherman told him that there were no ship reportsin the area but the center seemed to be somewhere inthe central Gulf.

“What’s the matter with the radio reports from boats?”he asked.

“Because of the warnings we issued yesterday, all theships got out of the area and apparently there are no shipsclose enough this morning to do any good,” the weathermanexplained.

“Say, what kind of a deal is this?” demanded the citizen.“The only way we can tell where the center is located is toget radio reports from boats out there and you fellows chaseall the boats away from the storm.”

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“Well, that’s our business,” replied the Weather Bureauman in astonishment. “We are required by law to give warningsto shipping.”

“I don’t see it. I’m going to write to my Congressman andto the White House, if necessary, to get this straightenedout. What we ought to do is send boats out there to givereports when we need them,” was the final declaration bythe citizen who had one time been a shipmaster himself. Andhe did write to Congress and the White House. Othersjoined him. The argument over legislation began.

Long before the use of radio on shipboard, the location,intensity, and movement of hurricanes over the Atlantic,Caribbean, and Gulf, and along the coasts and between theislands in the West Indies had been judged by careful observationsof the wind, sea and sky. In the latter part of thenineteenth century, the storm hunters had become quite expertat it. Among the best were the Jesuits in the WestIndies and in the Far East. They watched the high cloudsmoving out in advance of the tropical storm, the sea swellsthat are stirred up by the big winds and travel rapidly ahead,and, finally, as the storm center drew near, they studied thewinds in the outer edges when they began to be felt locally.One of the pioneers in this work in the West Indies wasFather Benito Viñes, at Havana. He began giving out warningsas early as 1875 and by the end of the century was anauthority on the precursory signs of hurricanes, both for landobservers and for men on shipboard. By that time many ofthe Weather Bureau men along the coasts had become expertsand, after the Spanish War, they began work on theislands in the West Indies.

Observations from the islands came in by cable and fromthe American coasts they came by telegraph. In some areasthis information served very well, but far from land—in theopen Atlantic, Caribbean, or Gulf—there was not much to61go on. Along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, the last resort beforeputting up the red flags with black centers was theexperienced observer who had an unobstructed view of theopen sea. Even with the best of such reports, there was alwaysa question as to whether it was a big storm with itscenter far out or a small storm with its center close by. Thisfact, plus the rate of forward motion of the storm, couldmake a vital difference. A big, slow-moving storm gaveplenty of warning but a small, fast-moving one brought destructivewinds and tides almost as soon as the warningscould be sent out and the flags hoisted.

Aside from these indications, the storm hunters dependedheavily on the behavior of tropical storms in different parts ofthe season. They had average tracks by months, showinghow storms had moved both in direction and speed, andmuch other information on their normal behavior. But all toooften hurricanes took an erratic course, and now and thenthe center of a big one described a loop or a track shaped likea hairpin. A few of the storm hunters thought that someupper air movement—a “steering current”—controlled thehurricane’s path. The most obvious influence of this kind is thegeneral air circulation over the Atlantic—the large anticyclonenearly always centered over the ocean near the Azoresbut often extending westward to Bermuda or even to theAmerican mainland.

In the central regions of the Atlantic High, the modernsailor, unlike his predecessor in the sailing ship, is delightedby calms or gentle breezes and fair weather. On its northernedge, storms pass from America to Europe, stirring thenorthern regions of the ocean. On its southern edge, we findthe trade winds reaching down into the tropics and turningwestward across the West Indies and the Bahamas. A chartof these prevailing winds gives a fairly good indication ofthe ocean currents. Some of the surface waters are cold,62some warm. And where they wander through the tropics asequatorial currents or counter-currents, they are hot and,other things being favorable, we find a birthplace of storms.In some other tropical regions, the waters are cold and nohurricanes form there.

Near the equator, the earth is girdled by a belt of heat,calms, oppressive humidity, and persistent showers. This beltis called the “doldrums.” The trade winds of the NorthernHemisphere reach to its northern edge, while the trades belowthe equator brush its southern margin. Tropical stormsform now and then in and along the doldrum belt at certainseasons—just why, no one knows, for there are hundreds ofdays when everything seems right for a cyclone but nothinghappens except showers and the miserable sultriness of thetorrid atmosphere.

Stripped to his waist, the sailor sits on his bunk at nightwithout the slightest exertion while perspiration descends inrivulets from his head and shoulders. Nothing seems capableof making any appreciable change in this monotonous regime.But eight or ten times a year on the Atlantic, in summeror autumn, a storm rears its head in this oppressiveatmosphere. Its winds turn against the motions of the handsof a clock, seemingly geared to the edges of the vast, fair-weatherwhirlwind centered in mid-ocean. Around thesouthern and western margins of this great whirl the stormmoves majestically, gaining in power which it takes in somemanner from the heat and humidity—a power which woulddrain the energies of a thousand atom bombs. The crowningclouds push to enormous heights and deploy ahead of themonster—a foreboding of destruction in its path. Here is oneof the great mysteries of the sea. Its heated surface lets loosegreat quantities of moisture which somehow feed the monster—thatwe know—but what sets it off is almost as much ofa mystery as it was in the time of Columbus.

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Until lately, the investigators trying to study the hurricanein motion across the earth were as handicapped as if theyhad been stricken blind and dumb when its great cloudshield enveloped them. The darkening scud and rain shutoff all view of the upper regions by day and left them inutter darkness by night. No word came from ships caughtin its inward tentacles until long afterward, when the survivorshad come into port. Balloons tracing its winds disappearedin the clouds and were carried away. A method offollowing them above the clouds would have helped in theunderstanding of the upper regions in the same way thatreports from sailing ships had helped in the study of thesurface winds. This was the situation at the end of the SpanishWar. But a new era was opening.

As the century came to a close, Marconi was getting readyto span the far reaches of the Atlantic with his wireless apparatus.Already the miracle of the telephone carrying thehuman voice by wire had become a practical reality, withmore than a million subscribers in the United States, but itwas not destined to be used across the ocean for many years.Even that accomplishment would not have afforded muchhelp to the storm hunters. They had tried transoceanic messagesfor weather reporting when submarine cables werelaid across the Atlantic. Some weathermen thought at firstthat it would be possible to pick up reports of storms on theAmerican Coast and, allowing a certain number of days forthem to cross the Atlantic, to predict their arrival in Europe.This failed to work, for many storms die or merge withothers en route, and so many new disturbances are born inmid-Atlantic that it is necessary to have reports every dayfrom all parts of the ocean to tell when storms are likely toapproach European shores.

In 1900, Marconi was building a long distance transmittingstation in England, and readable signals had been sent64over a span of two hundred miles. No one then could foreseethe strange roles that this remarkable invention would playin storm hunting but it was obvious that messages could besent across long distances between ships at sea and fromship to shore. Already wireless had been used successfullybetween British war vessels on maneuvers. Actually, it wasdestined to be a powerful ally of the men who searched forhurricanes and reported their progress, but eventually thistrend reversed itself and radio was the cause of tropicalstorms being found and then lost again in critical circ*mstances.

The spread of wireless across the oceans began while theAmerican people still had vividly in mind the most terriblehurricane disaster in the history of the United States. Thenation had been shocked by news of a “tidal wave” whichhad virtually destroyed Galveston, Texas, on the night ofSeptember 8, 1900, and killed more than six thousand of itscitizens. Really it was not a tidal wave but a West Indianhurricane of almost irresistible force which had raised thetide to heights never known before and then topped it withan enormous storm wave as the center struck the low-lyingisland.

There was good reason to expect a disaster of this kind.A number of bad hurricanes had hit Galveston in the nineteenthcentury. The first of which we have any reliable recordstruck the island in 1818, when it was nothing more than arendezvous for pirates, principally the notorious Jean Lafitte.It is known that he was in full possession there in 1817, andit was rumored that he and his pirate crews were caught inthe hurricane of 1818 and had four of their vessels sunk ordriven on shore.

All along the Texas Coast, the inhabitants always haveworried about hurricanes and they have plenty of reason.Whole settlements have been destroyed by wind and wave.65One case deserves special mention. After the middle of thecentury, there had been a thriving town named Indianola inthe coastal region southwest of Galveston. The town gavepromise then of being the principal competitor of the islandcity for the commerce of the State of Texas. But in September,1875, a West Indian hurricane took a slow westwardcourse through the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico,and struck the Coast near Indianola. Vicious winds prostratedthe buildings while enormous waves swept throughthe streets, drowning a large share of the population.

Courageous citizens rebuilt the town and for more thanten years it prospered. Then in August, 1886, a bigger hurricaneravaged the town and the countryside and literallywiped the place out of existence. The survivors deserted thesite and after a few days nothing was left to mark the spotexcept sand, bushes and the wrecks of houses and carriages,a litter of personal property, and a great many dead animals.After the hurricane of 1875, the Signal Corps had establisheda weather station at Indianola, and in the storm of 1886 thebuilding fell in, overturning a lamp in the office and settingfire to the fallen timbers. The observer tried to escape butwas drowned in the street.

Both of these hurricanes caused much damage at Galveston,for the island was caught in the dangerous sector on theright of the center in both cases. And it was natural thatwhen, on September 8, 1900, the winds began to increaseand the tide rose above the ordinary marks at Galveston, thecitizens became alarmed, expecting a repetition of the bigblows of 1875 and 1886, which were still being mentioned inAugust and September every year when the Gulf becamerough and gusty northeast winds tugged at the palm treesand oleanders.

But on September 8 the wind kept on rising and the tidecrept above any previous records. The weather observers66feared the worst and dispatched a telegram to Washington,telling about the heavy storm swells flooding the lower partsof the city and adding, “Such high water with opposingwinds never seen before.” It was not altogether unexpected.Beginning on September 4, the hurricane had been trackedacross Cuba and into the Gulf toward the Texas Coast, butthis rise of the sea was more than the observers had bargainedfor.

By noon, the wind and sea were much worse, the fall ofthe barometer was ominous, and the Signal Corps observers,two brothers named Isaac and Joe Cline, took turns goingout to the beach and reporting to Washington. At 4:00 P.M.,all communications failed. Isaac found the water waist deeparound his home and the wreckage of beach homes batteredby waves was flying through the streets. At 6:30, Joe, whohad come to the south end of the city to view the Gulf,joined his brother and found the water neck deep in thestreets and roofs of houses and timbers flying overhead afterbeing tossed into the air by giant waves. As the peril grew,fifty neighbors gathered for refuge in the Cline home becauseit was stronger than others in that part of the city.

At 6:30, in the weather office, one of the assistant observers,Joe Blagden, looked first at the steep downwardcurve on the recording barometer and then noted that thewind register had failed as the gale rose to one hundredmiles an hour. To repair the gauge, he climbed to the roofand crawled out, holding on tightly in the gusts and edgingforward in the lulls. Reaching the instrument support, hesaw that the wind gauge had been blown away, so hecrawled down from the roof, after taking one brief, horrifiedlook over the stricken city.

There was no longer any island—just buildings protrudingfrom the Gulf, with the mainland miles away. Down the67street filled with surging water, the spire of a church bentin the wind and then let go as the tower collapsed. The sideof a brick building crumbled. As each terrible gust heldsway for a few moments, the air was full of debris. The topstory of a brick building was sheared off. The scene was likethat caused by the destructive blasts at the center of a tornadobut, instead of the minute or two of the twister, itlasted for hours. Darkness, under low racing storm clouds,swiftly closed over the city in the deafening roar of giantwinds and the crash of broken buildings. The frightened observerssaw that the right front sector of the hurricane wasbearing down on the island.

Out at the beach, block after block of houses, high-raisedto keep them above the tide marks of previous storms, hadbeen swept into the center of the city and were being usedas battering rams to destroy succeeding blocks, until a greatpile of wreckage held against the mountainous waves. Afteran hour or two that seemed like an eternity, the hurricanecenter began crossing the western end of the island, and thecity on the eastern end was swept by enormous seas whichbrought the water level to twenty feet behind the dam ofwrecked houses. Everything floated, many frame buildings,or what was left of them, being carried out into the Gulf.

The Cline house disintegrated and more than thirty peoplein it drowned, among them Isaac’s wife. The othersdrifted on wreckage, rising and falling with huge waves andtrying desperately to hold timbers between them and thewind, to ward off flying boards, slate, and shingles. Onewoman, seeing her home was giving way to the wind andgoing down in the water, fastened her baby to the roof byhammering a big nail through one of his wrists. He survived.How many drowned or were killed in that awful night wasnever known. The estimates finally rose above six thousand.68Doubt about the number was due to the presence of manysummer visitors at the beaches and, besides, there was noaccurate check on the missing, partly because the cemeterywas washed out and the recently buried dead were confusedwith the bodies of storm victims. The aftermath was horriblebeyond description.

Galveston had been on the right edge of the hurricanecenter. If the city had been equally close to the center onthe left side, the destruction of wind and waves would havebeen bad, but nothing like that actually experienced. On theleft side—that is, left when looking forward along the line ofprogress—the tide would have fallen rapidly as the centerpassed and the gales would have lacked the peak velocitiesso damaging to brick buildings and other structures whichhad withstood previous hurricanes. Here was a sharp challengeto the storm hunters. To tell in advance how devastatingthe hurricane might be, they would have to be able topredict its path with sufficient accuracy to say with someassurance whether the center would pass to the left or rightof a coastal city.

This case shows how hard it was to make predictions withoutradio. During the approach of the Galveston hurricane,the storm hunters knew the position of its center only whenit crossed Cuba and again when it struck the Texas Coast.While it was in the Gulf, weather reports from coastalpoints indicated that there was a hurricane outside, movingwestward, but the winds, clouds, tides, and waves at thosepoints would have been about the same with a big storm farout over the water as with a small storm close to land. Soonafter the Galveston disaster there was a growing hope thatwireless messages from ships at sea would provide this vitalinformation in time for adequate warnings.

Progress in the use of wireless at sea really was fast, although69it seemed very slow to the storm hunters at the time.The first ocean-weather report to the Weather Bureau wasreceived from the Steamship New York, in the western Atlantic,on December 3, 1905. It was not until August 26,1909, that a vessel at sea reported from the inside of a hurricane.It was the Steamship Cartago, near the Coast of Yucatan.The master estimated the winds at one hundred milesan hour. This big storm struck the Mexican Coast onAugust 28, drowned fifteen hundred people and createdalarming tides and very rough seas all along the Texas Coast.Thousands of people at Galveston and at many other pointsbetween there and Brownsville stood on the Gulf front andwatched the tremendous waves breaking on the beaches.

Gradually the number of weather reports by radio increasedand the work of the storm hunters improved. WorldWar I and enemy submarines stopped the messages fromships temporarily, but after 1919 weather maps were extendedover the oceans. Other countries co-operated in theexchange of messages and the centers of storms werespotted, even when far out of range of the nearest coast orisland. Cautionary warnings were sent to vessels in the lineof advance. By this means, the service of the storm hunterswas of extreme value in the safety of life and property afloatas well as on shore.

By 1930 another trouble had developed serious proportionsas a consequence of this efficiency in the issuance ofwarnings. Vessel masters soon learned that it was dangerousto be caught in the predicted path of a hurricane, and whena warning was received by radio, they steamed out of theline of peril as quickly as possible. Thus, as the storm advanced,fewer and fewer ships were in a position to makeuseful reports and in a day or two the hurricane was said tobe “lost,” that is, there were too few reports to spot the70center accurately, or in some cases there were no reports atall. The storm hunters could only place it vaguely somewherein a large ocean area. When it is impossible to trackthe center of a hurricane accurately, it is impossible also toissue accurate warnings.

In 1926, a hurricane crossed the Atlantic from the CapeVerde Islands to the Bahamas and threatened southernFlorida. After it left the latter islands, weather reports fromships became scarce and the center was too close to the coastfor safety when hurricane warnings were issued, althougheverybody in southern Florida knew that there was a severestorm outside. More than one hundred lives were lost inMiami and property damage reached one hundred milliondollars. In 1928, another big hurricane started in the vicinityof the Cape Verdes, swept across the Atlantic, and devastatedPuerto Rico and parts of southern Florida. Loss of lifewas placed at three hundred in Puerto Rico and at twothousand in Florida, mostly in the vicinity of Lake Okeechobee.

In these years and up to 1932, several hurricanes were“lost” in the Gulf of Mexico and citizens of the coastal areasbegan making demands for a storm patrol. They wantedthe U. S. Coast Guard to send cutters out to search for disturbancesor explore their interiors and send information byradio to the Weather Bureau. There was opposition from theforecasters—they didn’t know what they would do with thecutters. If they had enough ship reports to know where tosend the cutters, they would not need the latters’ reports,and if they had no reports, they would not know where tosend the vessels. Besides, it was the government’s businessto keep ships out of storms—not to send them deliberatelyinto danger.

The season of 1933 established an all-time record of71twenty-one tropical storms in the West Indian region. Manyof them reached the Gulf States or the South Atlantic Coastand the controversy about sending ships into hurricanes wasresumed, resulting in legislation containing the authority,but President Roosevelt vetoed it. By 1937 the criticism ofthe warnings and the arguments about Coast Guard cuttersbegan again. This time it involved Senators and Congressmenfrom Gulf States and finally the White House wasembroiled.

In August, 1937, a delegation of citizens came to Washingtonand brought their complaints direct to the WhiteHouse. The President arranged a conference so that thestorm hunters, Coast Guard officials and others could explainagain why vessels should not go out into the Gulf of Mexicoto get data when the presence of a hurricane was suspected.Actually, ships were being saved by the warnings whichkept them out of danger, and the criticism was based on fearof hurricanes rather than any deficiency of the warnings withrespect to the coastal areas.

When the conference was held at the White House, thePresident was busy with other matters and James Rooseveltpresided. The President had given him a note to the effectthat he should receive the delegation in a most pleasantmanner but that it would be dangerous and fruitless to tryto send Coast Guard vessels into hurricanes.

The President’s note to his son said in part:

“Make it clear that I would veto the bill again and thatinstead of a hurricane patrol the safest and cheapest thingwould be a study of hurricanes from all of the given pointson land and around the Gulf of Mexico. This might involvesending special study groups to points in Mexico, such asTampico, Valparaiso, Tehuantepec, Yucatan, Campeche,also to the west end of Cuba and possibly to some of the72smaller islands in the region. What the Congressmen andothers in Texas want is study and information and it is mythought that this can be done more cheaply and much moresafely on land instead of sending a ship into the middle ofa hurricane.”

The delegation gathered in an outer office at the WhiteHouse. It happened that the Coast Guard had a new Commandant,Admiral Waesche, who had not been advised ofthe views of the White House, the Coast Guard, and theWeather Bureau. In the few minutes before the conferencestarted, there was no opportunity to inform the Admiral, forhe was engaged in conversation with a group of Senatorsand Congressmen. As soon as the conferees were assembled,James Roosevelt called on the Admiral to speakfirst. To the amazement of all present, he indorsed the ideain full and promised to send cutters out in the Gulf whenevera request was received from the Weather Bureau.Nobody knew what to do next, so James adjourned theconference, and after everybody had shaken hands anddeparted, he went back to his father to explain what hadhappened.

Thus began a brief period of hunting hurricanes in theGulf of Mexico with Coast Guard cutters. During the nexttwo seasons, the Weather Bureau forecasters notified theCoast Guard when observations were needed. In each instancea cutter left port in accordance with the agreement,but as soon as the vessel was in the open Gulf the masterwas in supreme command and he would not deliberately puthis ship and crew in jeopardy. Cutters went out in a fewcases, but most of the disturbances to be reconnoitered werecrossing the southern Gulf, out of range of merchantmen onroutes to Gulf ports. In sailing directly toward the centerunder these conditions, the Coast Guard commander would73have been traveling into the most dangerous sector, and thedistance he could make good in a day in rough water couldnot have been much larger than the normal travel of a tropicalstorm, certainly not a safe margin.

Irate citizens complained to Washington, first, that theWeather Bureau refused to call on the Coast Guard for observations;and, second, that the Coast Guard refused tocarry out the Weather Bureau’s instructions. After two orthree years, no special information of any particular valuewas obtained and the scheme was forgotten.

In accordance with the ideas expressed by PresidentRoosevelt, but without any support from Congress, somestudy groups and other special arrangements secured usefulresults on coasts and islands, but it was obvious after 1940that automatic instruments for exploration of the upper atmosphereand reconnaissance by aircraft offered the bestprospects for improvement in the service.

The most destructive hurricane during this period devastatedlarge areas of Long Island and New England in September,1938, taking six hundred lives and destroyingproperty valued at about a third of a billion dollars. Thisevent aroused general criticism of the storm hunters for tworeasons. First, this disturbance, while it was in the West Indiesand during its course as far as Hatteras, behaved likeothers of great intensity, but from that point northward itsforward motion was without precedent. During the daywhen it passed into New England, its progressive motionexceeded fifty miles an hour, hence little time remained forthe issue of warnings after its increased rapidity of motionwas detected. Second, the people were absorbed in news ofnegotiations in Europe to prevent the outbreak of a worldwar, and storm news on the radio was largely suppressed tomake way for reports of the European crisis.

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Here it might be said that the storm hunters lost anotherbattle, but it is probable that the loss of life in this hurricanewould have exceeded that at Galveston in 1900 if therehad been no real improvement in the warning service in themeantime.

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6. THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE

“—the whirlwind’s heart of peace.”—Tennyson

After the White House conference in 1937 about sendingships into hurricanes, some of the Weather Bureau forecastersexpressed the idea that the best method of trackinghurricanes would be by airplane. What they had in mindwas flying around the edge of the storm and getting three ormore bearings from which the location of the center couldbe accurately estimated. Nothing came of the idea at thetime but after World War II broke out in Europe, the talkabout use of planes increased. It was the Weather Bureau’splan to contract with commercial flyers to go out and getthe observations on request from the forecasters. But no oneseriously considered sending planes into the centers of hurricanes.No one knew what would happen to the plane.There was no very definite information as to what the flyerwould encounter in the upper layers in the region aroundthe center.

Of course, it was known that at the surface of the earthor the sea there was a small calm region in the center—an76oddity in the weather, for no other kind of large storm hassuch a center. The tornado may have, but it is a very smallstorm in comparison with a hurricane. Its writhing, twistingfunnel at the vortex is hollow, according to the testimony ofa few men who have looked up into it and lived to tell aboutit. In the tropical storm, however, nothing was known aboutthe central winds in the upper levels. There was no proofthat strong winds did not blow outward from the center upthere and a plane would be thrown into the ring of powerfulwinds around the eye. The only way to find out was tofly into it and have a look, but there was no one at the momentwho wanted to venture into it.

On the outer fringes of the hurricane, where light, gustywinds blew across deep ocean waters, stirred at the surfaceby giant sea swells, the hurricane hunters were fairly wellsatisfied with their findings. In the middle regions, wheredeluges of rain slanted through raging winds and low-flyingclouds, the grim fact was that they knew amazingly littleabout what was going on in the upper layers. Their balloonssent up to explore the racing winds above were lost in thickclouds before they had risen more than a few hundred feet.

On beyond, somewhere in that last inner third of thewhirlwind, the increasing gales rose to a deadly peak andtorrents of rain merged with the spindrift of mountainouswave crests to blot out the view of the observer. Within thiswhirling ring of air and water lay the vortex. When themariner entered, sometimes slowly, but more often suddenly,the wind and rain ceased and usually there would be noviolence except the rise and fall of the sea surface, like aboiling pot on a scale which was huge in fact but small inproportion to the extent of the storm itself. The entire whirlingbody of air would likely be bigger than the state ofOhio; the calm central region might be the size of the city ofColumbus.

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Here in this inner third were the mysteries. Where couldall this air go—streaming so violently around and in towardthat mysterious center but never getting there? It must goup, the storm hunters argued, for what else could produceall this tremendous rainfall if not the upward rush of moistair to be cooled in the upper levels? And then, why no rainor wind in the central region? Some argued that the air mustdescend in the vortex, growing warmer and dry in descent,but why the descent? And finally, if the air was moving upwardin all this vast area outside the calm center, what finallybecame of it?

Even if the storm hunters were unable to answer thesequestions, they could render a service of enormous value ifthey could track the storm and predict its movements. Butthey knew that the only sure way to track a hurricane overthe ocean was to find its center and follow it persistently andaccurately from day to day. Tests had shown that it was notpractical to send ships into the storm to find its center andreport by radio. Ships couldn’t move fast enough. If thestorm hunters had known enough about it, they might haveconcluded that a plane could enter the storm in the leastdangerous sector and find its way swiftly to the calm centerthrough some upper level without being hurled into theangry sea. If it reached the center of the vortex—usuallycalled the “eye of the hurricane”—the navigator might beable to see the sky and the sun by day, the stars by night.Here the pilot might be able to figure out his position, as anocean-going vessel does on some occasions, and that wouldbe the location of the storm to be placed on the charts ofthe storm hunters in the weather office. But nobody took itseriously until after the United States got into the SecondWorld War.

When the request for funds to hire commercial flyers inhurricane emergencies was presented to the Bureau of the78Budget, the examiners asked why the Weather Bureau didn’ttry to get the co-operation of the Army and Navy. Whycouldn’t they have their pilots carry out the flights asneeded? There was some talk about it in 1942, but at thattime there were no experienced Army or Navy pilots tospare.

Naturally, the military pilots who thought about flyinginto the eyes of hurricanes wanted to know what it was likein the upper levels and in the center. Air Force pilots whoexpected to go on bombing missions to Germany thought itmight be more dangerous flying into the vortex of a hurricanethan over an enemy stronghold with the air full of flakand Nazi fighters rising on all sides. Nobody looked upon theassignment with any enthusiasm. One discouraging fact wasthat the reports of shipmasters who had been in the eyes ofhurricanes didn’t agree very well. Few of them had theability to describe what they saw. And those who had theability told a story that was not reassuring. For example,one of the first was the master of the ship Idaho, caught inthe China Sea in September, 1869, as a typhoon struck. Withlittle of the precious sea room needed to maneuver, the shipsoon was obliged to lie to and take it. Afterward, when bysome miracle the ship had made its way to shore, the mastercalmly described his experiences while they were fresh:

“With one wild, unearthly, soul-chilling shriek the windsuddenly dropped to a calm, and those who had been inthese seas before knew that we were in the terrible vortexof the typhoon, the dreaded center of the whirlwind. Tillthen the sea had been beaten down by the wind, and onlyboarded the vessel when she became completely unmanageable;but now the waters, relieved from all restraint, rose intheir own might. Ghastly gleams of lightning revealed thempiled up on every side in rough, pyramidal masses, mountainhigh—the revolving circle of wind, which everywhere inclosed79them, causing them to boil and tumble as though theywere being stirred in some mighty cauldron. The ship, nolonger blown over on her side, rolled and pitched, and wastossed about like a cork. The sea rose, toppled over, and fellwith crushing force upon her decks. Once she shipped immensebodies of water over both bows, both quarters, andthe starboard gangway at the same moment. Her seamsopened fore and aft. Both above and below, men werepitched about the decks and many of them injured. Attwenty minutes before eight o’clock the vessel entered thevortex; at twenty minutes past nine o’clock it had passed andthe hurricane returned blowing with renewed violence fromthe north, veering to the west. The ship was now only anunmanageable wreck.”

For many years, the classic case was the obliging typhoonthat moved across the Philippines with its center passingdirectly over the fully-equipped weather observatory inManila. It happened on October 20, 1882. The wind whichcame ahead of the center was of destructive violence, reachingabove 120 miles an hour in a final mad rush from thewest-northwest before the calm set in. It was not an absolutecalm. There were alternate gusts and lulls. The way thewinds acted led the observer to think that the center wasabout sixteen miles in diameter. He said:

“The most striking thing about it was the sudden changein temperature and humidity. The temperature jumped from75° to 88°. The air was saturated at 75° but the humiditydropped from 100% to 53% in the center and then rose to100% again as the center passed. When the wind suddenlyceased at the beginning of the calm and the sun came out,many people opened their windows but they slammed themshut right away, because the hot, dry air seemed to burnthe skin.”

For more than fifty years after this, there were arguments80about the reasons for these changes in temperature andhumidity. Some scientists claimed that they were causedmerely by the heating of the sun in a clear sky and that theair which preceded and followed the center was cooled andsaturated by the rain. Some of the Jesuit scientists at Maniladid not agree. One weatherman showed, for example, that ifthey took air at 75° and 100% humidity and heated it to 88°,the humidity would fall only to about 61% and that the airat Manila at that time of year had never had such a lowhumidity (53%), even when the sun was shining.

The general conclusion was that the air descends in theeye of the tropical storm. At least, they were convinced thatit descended in the Manila typhoon. When air descends, itis compressed, coming into lower levels where the pressureis higher. This compression causes its temperature to riseand the air then has a bigger capacity for moisture. In otherwords, the air becomes warmer and drier. There never hasbeen full agreement on this question. Certainly, in somecases, the air is not warmer and drier in the center.

In later years, typhoon centers passed over other observatoriesand had various effects. However, one struck Formosaon September 16, 1912, and the calm center passed over theobservatory long after the sun had gone down. In this case,the temperature jumped from 75° to 94° and this could notbe explained by the direct heat of the sun. But there weredifferent results in other cases and in one instance the temperaturefell a little.

All of these observations were confined to ground leveland what the observer could see from there or from shipboard,where he was being bounced around by violent seasand sometimes was thoroughly drenched by the mountainouswaves breaking over the decks. One example was theIdaho in the typhoon in 1869.

A half-century later, two British destroyers were trapped81in the same region by an unheralded typhoon. Setting outfor Shanghai in the early morning, they rounded the ShantungPromontory and headed across the Yellow Sea at fifteenknots, with sunlight gleaming on the water ahead. Theweather looked favorable, barometer high, wind light, butit failed to stay that way very long. By ten o’clock there wasa strong wind on the port beam, blowing gustily from theeast, and an ominous rising sea. Reducing speed to elevenknots, the commander of the destroyer in the lead—calledthe Exe—found by dead reckoning that he was only abouteight miles from land and, although he was running almostparallel to the coast, their situation was beginning to lookdangerous. He had to make a decision as to his future course.

Among other disturbing factors was the design of theships. These destroyers were of a new type, with a largeforecastle which made it likely that they would drag theiranchors if they tried to lie-to in a sheltered place on thatexposed coast. The two ships held their course. By noon thevisibility had dropped to less than a mile. The commanderfeared that he would be unable to identify any land he mightsee through the increasing gloom and concluded that hischances of finding a safe shelter among the rock-bound islandsalong the coast was fast becoming nil. So he signaledto the other destroyer to head fast for the open sea. In thenext hour, the wind and sea mounted rapidly and he wascertain that they were being overtaken by the dangeroussector of the typhoon. Now they were in real trouble!

His first lieutenant was the last of his officers out of school,so the commander asked him about the law of storms andthe proper course under the circ*mstances. According to thelatest books which the lieutenant had studied, they shouldhave steamed toward the northwest but this would havethrown them onto a lee shore. The commander decided thatthere was no choice except to hold their course and run the82chance of going into the dreaded center of the typhoon. Sothey got busy, doubly securing all movable gear and seeingthat all was snug for a frightening trip into the unknown.The commander was annoyed, not so much by the batteringthe ship was taking as by the cheerful attitude of the lieutenant,who seemed to be looking forward to this new experience.

In this miserable situation they fought heavy gales andtowering seas for hours. The other destroyer had been lostfrom view but now appeared close on their beam. She assumedstrange attitudes in the growing darkness. “At times,”the commander said, “she would be poised on the crest ofa great wave, her fore part high above the sea and her keelvisible up to the conning tower; the after part, also high inthe roaring wind, leaving her propellers racing far out of thewater. Then she would take a dive and an intervening wavewould blot out this ‘merry picture,’ and then, to our reliefas the wave passed, a mast would appear waving on theother side and then we would catch sight of her funnels andfinally her hull, still above water.” As darkness closed in, thecrew of the Exe were glad they could no longer see the otherdestroyer for it made them vividly conscious that their ownlittle ship was going through equally dangerous contortions.

During this time the destroyer Exe had suffered muchdamage. The upper deck had been swept clear. Much waterwas getting below and the pumps were choked. The commanderwas weary from holding on to the bridge and tryingto keep his balance. The crew was frightened more than everby the increasing power of the storm and the inexorable approachof the unknown horrors in the center.

The awful night passed in this terrifying manner, with thebarometer steadily going lower, and the quartermasterstraining to keep the craft on course. With powerful windsfull in his face and drenched by spray, he managed to hold83the ship most of the time and made the best use of her highbows. When he failed and allowed the ship to get a fewpoints off course, the steep waves threw her on her beamends and came crashing along the upper decks, making it atough job to get her back with her nose against the elements,and the high bows as a sort of shield against the brutal sea.Besides, the compass light had been beaten out and in theblackness of the storm he had no way of judging the directionexcept by the crash of the wind and water in his face.

In a storm like this, the crew think that they are probablyon their last voyage. They can feel tremendous masses ofwater strike with immense force and, after the shock, thevessel shivering as though the hull had given way, leavingthem on the verge of diving toward the bottom of the sea.Sometimes the Exe was mostly out of water—they couldsense it in the darkness—and then she took what they calleda “belly-flopper” and every man felt sick, fearing the end hadcome and, after a moment, fearing just the opposite—that itwould not be the end, after all, and they would have to takemore of the same.

Now the lieutenant crawled out from below and, by aseries of lurches between gusts, pulled himself to the side ofhis commander. “Things look better,” he shouted. “Thebarometer is up a little.” But soon after that he found he hadmade an error. He had read it an inch too high. Actually, ithad dropped almost an inch in three hours, showing that thecenter must now be drawing near. Shortly the rain ceasedand the wind dropped. At 7:00 A.M. they were passing intothe vortex.

The ocean now presented a fantastic spectacle. They couldsee for several miles—a cauldron of steep towering cones ofwater with spray at the crests—a brightening sky over achaotic sea. Some of these columns of water would clashtogether on different courses and produce a weird effect.84The wind became light and a few tired birds sought havenon deck. This scene lasted only ten to twenty minutes andthen the dreaded squalls ahead of the opposite semicircleof the typhoon began to hit the vessel. By 7:20 A.M. thefull force of the most vicious gales was bringing new miseriesto the exhausted crew.

After three hours, the typhoon began to abate and thecommander was feeling a little easier about his damagedship until one of the officers reported that they had sprunga leak. The compartment containing the fore magazines wasflooded and soon filled up. “So the destroyer went her way,”the commander reported, “with her nose down and her tailin the air.” She made it to the mouth of the Yang-tse at11:00 A.M. Up the river a distance they found their companiondestroyer. Its commander had been much impressedby the blue sky and calm in the vortex, also by the largenumber of birds, mostly kingfishers, that came on board.

Examination of the Exe showed that a part of the bottomhad been battered in, shearing the rivets and opening theseams. After thinking about his good fortune in comingthrough the typhoon, the commander wrote in his report:“When I recall (which I can without any trouble) those awfulbelly-floppers the craft took, and realized by inspectionin dock what amount of holding power a countersunk rivetcan possibly have in a three-sixteenth of an inch plate, Iwonder that I am now in this world.” Actually, the commanderof the Exe had escaped the worst of it. If he hadmissed the vortex and had passed through the right edge,where the forward drive of the typhoon was added to theforce of the violent inner whirl, he might not have lived totell the story. Many others have failed under similar circ*mstances.

Shanghai suffered severely from this typhoon. A flood in85the river and on a low-lying island drowned five thousandChinese.

All these accounts agreed on one thing—the ring of galesaround the center. Some were more violent than others but thering was always there. On the eye of the hurricane, however,there was less agreement. A strange case was the experienceon the American steamship Wind Rush, in October, 1930,off the west coast of Mexico. She was caught in a violenthurricane and the master suddenly saw that the ship hadpassed into the vortex. The second officer, in his report, said:“From 9 A.M. to 10 A.M. we were in a calm spot with nowind and smooth sea, and the sun was shining.”

There have been similar instances of vessels in the vortexof hurricanes without much disturbance of the sea, but theseare exceptions. Most of them have reported confused crossseas, described as “pyramidal” or “tumultuous.” In November,1932, the master of the British steamship Phemius, ona voyage from Savannah to the Panama Canal, was so unfortunateas to become entangled in the outer circulation ofa late-season hurricane moving westward in the CaribbeanSea. It turned sharply northward and the Phemius wastrapped by the ring of fierce gales in the central region. Sherolled through an arc of 70° while the gusts came with suchforce that the funnel was blown away. The master put thewind at two hundred miles an hour. Hatches were blownoverboard like matchwood, derricks and lifeboats werewrecked, and the upper and lower bridges were blown in.The ship was rendered helpless and was carried with thehurricane in an unmanageable condition.

Twice the Phemius drifted into the vortex, with high, confusedseas and light winds. The second time the vessel wasbesieged by hundreds of birds. They took refuge in everypart of the ship but lived only a few hours. Driving towardthe coast of Cuba, the hurricane ravaged the town of Santa86Cruz del Sur, hurling a tremendous storm wave across allthe low ground, engulfing the town, and drowning twenty-fivehundred persons out of a population of four thousand.The Phemius was left behind in a helpless condition andwas taken in tow by a salvage steamer.

The width of the eye of a hurricane commonly varies froma few miles to twenty or twenty-five. The smallest knownwas entered by a fishing boat, the Sea Gull, in the Gulf ofMexico, on July 27, 1936. The master, Leon Davis, was fishinga few miles east of Aransas Pass, Texas, when he becameinvolved in a small hurricane. “Suddenly,” CaptainDavis said, “the wind died down, the sun shone brightlyand the rain ceased. For a space of about a mile and a half,a clear circular area prevailed; the dense curtain of rain wasseen all around the edge of the circle; and the roar of thewind was heard in the distance.” On the other hand, one ofthe largest eyes yet known attended a big hurricane in October,1944. It blasted its way across Cuba and entered Floridaon the west coast, near Tampa. As it neared Jacksonville,the calm center was stretched out to the remarkable distanceof about seventy miles. This was a kind of freak; some of thestorm hunters thought that it had been distorted and finallydrawn into an elongated area by its passage over the westernend of Cuba.

All of the available records of this kind were consulted indue time by the men who were assigned to the perilous dutyof flying military planes into the vortices of hurricanes inthe West Indies and into typhoon centers in the Pacific. Butone of the best of these reports—of weather and sea conditionsobserved on many ships caught at the same time in thecentral region of a big typhoon—was not available until longafter it happened. The Japanese kept it secret for seventeenyears.

The reason for keeping the data secret was the fact that87while on grand maneuvers, the RED Imperial Japanese Fleetwas outmaneuvered by a pair of typhoons and was caughtin the center of one of them and severely damaged. It happenedin 1935 and was not reported for publication in Americauntil 1952.

Just how this happened is not altogether clear. It was inthe middle of September, 1935, when the first typhoonappeared, northwest of the island of Saipan. It increased infury as it moved slowly toward Japan. On the twenty-fifthit crossed western Honshu and roared into the Sea of Japan,headed northeastward in the direction of the Japanese Fleet.Soon after this, it dissipated. Before it weakened, however,another typhoon had formed near Saipan and started towardJapan. It turned more to the northward than the first typhoonand missed Japan altogether. As it approached Honshu, lateon the twenty-fifth, the RED Imperial Fleet was passingthrough the Strait of Tsugaru into the Pacific—squarely infront of the typhoon center.

The logical explanation for this apparent blunder is thatthe commanders wanted more sea room than was at hand inthe northeast Sea of Japan to maneuver in the first typhoonand hoped to get well out in the open Pacific before theycould be cornered by the second one. But it turned northeastwardand went faster and farther out in the Pacific thanthey had expected. In fact, its forward motion was morethan forty miles an hour in these last hours before its furiouswinds surrounded the fleet.

It was a bad calculation for the naval commanders andperhaps for the weather forecasters. Among the latter, H.Arakawa, one of the foremost typhoon students in Japan,was then on the staff of forecasters in the Central MeteorologicalObservatory in Tokyo. He was in part responsible forthe predictions. In 1952 he made the report which was published88by the U. S. Weather Bureau early in 1953. Takingthe view of the weatherman, Arakawa said that although thedamage to the fleet was unfortunate, there was fortunatelya magnificent collection of reports from the central regionof the typhoon for scientific study.

The fleet was caught in the central part of the big stormon the twenty-sixth of September. Among the ships involved,many of them damaged, were destroyers, cruisers, aircraftcarriers, a seaplane carrier, mine-layers, transport ships, submarines,torpedo boats, and a submarine depot ship. Thefleet suffered damage mostly from the tremendous waves inthe right rear quadrant of the typhoon. Here the rapid forwardmotion of the storm was added to the wind circulationand the seas were driven to excessive heights. In his report,Arakawa had a footnote: “The bows of two destroyers,Hatsuyuki and Yugiri, were broken off as a result of excessivestorm waves, and many officers and sailors were lost.”

In the calm center, the clouds broke and faint sunlightcame through. The diameter of the eye was nine or tenmiles. To the right of the eye, some of the waves measuredmore than sixty feet in height. The maximum roll of the shipsin this area—the total angle from port to starboard—reached75° on some of the ships. The wind was steadily aboveeighty miles an hour; the gusts were not measured but probablywent as high as 125 miles an hour.

Many of the ships took frequent observations while in thetyphoon and the data would have been extremely valuableif released to the storm hunters at that time, but when thereport was published in 1953 a great deal of new data hadbeen obtained by airplane, both at the surface—where Arakawa’sobservations were confined—and at higher levels. Itwas a little more than nine years after this Japanese incidentwhen the U. S. Third Fleet was caught in a typhoon east of89the Philippines and suffered at least as much damage as theJapanese in 1935.

One fact is clear. For many years the storm hunters hadbeen gathering information about hurricane and typhooncenters from observations on land and sea but they knewvery little of what went on there in the upper air. WorldWar II brought a new era.

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7. FIRST FLIGHT INTO THE VORTEX!

“Whirlwinds are most violent near their centers.”—Euripides

After war broke out in Europe in 1939, the job of findingand predicting hurricanes became steadily more difficult.Ships of countries at war ceased to report weather by radioand fewer vessels of neutral nations dared to risk submarineattack. After Pearl Harbor, the American merchant marinealso stopped their weather messages and the oceans wereblanked out on the weather maps. Already the British hadbeen confronted by the lack of weather reports from theAtlantic and the seas around the British Isles, and this wasextremely serious in their fight against Nazi air power.

Notwithstanding the alarming scarcity of planes for militarypurposes, the British were forced to send aircraft onroutine weather missions. They usually flew a track in theshape of a triangle—for example, one leg of the triangle northwestwarduntil well out at sea, a second leg southward acrossthe ocean about an equal distance, and the last leg back to91home base. Other triangles were flown over Europe and backand over the North Sea. As time went on, the pilots of theseobservation planes gained much experience in flying theweather, including some fairly bad storms, but no one hadoccasion to fly into a hurricane. There was a good deal oftalk about the situation in the United States in 1942, however,because of the danger that the West Indian regionmight become a theater of war, if the Nazi armies gainedcontrol of West Africa and attacked the United States byair, across Brazil and the Caribbean.

With this threat from the southeast, the United States tookaction, which was a repetition of the events during the SpanishWar in 1898. Military weather stations were set up inthe West Indies and aircraft were prepared to fly weathermissions in the area. At the same time, the United States wasgetting ready to ferry planes across the South Atlantic viathe Caribbean, the South American Coast and AscensionIsland. It was very definitely evident early in 1942 that hurricanesmight play a critical role if the West Indies became atheater of war. By 1943, however, there were two surprisingturns of affairs. The Allies invaded Africa late in 1942 andthe first flight into a hurricane center, unscheduled and unauthorized,came in 1943.

The first to fly into the vortex of a hurricane was JosephB. Duckworth, a veteran pilot of the scheduled airlines, whowas at the time a colonel in the Army Air Corps Reserve,in command of the Instrument Flying Instructors School atBryan, Texas. It was one of those rare combinations of circ*mstancesby which the man with the necessary skill, experience,daring, and inclination happened to be at the rightplace at the right time. With a full appreciation of the danger,he flew a single engine airplane deliberately into thehurricane and proceeded on a direct heading into the calmcenter, looked around, and flew back to Bryan. Spotting his92weather officer, he bundled him into the back seat and duplicatedthe feat immediately!

Joe Duckworth was born in Savannah, Georgia, on September8, 1902, which, incidentally, was the anniversary dateof the terrible Galveston disaster of 1900, and it was a hurricaneat Galveston into which he flew in 1943. Joe’s motherwas Mary Haines, a Savannah girl. His father, Hubert Duckworth,was a naturalized Englishman who had been sent tothe States to take over the American cotton offices of Joe’sgrandfather, after whom he was named. When Joe was twoyears of age, the family moved to Macon, Georgia, wherehis father was vice-president of the Bibb ManufacturingCompany.

Joe’s first memory of anything connected with aviationwas when his parents took him to the fair grounds at Maconto see Eugene Ely fly in an early Wright-type biplane. Thewind was not right for a flight. Pilots were cautious in thosedays and Ely didn’t go up. Joe and his parents were lookingat the plane when his father remarked, “You know, some daythey will be carrying passengers in these things.” His motheranswered, “Don’t be silly, Hubert, you might as well try tofly to the moon.” Joe had a vague idea at the time that hewould like to fly when he grew up. Long afterward, he did.He says, “Many times in the nineteen thirties I captainedan Eastern Airlines plane over Macon and looked down onthe old fair grounds and recalled the thrill I had on seeingmy first airplane and the remarks of my mother and father.”

After his father died in 1914, Joe attended WoodberryForest School in Orange, Virginia, for three years and thenwent for two years to Culver Military Academy in Culver,Indiana, graduating from there in 1920. In the meantime,his mother had moved to Atlanta and he continued hiseducation for two years at Georgia Tech, and one year atOglethorpe University. Nothing he did would take flying93out of his mind and he finally gained admission to the FlyingCadets. After going through both Brooks and Kelly Fieldsas Cadet Captain, he was graduated in 1928, the happiestyear of his life. Later, while flying for Eastern Airlines, hegot a law degree from the University of Miami.

With basic training of the kind that young Duckworthreceived as a Cadet, he was not fitted to fly into a hurricaneor into any sort of really bad weather. Military operations atthat time were strictly visual or “contact.” The problem wasnot how to get through bad weather—thunderstorms, lowovercast, fog, for example—but how to keep out of it. Therewere few flight instruments, and there was no instrumentflying training. At that time, dirigibles were thought bymany leaders in aeronautics to have the best passenger-carryingpossibilities for the future. Steel had just replacedwood in fuselages and airplanes in general had earned thedescription “heavier-than air.” On the other hand, the worldhad been electrified by Lindbergh’s flight to Paris in 1927and other “stunt” flights became numerous. Another thrillingpiece of news was Admiral Byrd’s flight to the South Polein 1929.

Trial freight-carrying runs were being flown by the FordMotor Company from Detroit to Chicago and from Detroitto Buffalo, and Joe heard that a young man could get tri-motorflight time as a co-pilot two days a week, providedhe worked four days in the factory. Duckworth headed forDetroit. After getting on the job with Ford, he had his firstserious run-in with clear ice, or freezing rain. The planebarely made South Bend Airport, coming in at high speedwith a load of ice on the wings. Fifteen years later, the piloton instruments would have climbed quickly into the warmerair at higher levels and then worked his way down to destination,but instrument flying was unknown at the time.

In the spring of 1929, Joe went with the Curtis Wright94Flying Service as their first instructor, at Grosse Ile, nearDetroit. They were starting out to set up a nation-widechain of bases with the idea of teaching everyone to fly. Theplan was successful at first and in the fall Joe opened abranch at Atlanta, just as the stock market broke wide open.The slump in business that followed in 1930 caused generalfailure in the flying services. In December, Joe saw that theAtlanta branch was going out of business, and he went towork as a pilot for Eastern Air Transport, now Eastern Airlines,and remained with the company for ten years. At firsthe flew mail planes with parachutes but no passengers.

Even then there was no such thing as flying the weather.On his first mail flight, he got some pointed advice from theoperations manager. He told Joe to be “sure to be on thelook out for a reflection of the revolving radio beacon onthe cloud ceiling and the moment you see such an apparition,you must get down immediately in an emergency field.If you let the overcast close down on you, you are strictlyout of luck.” Airplanes were a long way then from beingequipped to fly into hurricanes.

What little was known at that time about the temperature,pressure, and humidity in the upper air was secured by kitessent up daily at a few places. They were box kites, carryingrecording instruments and flown by steel piano wire. Observerslet them rise and pulled them in by reels and, afterexamining the records, sent the data to the weather forecasters.This was a slow process and, besides, it was becomingdangerous around airports where the data were neededmost. A long piano wire in the sky was a serious hazard foraircraft. After 1931 this method was abandoned, and pilotsunder contract to the Weather Bureau attached weather-recordinginstruments to their planes and ascended to aheight of three miles or a little higher, and on return gavethe records to the weather observer, who worked them up95and wired the results to the forecasters. Army and Navypilots carried out similar missions at military bases. This planworked fairly well. The flights were made early in the morningbut when the weather was bad and the data would havebeen most useful, the planes were obliged to remain on theground.

Gradually, beginning about 1932, airline pilots beganmore and more intentional flights “on instruments,” that is,operating in clouds without visual reference to ground orhorizon. Reliability of schedules was an economic necessity.Navigation by radio was becoming more of a commonplaceand, by experiment and self-teaching, by 1940 airlines wereflying almost all kinds of en route weather, including thunderstorms.

In 1940, Joe’s thoughts turned to the Army Air Corps, inwhich he held a reserve commission as Major. It looked asthough war might come to the United States, so in Novemberof that year he resigned from Eastern to enter activeduty—probably the first airline pilot to do so. Assigned tothe Training Command, he never got overseas—but what hedid in teaching instrument flying throughout the Air Corpsis still acknowledged and appreciated by thousands of wartimepilots. He received literally hundreds of letters expressingtheir gratitude, some of them declaring that the trainingthey had received had literally saved their lives on manyoccasions.

Joe found a serious lack of instrument flight training inthe Air Corps, due to the frenzied expansion of training forWar. And, as Joe said, “You couldn’t call off the war whenthe weather was bad!” He set out to make his wartime missionthe remedying of this situation, and the record willshow he did a monumental job. Cutting “red tape” whereverpossible, experimenting, lecturing, and writing a whole newsystem of instrument flying training, he and his chosen assistants96culminated two years of intensive effort by establishingan instrument flying instructors school at Bryan, Texas,in February of 1943. During the next two years, the schoolprovided over ten thousand highly qualified instructors tothe Army Air Forces, and attained a solid reputation which isnot forgotten today. Joe’s instructors flew all types ofweather—anywhere—and at the same time piled up a safetyrecord unheard of at the time. The manuals they developedare still, in principle, the standard of today’s Air Force.

Joe’s school taught, through novel and thorough techniques,two things. First, that there is no weather, exceptpractically zero-zero landing conditions, that cannot be flownby the competent instrument pilot, with proper equipment.Second, that the safety and utility of both military and commercialflight depend almost wholly on the competence ofthe pilot in instrument flying.

Thus it came about that the first flight into a hurricanecenter was not the result of a sudden notion but of years ofintensive training in flying the weather, including storms,and the flyer who did it was probably the most expert inthe world at getting safely through all kinds of weather.Looking at it from this point of view, it is not strange thatthere was a rather amusing sequel to this story, involvingthe other instructors at Bryan, Texas. But first we come tothe story of the history-making flight by Colonel Duckworth.

Early on the morning of July 27, 1943, Joe came out tohave breakfast at the field. The sky at Bryan was absolutelyclear and it did not seem to promise any kind of weather thatwould try the mettle of men whose business it was to fly instormy conditions. Someone at the table said he had seen areport that a hurricane was approaching Galveston. Joe wasimmediately attentive. Sitting opposite him was a young andenthusiastic navigator, the only one at the field, LieutenantRalph O’Hair.

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Thinking again about the fact that no one had flown ahurricane and that it ought to be easy because of the circularflow, Joe suggested to Ralph: “Let’s go down and get anAT-6 and penetrate the center, just for fun.” He said it wouldbe “for fun” because he felt sure that higher headquartersprobably would not approve the risk of the aircraft andhighly trained personnel for an official flight. There werethree or four newly arrived B-25’s at the field but Duckworthhad not had the time to check out in one of them and thereforecould not fly a B-25 (a twin-engine airplane) withoutgoing through some formalities. Use of the AT-6, of course,involved the danger that its one engine might quit inside thehurricane and they would be in trouble.

Lieutenant O’Hair was quite willing—enthusiastic in fact—andthe pair gathered such information as was availableabout the hurricane and made ready for the flight. They tookoff in the AT-6 shortly after noon. The data on the storm hadbeen rather meagre. Two days before, Forecaster W. R.Stevens at New Orleans had deduced from the charts that atropical storm was forming in the Gulf to the southward. Hedrew his conclusion almost solely from upper air data atcoastal stations, for no ships were reporting from the Gulf.On the twenty-sixth, Stevens had correctly tracked it westwardtoward Galveston (quite a feat in view of the lack ofobservations) and warnings had been issued in advance.

On the morning of the twenty-seventh, this small butintense hurricane was moving inland on the Texas Coast, ashort distance north of Galveston, and by early afternoonthe winds were blowing eighty to one hundred miles an houron Galveston Bay and in Chambers County, to the eastwardof the Bay. Houston and Galveston were in the western orless dangerous semicircle, a favorable condition for the flightfrom Bryan to Houston. Soon after leaving Bryan, the venturesomeairmen were in the clouds on the outer rim of the98storm—with scud and choppy air—and shortly after they raninto rain. Precipitation static began to give them trouble incommunications but there was no other serious difficulty.

As they approached Houston, the air smoothed out, thestatic leaked off the plane, the radio was quiet, and the overcastgrew darker. They called Houston. The airways radiooperator was surprised when they said their destination wasGalveston.

“Do you know there is a hurricane at Galveston?” theoperator asked.

“Yes, we do,” said O’Hair. “We intend to fly into thething.”

“Well, please report back every little while,” the operatorrequested. “Let me know what happens.” Evidently, hewanted to be able to say what became of the plane if theywent down in the storm.

At this point Joe’s mind began to run back over some ofthe lectures the flight instructor had given and recall howthey had stressed the fact that a pilot should always havean “out,” even if it meant taking to a parachute. He wonderedwhat it would be like to use a parachute in a hurricane.They were flying at a height of four thousand to ninethousand feet.

As they approached the center, the air became choppieragain and he said afterward that they were “being tossedabout like a stick in a dog’s mouth,” without much chance ofgetting away from the grip of the storm. Checking on theradio ranges at Houston and Galveston, they flew over thelatter and then turned northward. Suddenly, they broke outof the dark overcast and rain and entered brighter clouds.Almost immediately, they could see high walls of whitecumulus all around the circular area in the center and, belowthem, the ground and above the sky quite clearly. The99plane was in the calm center. The ground below was notsurely identified but it seemed to be open country, somewherebetween Galveston and Houston. They descended inan effort to get their position more clearly but the air becamerougher as their altitude decreased. This led Duckworth tothe conclusion that the eye of the hurricane was like a “leaningcone,” the lower part probably being restricted andretarded by the frictional drag of the land over which thestorm was passing. They flew around in the center a whileand then took a compass course for Bryan.

Once out of the center, the plane went through, in reverse,the conditions the fliers had experienced on the way in,arriving at the air field at Bryan in clear weather. When theygot out of the plane, the weather officer, Lieutenant WilliamJones-Burdick, came up and said he was very disappointedthat he had not made this important flight.

Duckworth said, “OK, hop in and we’ll go back throughand have another look.” So he and the weather officer flewinto the calm center again and looked around a while. Theweather officer kept a log from which the following excerptsare taken, beginning with their entry into dense clouds onthe way into the hurricane. The time given here is twenty-four-hourclock. Subtract 1200 to get time (P.M.) by CentralStandard.

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One sequel to this story was Duckworth’s discovery, a yearlater, that after these flights into the center, some of hisinstructors and supervisors who were checked out in B-25’shad sneaked out and flown the same hurricane! They wereafraid to tell him about it at the time, for they did not have101permission to do it, but he accidentally learned about it thenext year, when he overheard some of them talking abouttheir trips into the storm.

Altogether, Joe did not consider his flights into the hurricaneto be as dangerous as some of his other weather flights.Only two things worried him at the time, the heavy precipitationstatic and the possibility that heavy rain might causethe engine to quit. Afterward, when pilots began to flyhurricanes as regular missions, the effect of torrential rainin lowering engine temperatures proved to be a real hazardand they had to take special precautions on this account.

Considering his hurricane penetration a routine weatherflight at the time, Joe thought nothing more about it untilhe read a story in a Sunday paper, several weeks later. Thenhe had a telephone call from Brigadier General Luke Smith,at Randolph Field, who asked him to come down, and surprisedhim by saying that he knew of the incident. At Randolph,the General said that Joe was being recommended forthe Distinguished Flying Cross. This never went through butlater Joe did receive the Air Medal.

There were several amazing features about these flightsinto the vortex. First, they justified Duckworth’s unswervingconfidence in his ability to fly safely through a hurricane;second, at the level of high flights there was a remarkableabsence of violent up drafts or turbulence; third, theyshowed that quiet air in the center extended at least toheights of a mile to a mile and a half, and that at those levelsthe air in the center was much warmer than the air in thesurrounding region of cloud, rain, and high winds. Joe issorry now he did not organize his flight to get better scientificdata. He believes his air temperature gauge probablywas inaccurate. But, as he says, “It was just a lark—I didn’tthink anybody would ever care or know about it!”

This demonstration was followed by an increasing number102of penetrations by aircraft into the eyes of tropical storms,not all of which, by any means, were as uneventful as theflights by Duckworth and his fellow officers. After years ofexperience, the military services involved in flying hurricanesdeveloped a technique which was essentially the same asthat used by Duckworth in this first flight; that is, penetrateinto the western semicircle and then into the center or eyefrom the southwest quadrant.

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8. THE HAMMER AND THE HIGHWAY

During the first half of the present century there was atremendous growth in population, industry, truck-farming,citrus-growing, boating, and aviation on the Gulf and SouthAtlantic coasts of the United States. This brought newworries to the hurricane hunters and forecasters.

By the beginning of the century, most of the older citiesand port towns in this region had been hit repeatedly bytropical blasts. Insecure buildings had been eliminated.From bitter experience, the natives knew what to do whena storm threatened. They had built houses and other structuresto withstand hurricane winds, placing nearly all ofthem above the highest storm tides within their memories.Down in the hurricane belt of Texas and Louisiana, a sixty-penny104nail was known as a “Burrwood finishing nail.” Thetown of Burrwood, at the water’s edge on the southern tipof Louisiana, had no frame buildings that had survived itsravaging winds and overwhelming tides except those whichwere put together with spikes driven through heavy timbers.

Learning to deal with hurricanes takes a lot of time. Mostplaces on these coasts have a really bad tropical storm aboutonce in ten or twenty years. And so it happened that whilethe population was increasing rapidly in the years from 1920to 1940, many thousands of flimsy buildings were constructedin the intervals between hurricanes. Too many werebuilt near the sea, where they would be wrecked by the firstbig storm wave. To build near the water is tempting in a hotclimate. And so it happened that after 1920, widespreaddestruction of property and great loss of life attended thefirst violent blow in many of these rapidly growing communities.

Newcomers—and there were many—didn’t know what todo to protect life and property. After the first calamity, theywere alarmed by the winds which came with every localthundershower and they were likely to flee inland in greatnumbers whenever there was a rumor of a hurricane. Herethey became refugees, to be fed and sheltered by the RedCross and local welfare organizations. By the middle thirties,this had become a heavy burden on all concerned. To getthings under control, local chapters of the Red Cross wereformed and other civic leaders joined in seeing that precautionswere taken when required, and panics were averted attimes when no storm was known to exist. But when warningswere issued by the Weather Bureau, coastal towns werealmost deserted. The greatest organized mass exodus fromshore areas in advance of a tropical storm occurred in Texas,in 1942. On August 30, a big hurricane with a tremendousstorm wave struck the coast between Corpus Christi and105Galveston. It had been tracked across the Caribbean andGulf, and ample warnings had been issued. More than fiftythousand persons were systematically evacuated from thethreatened region and though every house was damaged inmany towns, only eight lives were lost.

All of this brought heavy pressure on the hurricane huntersand forecasters to be more accurate in the warnings, to“pinpoint” the area to be seriously affected, and to defer thehoist of the black-centered red hurricane flags until thoseresponsible were reasonably sure of the path the stormwould take across the coast line. Thus, the warnings actuallybecame more precise, but in some instances the time availablefor protective action was correspondingly reduced.

Precautionary measures must be carefully planned. Theforce of the wind on a surface placed squarely across theflow of air increases roughly with the square of the windspeed. For this reason, it is a good approximation to say thatan eighty-mile wind is four times as destructive as a forty-milewind. A 120-mile wind is nine times as destructive. Inorder to lessen property damage, residents of Florida andother states in the hurricane belt prepared wooden frameswhich could be quickly nailed over windows and otherglassed openings. These devices proved to be very effective.In some cases it was a dramatic fact that, if two houses werelocated side by side, the one with protective covers on windowsand other openings escaped serious damage while theother house soon lost a window pane and then the roof wentoff as powerful gusts built up strong pressures within thebuilding. At the same time that this protection was appliedon the windward side, openings on the leeward side (awayfrom the wind) helped to reduce any pressures that builtup in the interior.

As these experiences became common after 1930, woodand metal awnings were manufactured so that they could be106lowered quickly into position to protect windows of residences.Business houses stocked wooden frames that couldbe fastened in place quickly to prevent wholesale damageto plate glass windows.

Many other measures were taken hastily when the emergencywarnings were sent out. One, for example, was acheck by home owners to make sure that they had tools andtimbers ready to brace doors and windows from the insideif they began to give way under the terrific force of hurricanegusts. They had learned that with a wind averagingeighty miles an hour, say, the gusts are likely to go as high as120 miles an hour and it is in these brief violent blasts, socharacteristic of the hurricane, that the major part of thewind damage occurs.

In addition, the experienced citizen prepares for hourswhen water, lights, and electric refrigeration will fail. Heknows, too, that these storms have a central region, or eye,where it is calm or nearly so, and he does not make the often-fatalmistake of assuming that the storm is over when thecalm suddenly succeeds the roaring gales. He wisely remainsindoors and closes the openings on the other side of thehouse, for the first great gusts will come from a directionnearly opposite that of the most violent winds which precededthe center.

In the early thirties, the hurricane forecasts for the entiresusceptible region were still being made in Washington,having been begun there in 1878. Weather reports werecoming in season from observers at land stations in the WestIndies, mostly by cable. From many places the cable messageswent to Washington via Halifax. Ship’s weathermessages came by radio to coastal stations on the Atlanticand Gulf, and from there to Washington by telegraph. Twicea day these reports were put on maps and isobars, andpressure centers (highs and lows) were drawn.

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In general, the same system is used today. Arrows showthe direction and force of the wind at each of many points;also the barometer reading, temperature, cloud data, andother facts are entered. Conditions in the upper air areshown at a few places where balloon soundings are made.As the map takes shape, it begins to show the vast sweep ofthe elements across the southern United States, Mexico,Central America, and all the region in and around the CaribbeanSea and the Atlantic. In these southern regions, thetrade winds, coming from the northeast and turning westwardacross the islands and the Caribbean, bring goodweather to the edge of the belt of doldrums.

This is the lazy climate of the tropics, in the vast spaceswhere the bulge of the earth near the Equator seems to givethings the appearance of a view through a magnifying glass.In the distant scene, islands are set off by glistening cloudshanging from mountain tops. White towers of thunderyclouds push upward here and there over the sea, in startlingcontrast to the blue of the sky and water. Nature seems tobe at peace but the trained weather observer may see andmeasure things that are disturbing to the weather forecasterswhen put together on a weather map of regions extendingfar beyond any single observer’s horizon.

Here and there in this atmosphere that seems so peacefulan eddy forms and drifts westward in the grand sweep ofthe upper air across these southern latitudes. These temporaryswirls in the atmosphere, some of which are called“easterly waves,” are marked by a wave-like form, driftingfrom the east. The wind turns a little, the barometer fallsslightly, the clouds increase temporarily, but nothing serioushappens and the eddy passes as better weather resumes.This goes on day after day and week after week, but duringthe hurricane season the storm hunters are always on thealert.

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All this work of charting the weather day by day andweek by week is not wasted if no hurricane develops. Planestake off every day from southern and eastern airports, carryingpassengers to Bermuda, Nassau, Trinidad, Cuba, Jamaica,Mexico, and Central and South America. The crews stop atthe weather office to pick up reports of wind and weather fortheir routes and at destination. The weather over these vastexpanses of water surface is reported and predicted also forships at sea. And when a storm begins to develop, ships andplanes are among the first to be notified.

Sooner or later, one of these swirling waves shows a definitecenter of low pressure, with winds blowing counterclockwisearound it. Now the modern drama of the hurricanebegins. In the region where these ominous winds arecharted, radio messages from headquarters ask for reportsfrom ships—every hour, if possible—and weather offices onislands are asked to make special balloon soundings of theupper air and send reports at frequent intervals. Warningsgo out to vessels in the path of the storm as it picks up force.Alert storm hunters in Cuba and other countries are contactedto discuss the prospects, to furnish more frequentreports, and to assist in warning the populations on the islands.

On the coast of the United States, excitement is in the air.Conversations in the street, offices, stores, homes, everywhere,turn to the incipient hurricane, and become moreinsistent as the big winds draw nearer. And finally the hourcomes when precautions are necessary. By this time, businessin the threatened area is at a standstill. The situation islike that during world-series baseball games and almost asdramatic as that which follows a declaration of war. Fewpeople have their minds on business. At this point, the reportsof storm hunters and the decisions of forecastersinvolve the immediate plans of hundreds of thousands of109people, large costs for protection of property, and the safetyof human life along shore and in small craft on the water.

Some of the men and women who came down to theweather and radio offices this morning know now that theywill not go home tonight. There will be an increasing volumeof weather reports, the rattle of teletypewriters willbecome more insistent, the radio receivers will be guarded byalert men growing weary toward morning, planes will beevacuated from airports in the threatened region and flownback into the interior, and the businessman will go home earlyand get out the frames he uses to board up the windowswhen a hurricane is predicted. The Navy may take battleshipsand cruisers out of a threatened harbor, so that theirofficers will have room to maneuver.

Under these dramatic conditions the hurricane comestoward land with good weather in advance—sunny by dayand clear at night. The native fears the telltale booming ofthe surf and feels concerned about the fitful northeastbreezes. In time there are lofty, thin clouds, spreading acrossthe sky in wisps or “mares’ tails” of cirrus—composed of icecrystals in the high cold atmosphere far above the heatedsurface of the subtropics. A thin veil forms over the sky. Atthe end of the day, red rays of the lowering sun cast a weirdcrimson color into the cloud veil, reflecting a scarlet hue overthe landscape and the sea. For a few minutes the earthseems to be on fire. To the visitor, it is a beautiful sunset. Tothe native, it is alarming, and in some parts of the Caribbeanit is terrifying as an omen of the displeasure of the stormgods. In these dramatic situations the head forecaster makeshis decision.

Also, during these nervous hours, representatives of theRed Cross begin arriving on the scene. At the same time,crews assigned to duties of repairing telephone, telegraph,and power lines are sent to the threatened area by their110respective companies. As soon as the storm has passed, thesem*n will be ready to go to work.

At this juncture it is probable that strange things willhappen. Against the stream of refugees moving away fromthe coast, there are always a few adventurers who comefrom more distant places to see the full fury of a great hurricaneroaring inland from the sea. At first they thrill to thecrash of tremendous waves breaking on the coast and hurlingspray high into the screaming winds. But when the raincomes in torrents, striking with the force of pebbles, andbeach structures begin to collapse and give up their componentsto wind and sea, the curious spectator has hadenough. Hurriedly he seeks refuge and begins to wonderfearfully if it will get worse. It does. He soon realizes thatwhat he has seen is only the beginning.

As the full force of the blast strikes a coastal city, thescene goes beyond the power of words to describe. Darknessenvelops everything, with thick, low-flying clouds and heavyrain acting like a dense fog to cut down on visibility. Theair fills with debris, and with the roar of the winds and thecrash of falling buildings. Power lines go down, and untilthe current can be cut off, electric flashes throw a weird,diffuse light on the growing chaos. In the lulls, the shrieksof fire apparatus and ambulances are heard until the streetsbecome impassable.

Most of these great storms move forward rather slowly—oftenonly ten to twelve miles an hour. A boy on a bicyclecould keep ahead of the whirling gales if the road took himin the right direction. Automobiles carrying news reportersand curious people travel the highways far enough in advanceto avoid falling debris, listening to the radio broadcastsfrom the weather office to learn of the progress of thestorm. Of all places, the most dangerous are on the immediatecoast and on islands near the coast, where the combination111of wind and wave is almost irresistible. But even herean occasional citizen chooses to remain, in spite of thewarnings, and when he finally decides to leave it may be toolate to get out and no one can reach him. There have beenmany instances of men being carried to sea, clinging to floatingobjects, and after describing a wide arc under the drivingforce of the rotary winds, being thrown ashore milesaway from home. But in other cases, people are trapped anddrowned in the rising waters. In 1919, at Corpus Christi,warnings were issued while many residents were at theirnoon meal, on a Sunday. Many delayed to finish eating whilethe only road to higher ground was being rapidly flooded. Ofthese 175 were drowned.

The native knows all of the preliminary signs well enough,and it is not necessary to urge him to take precautions afterthe moment when the ominous gusts of the first winds of thestorm are felt. He has been in these situations before and haslooked out to see palm trees bent far over and the rain beginningto blot out the view as the fingers of the gale seemedto begin searching his walls and roof for a weak spot. Manyprefer not to stay and watch. They board up their windowsand doors and go back to a safer place in the interior. Andso this is the time when the sound of the hammer is heardand streams of refugees are seen on the highways.

In the early thirties, the increasing population in the hurricanestates caused an annoying shortage of communicationsin storm emergencies. For many years the Washingtonforecasters had sent warnings by telegraph and the men inweather offices along Southern coasts had talked to eachother by telephone, to exchange notes and opinions, butthere were frequent delays and failures after 1930 because,when a hurricane approached the coast, the lines becamecongested with telephone calls and telegraph messages betweenrelatives and friends worrying about the dangers, and112by residents making arrangements for evacuation, in additionto emergency calls of many other kinds.

In 1935, the Weather Bureau found a very good answer tothe communication shortage in emergencies. A teletypewriterline called the “hurricane circuit,” running around theGulf Coast and Atlantic Coast of Florida, was leased on July1, with machines in all weather offices. Another line was installedbetween Miami and Washington and eventually extendedto New York and Boston. No matter how congestedthe public lines became, the weather offices were able to exchangemessages and reports without any delay. At the sametime, three hurricane forecast offices were established in theregion—at Jacksonville, New Orleans, and San Juan. Afterthat time, the Washington office issued forecasts and warningsof hurricanes only when they came northward to about35° north latitude and from there to Block Island, where theBoston office took over.

The first violent tropical storm to strike the coast of theUnited States after the hurricane circuit was set up cameacross the Florida Keys on Labor Day, 1935. It was spottedin ship reports and by observations from Turks Island onAugust 31 as a small storm. It moved westward not far fromthe north coast of Cuba on September 1 and turned to thenorthwest on September 2, having developed tremendousviolence.

This hurricane is worth noting, for its central pressure,26.35 inches, was the lowest ever recorded in a tropicalstorm at sea level on land anywhere in the world. The averagepressure at sea level is about 29.90 inches. The biggesttropical storms have central pressures below 28.00 inches,but very rarely as low as 27.00 inches.

The strongest winds around the center of the Labor Dayhurricane probably exceeded two hundred miles an hour.About seven hundred veterans of World War I were in relief113camps at the point where the center struck. A train was sentfrom Miami to the Keys to evacuate the veterans ahead ofthe storm, but it was delayed and was wrecked and thrownoff the tracks as the veterans were being put aboard. Theloss of life among veterans and natives on the Keys inthe immediate area was nearly four hundred. There wasmuch criticism in the press. In 1936, a committee in Congresscarried on a long investigation of the circ*mstanceswhich led to the establishment of the relief camps in such avulnerable position, the failure of the camp authorities toact on warnings from the Weather Bureau, and the delay ofthe rescue train. There was much talk in the committee ofincreasing the Weather Bureau’s appropriations, to enableit to give earlier warnings, but nothing came of it.

The new teletypewriter circuit served well. After this violenthurricane crossed the Keys, it went through the easternGulf and then passed over Western Florida and overland toNorfolk. In spite of intense public excitement, communicationsbetween weather offices were maintained without seriousinterruption. This improved service continued in theyears that followed. Radio circuits to the West Indies and ateletypewriter circuit to Cuba by cable helped to bring thereports promptly and at frequent intervals in emergencies.

In this modern drama of fear and violence, the hurricanewarning has become the signal that may cause desperateactions by hundreds of thousands of people. Colossal costsare entailed in the movement of populations in exposedplaces and in the protection of property and interruption ofbusiness. Now, in this emergency, a civil service employeenot used to making decisions involving large sums of moneyfinds himself in a position from which he has no escape. Hehas to make up his mind—to issue the warning or not to issueit. If he fails to get it out in time, there will be much loss oflife and property that might have been avoided. If he issues114the warning and the hurricane turns away from the coast orloses force, very large costs will have been entailed withoutapparent justification. In either case, he will be subjected toa lot of criticism.

The hurricane hunter and forecaster who stepped into thisresponsible position at a critical time was Grady Norton.Born in Alabama, in 1895, Grady joined the Weather Bureaushortly before World War I, then became a meteorologist inthe Army, after taking training at A. & M. College of Texas,where a weather school was established early in 1918. Buthe had no wish to be a forecaster or to send out warnings ofhurricanes.

Nevertheless, the people in Washington were unable toget out of their minds the fact that whenever Norton madeforecasts for practice, his rating was very high, especially forthe southeastern part of the country. The Bureau encouragedhim at every opportunity because he was one of thosewho are born with the knack of making good weather predictions—whichis an art rather than a science, even in itspresent stage of development.

Then in 1928, Grady went on a motor trip and arrived insouthern Florida just after the Palm Beach hurricane hadstruck Lake Okeechobee, killing more than two thousandpeople. He saw the devastation, the mass burials, the suffering,and determined to do something about it. By 1930 hewas at New Orleans, getting experience in forecasting Gulfhurricanes. After five years, the hurricane teletype and thecenters at Jacksonville and New Orleans were establishedand Grady was put in charge of hurricane forecasting atJacksonville. There, and later at Miami, his name, GradyNorton, coming over the radio, became familiar and reassuringto almost every householder in the region. For twentyhurricane seasons he took the brunt of it in almost countlessemergencies. In some instances, he made broadcasts steadily115and continuously every two hours, or oftener, for two daysor more without rest, his microphone having direct connectionsto more than twenty Florida radio stations, and bypowerful short-wave hook-ups to small towns all over thestate. As the hurricane threatened areas beyond Florida, hecontinued the issue of bulletins, warnings, and advices. Inthe last ten years of this service, he was warned by his physiciansto turn a good deal of the responsibility over to hisassistants, but the public wanted to know his personal decisions.

In 1954, after Hurricanes Carol and Edna had devastatedsections of the northeast with resultant serious criticism ofthe Bureau in regard to the former, a fast-moving blow thatallowed very limited time for precautions, Norton died onthe job while tracking Hurricane Hazel through the Caribbean.A tall, thin, sandy-haired Southerner, Norton had aslow, calm way of talking that put him, in the public mind,at the top of the list of hurricane hunters of his generation.And it was generally conceded that to his efforts were to becredited in a large degree the advances in hurricane forecastingin the years after 1935. But the outstanding progresswas gained from the use of aircraft to reconnoiter hurricanes,in which Norton played a very important part.

In Grady Norton’s place, the Bureau put Gordon Dunn,who was an associate of Norton’s at Jacksonville when theservice began and who had more recently been in charge ofthe forecast center at Chicago.

By the end of 1942 it was plain that the weather offices ofthe Army and Navy would have to join with the WeatherBureau in hunting and predicting hurricanes. It was agreedthat the combined office would work best at Miami. For the1943 storm season, the Weather Bureau moved its forecastoffice from Jacksonville to Miami, with Norton in charge,and the military agencies assigned liaison officers there for116the purpose of coordinating the weather reports receivedand the warnings issued. All the experts felt that military aircraftwould have to be used to get the reports needed. InAugust, 1943, the news of Colonel Duckworth’s successfulflight into the center of the Texas hurricane was the decisivefactor. Reconnaissance began in 1944.

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9. WINGS AGAINST THE WHIRLING BLASTS

After Joe Duckworth flew into the center of the hurricanenear Galveston on July 27, 1943, there was much excitementabout the remarkable fact that he had experienced no verydangerous weather or damage to his plane on the trip. But theexperts realized that hunting hurricanes as a regular businesswould be different. Men who had flown the weather in theCaribbean and elsewhere in the tropics and subtropics, andthose who had just thought about it, had visions of undulatingseas stirred by soft tropical breezes, white clouds piled118in neat balls on the horizon, blue water, blue sky, and lushpalm-covered coasts and islands. And yet they knew that nowhereis the sly trickery of wind and storm more dangerous.Suddenly and with no apparent reason, the soft breezes turninto quick little gusts and wrap themselves around a center,with gray clouds spreading and rain coming in brief squalls.The whirl spreads, gathering other winds into its orbit, andhard rain begins. Soon there are violent gales and the powerof the storm is apparent in the roaring of the wind and sea.

And so it is easy to think of a plane in a hurricane as beinglike an oak leaf in a thunderstorm, except that the leaf isbigger in proportion but lacks the skillful handling of ayouthful crew, alert, fearful and resourceful, straining desperatelyto keep it from rocketing steeply into the wind-tornsea below. For these reasons, the men who ventured in 1943to probe tropical storms by air were exceedingly cautiousabout it. They went into it at a high level—usually as far upas the plane would go—and came down by easy stages, inthe calm center, if possible, ready to turn around and dashfor land the moment anything went wrong.

The next after Duckworth and his associates to look intoa hurricane was Captain G. H. MacDougall of the Army AirForces. The second fully-developed storm of 1943 came fromfar out in the open Atlantic and passed east of the WindwardIslands on a north-northwest course toward Bermuda.MacDougall wanted to have a first-hand view of its insides.Ships in the Atlantic were reporting extremely high windsand waves fifty to sixty feet high and five hundred to sixhundred feet in length. MacDougall went to see ColonelAlan, who said he was ready to pilot the plane. So the twotook off from Antigua on August 20.

According to the report by MacDougall, they came in at avery high level and began to explore the outer circulation ofthe storm. He said: “We ran into rain falling from overcast.119There were broken cumulus and stratus clouds below us. Asthe sun became more and more blotted out, we seemed tobe heading into a bluish twilight. In spite of the low visibilitydue both to rain and moderate haze, it was impossible tomake out the ocean through the wind-torn stratus below,and while we were yet to see the teeth of the storm, thesnarl was already too evident. A surface wind of forty to fiftymiles per hour from the southwest was probably a good estimatein this part of the storm. Colonel Alan now began tolet the plane down and we stopped taking oxygen. At thesame time, the wheels were let down to minimize the turbulence,and the plane leveled off at an elevation of one thousandfeet which was below the stratus.

“For those of us who had spent enough time in the Caribbeanto be familiar with the magnitude of the waves usuallyencountered, it was hard to believe what we saw below. Theseas were tremendous and the crests were being blown off inlong swirls by a wind that must easily have exceeded seventymiles per hour. The long parallel streaks of foam streamingfrom one wave to another made it evident from which directionthe wind was blowing.”

About a month later, a tropical storm formed in the westernGulf of Mexico, not far from Vera Cruz. Shortly afterward,it moved toward the Texas coast, increasing rapidlyin force, and there was general alarm. People began to abandonthe beaches and protect their property in the coastaltowns. At this time there was a young officer, LieutenantPaul Ekern, at Tinker Air Field near Oklahoma City, whowas anxious to see the inside of one of these big storms. Thisone looked like his last chance for 1943 and he began talkingit up. He found Sergeant Jack Huennekens who wasready to go and they looked for a plane and pilot. Time wentby, but the hurricane center slowed down to a crawl anddescribed a loop off the coast, taking three days to turn120around. Excited conversations about the storm created interest,and about the time that Ekern and Huennekens foundan Air Force pilot, Captain Griffin, anxious to go, a Navyman came over from Norman, Oklahoma, and said he hadsome instruments he would like to carry into the hurricaneand get records of conditions encountered. He was told thatanybody crazy enough to go was welcome. He introducedhimself as a Navy Aerologist, Gerald Finger, and they allshook hands and got their things ready.

On the afternoon of the eighteenth, with the hurricanestill hanging ominously off the coast but with some loss ofviolence, the crew took off for south Texas, carrying theNavy man and his instruments. They came into the stormarea at about thirty thousand feet and proceeded cautiouslytoward the center. At this level there was very little turbulence,but the view was magnificent. There were mountainousthunderclouds, some extending fifteen thousand feetabove the plane. Carefully they explored the region andfinally came into a place where they could see the surface ofthe Gulf white with foam and piled-up clouds ringing aspace where the sky was partly clear. This, they decided,must be the center.

Cautiously they went down to twelve thousand feet, circlingaround as they descended, and keeping records of temperature,humidity, and pressure. At times they flew throughclouds on instruments in the rain, and now and then therewas light icing. After about three hours, they began to runlow on gas, so they flew through the western part of thestorm and back to Oklahoma.

At the end of the hurricane season, these flights were reportedto the Weather Bureau and recommendations wereforwarded to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that military aircraftbe used routinely to explore hurricanes and improve the accuracyof the warnings. The Joint Chiefs referred this to121their meteorological committee, with representatives of theArmy Air Corps, the Navy and the Weather Bureau, and onFebruary 15, 1944, a plan was approved for the coming season.As far as possible, crews with experience in flying theweather were selected. Some of these had been on dailymissions on the Atlantic, for the protection of convoys. Bythe beginning of the 1944 season, planes and men were attheir posts in Florida, ready to go on instructions from thejoint hurricane center in Miami.

Probing of hurricanes by air came to a sharp focus inSeptember, 1944. On the eighth, signs of a disturbance werepicked up in the Atlantic, northeast of Puerto Rico. As itapproached the northern Bahamas, its central pressure wasextremely low, below 27.00 inches—estimated at 26.85—andit covered an enormous area with winds of terrific force.From here its center crossed the extreme eastern tip ofNorth Carolina, sideswiped the New Jersey coast, doing vastdamage, and then hit Long Island and New England withtremendous fury. On account of the war, ships at sea werenot reporting the weather and the hurricane hunters had areal job on their hands.

On the morning of the tenth, Forecaster Norton at theMiami Weather Bureau studied the weather map, grumbledabout the lack of observations from the West Indies, anddecided to ask for a plane to go out and report the weathernorth of Puerto Rico. He had little to go on, but he thoughtit was a very bad storm. On the afternoon of the ninth, theAir Corps had sent a plane out from Antigua. They had reportedwinds of eighty miles, very rough seas, and centerabout 250 miles northeast of San Juan. Very little informationhad come from the area since that time, except theregular weather messages from San Juan. After tryingto get the Navy office on the telephone half a dozentimes, Norton gave up. Every time he started to dial, the122phone rang and he answered it, making an effort to hang upquickly and get a call in before it rang again. But many peoplehad learned about the storm and were anxious for moreinformation, hence the phone was constantly busy.

“I thought this was an unlisted phone,” he complained tothe map crew. “It is,” replied an assistant. “We gave thenumber only to the radio, press, and a few others, to makesure we could get a call out when we had to, but these restrictedphone numbers leak out. We’ll have to change thenumber again.”

Norton squeezed between the map man and the wall andsat down at the teletypewriter in the corner after the operatorhad stepped out into the hall. The office was crowdedand when one man wanted to leave his place, nearly everybodyelse had to stand up to make room. Norton rang a bell,rattled the teletypewriter, and finally got Commander Lovelandon the line down at the Navy office.

This was an exclusive line—Weather Bureau to Navy—andNorton pecked out a message. “Looks like a bad hurricaneout there. It’s maybe three days from Florida if it comeshere, but it probably won’t. Looks like it would go up towardthe Carolinas. We can’t be sure. Maybe we shouldhave a recco this morning. What do you think?”

“Think we can get one up there from Puerto Rico thismorning,” came the message from Loveland. “I’ll see what Ican do. Did you check with the Army?”

“Yes, the Major talked to Colonel Ellsworth and he saysthey expect to get a plane out there from Borinquen thisafternoon. Also, I asked for clearance on a public messageyesterday and got an OK last night.”

At that time, because of the war, public releases aboutstorms along the coast were still restricted and had to becleared with Naval Operations in Washington. If enemy submarineslearned that planes were being evacuated from airports123on the seaboard, they were emboldened to come out inthe open and attack shipping along the coast. Oil tankersand other ships would have a bad enough time in the stormwithout running into submarines openly on the prowl. Butthe Chiefs of Staff had to balance this against the possibleloss of life and property in coastal communities.

On their mission to explore the storm, the Navy crew fromPuerto Rico ran into heavy rain and turbulence. Visibilitywas nil as they approached the center. They stayed downlow to keep a view of the ocean but found the altimeterbadly in error. As soon as they broke out of the clouds, theyfound the sea was much closer than they had figured. Theplane was almost completely out of control several times.They changed course, got out of the storm, sent a messageto Miami, and returned to Ramey Field in Puerto Rico.

Steadily the hurricane kept on a west-northwest course,increasing in size and violence. As it went along, the aircraftof the Navy and Air Forces were on its heels and driving towardthe center, like gnats around an angry bull. It washeaded for the Carolinas; everybody was agreed on thatnow. Ships were in trouble, running to get from between thehurricane and the coast as the winds closed in, and anxiouspeople waited for the next report.

At that time, a hurricane was thought to have four stagesof existence. First was the formation stage, often with circulatorywinds and rain developing in a pressure wave comingwestward over the Atlantic or Caribbean. Second, it quicklyconcentrated into a small but very violent whirl and, over arelatively small area, had the most violent winds of its existence.In this stage it might not have been more than onehundred miles in diameter. Third, it became a mature storm,spreading out, and although its winds did not become anymore violent, they spread over a much larger area, maybe asmuch as three hundred miles, or more, in diameter. Fourth124was the stage of decay, when it began to lose its almostcircular shape and the winds began to diminish. Now it wentoff to the northward and became an extra-tropical storm orstruck inland in the south and died with torrential rains andsqually winds.

This hurricane seemed to be an exception. As it spread outto cover a bigger area, its winds seemed to develop greaterfury. A Navy plane went in as it approached the Carolinasand found extreme turbulence, winds estimated at 140 milesan hour, torrential rain that penetrated the airplane, and novisibility through the splatter and smear on the windows.And when the stalwart crew came down below the clouds,the sea was a welter of foam, with gusts wiping the tops offwaves that reached up to tremendous heights.

While no planes were lost in probing this terrible storm,a destroyer, a mine sweeper, two Coast Guard cutters, and alight vessel were sunk. An Army plane estimated the windsat 140 miles an hour. The weather officer, Lieutenant VictorKlobucher, said that it was the worst storm that had beenprobed by the hurricane hunters up to that time. The turbulencewas so bad that, with both the pilot and co-pilot strainingevery muscle, the plane could not be kept undercontrol, and several times they thought it would be tornapart or crash into the sea. On returning to the base, thefliers found that 150 rivets had been sheared off one wingalone.

On the morning of the fourteenth of September, the terribletempest was close to the eastern tip of North Carolina,apparently destined to sideswipe the coast from there northwardwith devastating force. There was some alarm inWashington. It might possibly turn more to the northwardand its center might come up Chesapeake Bay or up thePotomac River. A violent storm in Washington at that timewould have been detrimental to the prosecution of war125plans. In 1933, a smaller hurricane had taken this course andits destructive visit to the Bay region and the Capital hadnot been forgotten. Also, in the minds of the military wasthe opportunity offered that day to explore a big hurricaneand find out more concerning its inner workings.

On that critical morning, Colonel F. B. Wood, a veteranflyer in the Air Corps, came down to Bolling Field outsideWashington with hurricane-probing on his mind. After talkingabout it to the men around the field, he decided to try aflight at least into the outer edges of the storm as it passedto the eastward during the day. He thought about thejunior officers and men being sent into these furious windsand he felt it was a good idea for one of the head men to goout and see what it was like.

Wood talked to Lieutenant Frank Record and found hewas anxious to go. He grabbed the telephone and got MajorHarry Wexler on the line. Harry was a Weather Bureau researchofficial who was in the Army for the duration.

“Harry, how about taking you out in the hurricane today?”Wood asked. “I’ll pilot the plane. Frank is goingalong.”

“Sure you can take me out, but you’ve got to bring meback,” Harry answered. “This is a round trip, Floyd, I hope.”Wood agreed to do his best to make a round trip out of it.

At two o’clock that afternoon, the trio took off and headedeast with some misgivings. They knew that this was one ofthe worst tropical storms that had been charted up to thattime. The hurricane was then centered near Cape Henry,Virginia. The wind at Norfolk had been up to ninety milesan hour. Colonel Wood described it as follows:

“Immediately after take-off, we penetrated a thin overcast,the top of which was about fifteen hundred feet, andthen proceeded to a point approximately twenty miles northeastof Langley Field. The boundary of the hurricane, as126seen from the latter location, was a dense black wall runningalong the western edge of the Chesapeake Bay. The airplanewas turned on a heading so as to fly a track that would leadstraight toward the estimated position of the center of thehurricane. Altitude was three thousand feet. A drift correctionof 30° was allowed to account for the estimated onehundred miles per hour cross wind encountered at the outeredge of the storm. Immediately on entering the outer edge,the atmosphere turned very dark and a blanket of heavyrainfall was encountered.”

Very surprisingly, the flyers reported that in this area astrong but steady down-current was also encountered. Thelatter was contrary to the accepted idea that all of the areaencompassed by the steep pressure fall in a hurricane containsascending rather than descending air up to greatheights. Although visibility was very low, due to the heavyrainfall, there were very few clouds below the altitude ofthe airplane (three thousand feet), except for some scudover Cape Henry.

The waves in Chesapeake Bay were enormous. A freighterplowing through the Bay was being swept from bow to sternby huge waves which at times appeared to engulf the wholevessel at once. Spray was being thrown into the air at heightswhich appeared to reach two hundred feet above the surfaceof the Bay. From the appearance of the water, both withinChesapeake Bay and east of Cape Henry, it is not surprisingthat a Navy destroyer of the 1850-ton class was sunk there.One of the foremost thoughts in the men’s minds at the timewas that should the aircraft be forced down in the hurricane,neither life rafts, “Mae Wests,” or any other lifesavingdevice would have saved them from drowning!

The flight was continued on toward the assumed positionof the center of the hurricane. Although the downdraft continuedstrong, very little turbulence was encountered. The127airplane lost a speed of about seventy miles per hour in thenecessary climb required to make up for the downwardmotion of the air. The heavy rain continued. At a point approximatelyfifty to sixty miles inward from the outer edgeof the hurricane, they suddenly entered an area of rising air.This area also contained fairly dense clouds below, but verythin clouds above. The sun was visible through the thinclouds overhead. They seemed to be on the edge of thecenter. The vertical air movement was of such magnitudethat the airplane was lifted from the three thousand footlevel to five thousand feet before power could be reducedand the airplane nosed downward. Turbulence in this areawas also considerably more severe than in the zone of descendingair just passed through, but was not of such severityas to endanger the flight.

Although the flight was continued for a few minutes ontoward the point where the center of the hurricane wasthought to be, the conditions of flight remained constant;that is, moderate turbulence, rising air, and the sun faintlyvisible through the thin clouds overhead. The men thoughtthey were off to one side or other of the center, but not findingit, and not knowing the direction in which to fly to locateit exactly, the airplane was turned around and flown on atrack which was estimated would lead toward Norfolk. Analtitude of five thousand feet was maintained on the wayout. The dark band of descending air and heavy rainfall wastraversed in the reverse order as during the incoming flight.They emerged from the hurricane at a point approximatelythirty miles east-northeast of Norfolk.

Afterward, Colonel Wood felt more confident about juniorofficers flying into hurricanes, but there were many questionsyet to be answered. Incidentally, the three men in thisplane and the members of the squadron who flew into the128same hurricane from Miami were awarded the Air Medalin February, 1945, for their bravery in these flights.

Colonel Wood drew the following conclusions:

“Although one of the more important points indicated byour experience during the aforementioned flight is that hurricanescan very probably be successfully flown throughafter they have reached temperate latitudes, it should not beaccepted as conclusive proof that all hurricanes may beflown through. Although there have been several instancesof flights into hurricanes before they migrated out of thetropical regions, it is not known whether, at the times theflights were made, any of these storms were of an intensitythat even approached the maximum possible. Further, it isnot known for certain whether the hurricane that passedalong the Virginia coast on the fourteenth of September istypical of all hurricanes once they reach temperate latitudes.Indications are that this hurricane was about as severe asthey ever get to be at these latitudes, but insufficient flyingexperience in hurricanes has been obtained to determineconclusively that all hurricanes in temperate latitudes aresafe to fly through. Any pilot who in the future mightdesire to repeat the experience referred to in this statementis advised that any hurricane should be approached gingerlyand with a view toward making an immediate 180° changein his track, should severe turbulence, hail, or severe thunderstormactivity be encountered.

“It is believed that the method of examining a hurricaneby flight reconnaissance that would produce the most revealingresults is to attempt an approach to it from the stratosphere.It is thought, further, that such a flight could bemade over the outer rim of the hurricane and a let-downinto the center or hollow eye of the storm be made withcomplete safety. A record of the temperature at various129flight levels while descending through the central (hollow)portion of the storm, together with photographs of the cloudstructure, would be of tremendous value.”

In October there was another hurricane in Florida. It beganin the western Caribbean on the thirteenth and crossedwestern Cuba on the seventeenth. On the south coast thehurricane winds created an enormous tide. More than threehundred people were killed, and a Standard Oil Companybarge was carried ten miles inland. When the big windsroared across Florida on the eighteenth and nineteenth, itwas a severe storm with a calm center that was at one timeabout seventy miles long.

As it drove violent winds and seas toward Florida, an airlinecompany, Transcontinental & Western Air, decided toinvestigate and sent an experienced pilot, Captain RobertBuck, in a B-17, to fly through and observe the weather andelectrical phenomena in the storm. Of course, he consideredthe flight hazardous but he was willing. Any person who hadexperienced the violent winds of these storms or read abouttheir destructive effects was likely to assume that a plane atlow levels in the middle part of the storm might have itswings torn off.

Buck started to climb into the edge of the storm at Alma,Georgia, going in warily at four thousand feet and findingonly light to moderate turbulence from there to nine thousandfeet, after which it became smoother. This was in accordancewith the reports of other fliers who had venturedin at high levels, and he was reassured.

At eleven thousand feet the rain changed to sleet. Thiswas not unexpected. Ordinarily it is much colder at such aheight than at the ground. The temperature drops about onedegree for each rise of three hundred feet. Although theplane was flying in instrument conditions and “blind,” there130were no ordinary water-cloud particles, but simply haze andsleet.

At 12,700 feet, with the temperature at the freezing point,the plane flew through moderate to heavy snow with verylarge flakes. The climb was continued and the snow remainedmoderate, but as the altitude increased, the size ofthe snowflakes decreased. The air was perfectly smooth,with the exception of about one minute of light turbulenceat 16,000 feet. During the entire climb no ice was encountered,but there were a few patches of snow sticking on theairplane. This was definitely not ice. Due to loss of radioreception on all receivers, including the loop, it was difficultto obtain the wind accurately. It was estimated to be easterlyat approximately eighty-five miles an hour, to about16,000 feet, where it changed to westerly with about thesame velocity.

At 19,400 feet, the temperature had dropped to 27°. At22,800 feet, the snow was light and fine and the temperaturewas 18°. The temperature had dropped to 14° at 24,600 feet.

At 25,000 feet, the plane broke out of the side of the stormnear the top. At 25,800 feet, the plane was flying in the clearwhere the temperature was 18°. During the entire climbfrom 9,500 feet to 25,000 feet, no fog was encountered, onlyparticles of snow.

Near Jacksonville, Florida, the tops of the clouds droppedsharply to 8,000 feet. The plane flew east out to sea to checkthe eastern side of the storm and, satisfied that Jacksonvillewas close to the storm’s center, proceeded to the coast againand to Daytona Beach, where the craft landed.

Pilot Buck concluded that the paramount danger lies in anaircraft becoming lost, due to the failure of radio navigationcaused by static, coupled with the high winds. He said thata tropical storm of the type flown is not hazardous to aircraft131in respect to structural failure and loss of control, if an altitudeof over approximately 8,000 feet is held.

In December, all the men connected with the hurricanewarning service in the Army, Navy, Weather Bureau andother agencies—including the top officials, the forecasters,the men who directed the flights, the pilots, weather officers,and others who made up the crews, the radio men on shore,and the Coast Guard people—were fully represented in aconference in Washington. Here they all went over their experiencesand offered every possible suggestion for improvingthe service. Many things were needed, but two toughproblems worried everybody.

One was how the crew could find out where they were inlatitude and longitude or in distance and direction fromsome point on an island or on the coast after they found thecenter of the storm. After all, the weather observer, navigator,and the radio man might figure out how to get in theeye, and the plane might get into it, but if they failed to gettheir position accurately, the information was of doubtfulvalue. This nearly always depended on radio signals fromdistant shore stations, for it was seldom that they could geta celestial fix as a mate does on a ship at sea. The secondproblem was communications—how to get the weather messageoff and be sure it had been received at a shore radiostation, and see also that it reached the forecast officespromptly. All of this had many sources of delay. In a hurricane,the atmospherics were often excessive. At times theradio man on the plane could hear nothing but loud staticin his ear phones. He was powerless to do anything exceptto send “blind” and hope somebody would receive it andunderstand what it was. Slowly these problems were solvedin part as time went on.

132

10. KAPPLER’S HURRICANE

Kappler’s Hurricane was one of the most violent of history.It got its name from a weather officer, a second lieutenantin the Army Air Corps named Bernard J. Kappler. The storyincludes the vivid personal reactions of a number of menwho explored this tremendous storm as it built up its energywhile crossing fifteen hundred miles of tropical and subtropicalsea surface and finally ravaged parts of SouthernFlorida, including the outright destruction of the big RichmondNaval Air Base.

The fact is that this storm seems to have had its birth overwestern Africa. There were signs of it there and near theCape Verde Islands on the first two days of September.Later there were some indications of its winds and low pressurein radio reports from ships but eventually it was lostfor the time being, far out in the Atlantic.

Kappler discovered it on September 12, 1945. He was ona regular weather-reporting mission to the Windward133Islands. Every day one or more B-25’s took off from MorrisonField at West Palm Beach and explored the atmosphereon flights to Antigua, British West Indies, returningvia the open Atlantic to Florida. On that day there wasnothing unusual until the plane in which Kappler was flyingwas about two hours from Antigua. Here, he noted a blackwall of clouds to the east and at his suggestion the pilot,First Lieutenant D. A. Cassidy, took the plane down tofifteen hundred feet and they looked around.

Without any doubt, a tropical storm was in the making.Its winds already were blowing around a center with gustsat about seventy miles an hour. There was moderate turbulence,with stretches of rain, but they had no particular difficultyin flying through it. They reported it to headquartersand were told to land at Coolidge Field in Antigua and beprepared to take another look and report in the morning.

This operation was known as “Duck Fight,” consisting offive B-25 aircraft and five crews made up of twenty officersand fifteen men. This particular group had been at BritishGuiana but had moved up to Florida in May for the newhurricane duty. It was their job to explore this regiontwice daily, looking for weather trouble when no storm wasknown to be in progress. If a suspicious area was found, theywere deployed and used in accordance with directives fromthe hurricane center at Miami. The Navy also had planesassigned to similar missions.

After breakfast on the thirteenth Kappler’s crew took offa*gain. About two hours out of Antigua, they encounteredwinds up to about eighty knots (a little above ninety milesan hour) but flying was smooth. The crew made a few jokeson the general subject of how easy it was to fly through hurricanes.The co-pilot, Lieutenant Hugh Crowe, had the controls.He turned toward the center and the wind picked upto 120 knots. Soon they were in trouble, with severe turbulence134and heavy rain. The air speed fluctuated between160 and 240 miles an hour and cylinder temperatures beganto fall rapidly. Crowe fed power to the engines, but theplane began getting out of control. Cassidy had to help himkeep the ship level. Kappler shouted that the pressure wasdropping rapidly—the pressure altitude was seventeen hundredfeet but their actual height was only nine hundred.Crowe said the turbulence was the most severe he had everexperienced. The plane yawed fifteen degrees on either sideof the heading. The navigator, Lieutenant Redding W.Bunting, said dryly, “In my opinion a hurricane is not theplace in which to fly an airplane.”

By the fourteenth, it was obvious to all concerned thatthey had a really big storm on their hands. Its center hadbeen north of Puerto Rico on the thirteenth, and on thefourteenth, moving rather rapidly, it was passing north ofHaiti. The first plane took off from Borinquen Field, PuertoRico, in the morning, Cassidy at the controls, and within anhour the crew were getting into it. At the end of this flight,Co-pilot Crowe said, “My respect for hurricanes has increasedtremendously!”

First, the right engine was not running smoothly and aftera little it almost stopped. Cassidy asked Bunting where thenearest land was and when he said Cuba, they turned 90°and made for it. After twenty minutes the engine was doingbetter, so they had a brief conference and decided to try forthe hurricane center. Turning back, they saw gigantic seaswells and a white boiling ocean ahead. Soon they hit theworst turbulence Cassidy had ever seen, and with it therewere intervals of torrential rain. It was terrific. The co*ckpitwas leaking like a sieve. Most of the time it took full rudderand aileron to lift a wing. The plane got into attitudes theyhad never dreamed of. It was impossible to hold a heading,for the ship was yawing more than 30° and taking a terrible135side buffeting. Maybe this lasted three to five minutes but itseemed like hours. Suddenly they passed through the edgeof the center, it was smooth for about a minute, and thenthey were in the worst part again. Bunting noted a piece ofadvice, “When you are near the center, about all you can dois brace yourself and hold on to something that won’t pullloose.”

Bunting reported afterward that it took both pilot and co-pilotto control the ship and at times the RPM set at 2,100would drop to 1,900 and then rise to 2,200, due to the terrificforce of the wind. Kappler kept phoning the correct altitudeto the pilot at short intervals because of the enormouschanges in pressure. It was impossible to write in the logbook so he scribbled as best he could on a piece of paperand copied it afterward. He noted that before entering theeye it was very dark. Inside it was cloudy but the light wasbetter, indicating that the upper clouds were missing. Whenthe flight was finished the crew was glad to be back at MorrisonField—to put it mildly!

Another plane at Morrison Field had been out the day beforeand soon was taking off again, at 2:00 P.M. The pilotwas Lieutenant A. D. Gunn. He flew a direct course to thecenter of the storm—he hadn’t realized the day before thathe was elected to go through it again today, so he wantedto get it over with as soon as possible. These two days hadprovided his first such experience. One cylinder head slid toa very low temperature in the heavy rain and Gunn droppedthe landing gear and tried to keep it up to 100°, but oneengine died. The turbulence was so bad that neither he northe co-pilot could tell which engine was out. The severe turbulencelasted for a full thirty minutes, about ten minutesof this being flown on one engine, with the crew desperatelyworking on the other while they bounced around. The flightengineer, Sergeant Harry Kiefaber, had to leave his seat because136of water pouring down his back and the tossing upand down, with his head repeatedly hitting the top of theplane. He tried to go back to join the navigator but the planestarted to fall off to the right and he had visions of ditchingin a mass of white foam. The pilot got it under control butit seemed that they were being tossed around like popcornin a popper. Gradually the turbulence ceased, the other enginebegan running smoothly and they headed straight forMorrison.

But the conditions on the fourteenth were just an introductionto what happened on the fifteenth. The first crewtook off at 7 A.M., with the edge of the hurricane causingrough weather at the field. Here is the story told by the navigator,Lieutenant James P. Dalton:

“Frankly speaking, throughout my entire life I have beenfrightened, really frightened, only three times. All of thiswas connected intimately with weather reconnaissance. Ithink I can truthfully and without exaggeration say that absolutelythe worst time was while I was flying through Kappler’sHurricane on September 15, 1945. We were stationedat Morrison Field, West Palm Beach, Florida, at the time.Everyone except the Duck Flight Recco Squadron had evacuatedthe field for safer areas the day before.

“Hurricane reconnaissance being our business, we ofcourse stayed on, in order to operate as closely as possibleto the storm. We were to take off at 7:00 A.M. local timeand by then several thunderstorms had already appeared,thoroughly drenching us before we could climb into ourplane. But each crew member was keenly alert, for he knewwhat to expect. I’ve flown approximately fifteen hundrednormal weather reconnaissance hours; that is, if you can callgoing out and looking for trouble ‘normal flying.’ I have coveredthe Atlantic completely north of the equator to the137Arctic Circle, flying in all kinds of weather and during allseasons but never has anything like this happened to mebefore.

“One minute this plane, seemingly under control, wouldsuddenly wrench itself free, throw itself into a vertical bankand head straight for the steaming white sea below. An instantlater it was on the other wing, this time climbing withits nose down at an ungodly speed. To ditch would be disastrous.I stood on my hands as much as I did on my feet.Rain was so heavy it was as if we were flying through thesea like a submarine. Navigation was practically impossible.For not a minute could we say we were moving in anysingle direction—at one time I recorded twenty-eight degreesdrift, two minutes later it was from the opposite directionalmost as strong. But then taking a drift reading duringthe worst of it was out of the question. I was able to recorda wind of 125 miles an hour, and I still don’t know how itwas possible, the air was so terribly rough. At one time,though, our pressure altimeter was indicating twenty-six hundredfeet due to the drop in pressure, when we actually wereat seven hundred feet. At this time the bottom fell out. Idon’t know how close we came to the sea but it was far tooclose to suit my fancy. Right then and there I prayed. Ivouched if I could come out alive I would never fly again.

“By the time we reached the center of the storm I wassick, real sick, and terribly frightened, but our job was onlyhalf over. We still had to fly from the center out, whichproved to be as bad, if not worse, than going in.

“Mind you, for the first time, and after flying over fifteenhundred hours, I was airsick; and I wasn’t alone. Our radioOperator spilt his cookies just before we reached the center.

“After a total of five hours we landed at Eglin, the entirecrew much happier to be safely back on the ground. At thetime of our take-off we really didn’t think it possible to fly138safely through a hurricane. Personally I still don’t. And I sayagain, I hope never to be as frightened as the time I flewthrough Kappler’s Hurricane. It isn’t safe.”

Lieutenant Gunn, the pilot who had been in it the daybefore, was a man who took things calmly. He reported hisexperience:

“This morning the storm was only an hour and a half fromthe field. The usual line of squalls around the edge of thestorm was hitting Morrison Field about every hour and ahalf. Of course this trip was to take us through the verycenter.

“We left Morrison at one thousand feet. The entire flightwas turbulent and rainy. We circled the storm counterclockwiseagain and ran into the same turbulence and rain as before.This time the clouds must have been as low as five orsix hundred feet, as even though we were only at one thousandfeet, we could seldom get a glimpse of the ocean,which was churned up to such an extent that it seemed to beone big white cap. The altimeter was off one thousand feetat one point placing us at five hundred feet; then we could seethe water. I believe even the fish drowned that day. As weentered the northeast quadrant, it got so rough that bothpilot and co-pilot were flying the ship at the same time. Thewinds were so great at this point one could actually see theship drifting over the sea. I think we had a drift correctionof thirty-five to forty degrees at times.

“I don’t think anyone will form a habit of this particularjob. Prior to taking off I tried to take out hurricane insurancebut it seems that they have no policies covering B-25 planes.Anyway, all the insurance salesmen had evacuated to somedistant place like Long Beach, Calif.”

Sergeant Robert Matzke, the radio operator, put it thisway:

“September 15 was the day that I was picked on a crew139to fly the hurricane. Having been forewarned by several ofthe boys who had returned from the hurricane the day before,I set myself for something a little rougher than aweather mission with occasional turbulence. I figured thatwe had flown through what could well be considered roughweather while flying reconnaissance out of the Azores andmaybe the boys were trying to throw a little scare into usas new men to the Morrison initiation.

“It seems that we had no sooner left the ground when weencountered rain and turbulence. This made me sort of leeryof what was to come and I figured that if I were to sendweather messages while in a hurricane, I’d have to sendblind as the receivers were noisy already, and to hear andanswer to a call would be almost an impossibility. As weproceeded toward the storm the rain became more intenseand things were getting quite ‘damp’ in the ship. There wasa leak right over my table and the steady downpour of waterthrough this opening made it necessary for me to write withthe log tablet braced against my knee to keep it from gettingwet.

“The awful bouncing was getting my stomach and whenwe actually entered the hurricane it took all my strength toreach for the key to send a message. After a while I calledto Lieutenant Schudel, our weather observer, and told himthat I was sick and would have to rest my head on the tablefor a while. I had felt bad in a plane before but this was thefirst time that I was deathly sick. After a few minutes it waswith all the strength that I could muster that I rolled myhead to one side of the table and lost a few cookies.

“After I vomited a while I felt one hundred per cent betterand I went to work pounding out the messages that had accumulated.It was impossible for me to hear any signals onthe receivers due to atmospherics, so I sent blind, repeatingmyself over and over, in the hopes that someone would copy140and relay to Miami for me. Our ships were vacating to EglinField that day and Sergeant Le Captain was standing watchon the frequency I was using. He came through with areceipt when I got to where I could hear in my receiversagain.

“The flight that day was the roughest I have ever been onand a lot of my time was taken up just holding on for dearlife and watching the B-4 bags bouncing up and down enmasse like a big rubber ball. I was glad when the wheels hitthe runway at Eglin Field and hungry, too, for my breakfasthad stayed with me for a very short time. I imagine I lookedrather beat up when I stepped from the plane but theground felt so darn good under my feet and I didn’t carewho knew that I had been sicker than a dog.”

Each member of the crew saw a little different part of thepicture. Boys who flew these missions regularly became matter-of-factin their reports and it was only when they wereinvolved in a really big storm that they talked frankly abouttheir feelings. Here is the story of the flight engineer, SergeantDon Smith, in Kappler’s Hurricane on September 15:

“The morning of the fifteenth loomed dark and formidable.This was our day to take a fling at the hurricane theother boys were telling us so much about. As a matter offact it doesn’t make you feel as though you were going on aSunday School picnic. From the time we took off until wehit the storm we encountered turbulence and white capswere dashing around like mad but they were mild comparedto what was coming.

“We circled the storm before heading for the center. Wewere hitting rain and moderate turbulence all this time. Allat once we broke through the overcast and for a few secondsI wondered if it were letting up, but only for a second. Oneinstant everything was peaceful and the next instant we141were getting slapped around like a punching bag with JoeLouis on the prod. I looked at the bank and turn indicatorand the rate of climb, and they both looked as if they weregoing all out to win a jitterbug contest. Now it was reallyraining. You’ve never seen it rain until you’ve been in ahurricane. I couldn’t even see the engines from the co*ckpitwindow. I knew our right engine was the least bit roughbefore we started out and all I could think of was ‘For goshsakes, don’t be cutting out now.’ Before we were out of it,the engine sounded like a one-cylinder Harley motorcyclebut really she never missed a beat. It was about this timethat our cylinder head temperature dropped down to about90° and the pilot dropped the wheels to bring it back up.And it was also about this time that we started for a milderclimate.

“Don’t ask me if I was scared or not. It would only be afool or a liar who would say he wasn’t worried. One thingabout it is that you’re so busy hanging on and trying to keepfrom getting thrown on your face that there isn’t much timeto think whether you’re scared or not. It’s really rough butthere are no words to describe it. You’d have to go along toget the picture.”

Lieutenant Kappler, for whom the hurricane was named,was due to go to Eglin Field with the crew that penetratedthe hurricane on the fourteenth, but he wanted to stay overand see more of it. So they took him on, and although theyalready had a weather officer, Lieutenant Howard Schudel,Kappler was allowed to go as photographer. Schudel madethe weather report from which the following is extracted:

“The rain was moderate at a distance from the center butalready I was drenched because of a leaky nose in the ship.We flew almost completely around the center with nothingespecially spectacular. At about twenty miles from thecenter we encountered severe turbulence which lasted only142until the center was hit. During this time is when I foundmyself trying to code two weather messages at once and notdoing a very good job on either. I actually was too busy toget very scared as to whether or not the plane would holdtogether. Between the severe turbulence and the waterwhich by then had covered the entire desk, I could hardlyread my own writing a half hour later when I was able tosend the messages to the radio man. The turbulence near thecenter was of a nature I had never experienced previously.It was not a sharp jolt as experienced in a cumulus cloud butmore of a rhythmic up and down motion. But on top of thisthere was a motion from side to side that made it especiallyrough.

“To me the most unwelcome sight of the whole trip wasthe swelling, churning sea. From nine hundred feet, whichseemed to be our average altitude, the height of the sprayabove the ocean could not be determined. In places the surfacewas covered with sharp white streaks. If one thoughtfor very long about what would happen to him if he wereforced down upon this boiling ocean, he would be cured ofhurricane flying for some time to come.

“The center was very welcome. The turbulence there wasonly light and the intense rain stopped completely. Thisgave me a momentary ‘breather’ so that I could swallow mystomach, assure myself that I was not sick, and code up afew back messages.”

The morning crew went to Eglin Field and only one shipand crew was left at Morrison as the big storm closed in.The weather officer on this last flight was Lieutenant EdwardBourdet. He said:

“The weather during the entire morning at Morrison wasbad. There were numerous thunderstorms with heavy rainshowers that reduced visibility at times to less than one-quarter143mile. Our flight took off at 10 A.M. We went just eastof Miami where the wind was easterly at about fifty knots.We circled the storm center according to instructions andthe wind went around from east to north and then throughwest to south. We experienced not only vertical currents butshearing horizontal currents. It is surprising that an airplanecan hold together under such punishment. I found that thereis no dry place in the nose of a B-25 in hurricane rain andI had to sit on the papers to keep them fairly dry, but I wasalso troubled in trying to keep myself from being batteredagainst the side of the plane. We did not enter the eye ofthe storm but were in the northeast corner. The pilot laterremarked, ‘Our left wing tip may have been in the calm, butwe sure as hell weren’t.’ It was here that I experienced theworst turbulence and the heaviest rain I have ever seen. Thenoise was terrific.”

Lieutenant Bourdet added:

“The worst part of flying hurricanes is the fact that if thereshould be some trouble, structural or otherwise, that wouldforce the plane down, the crew would not have a chance ofgetting out alive. The best part is the fact that you knowthat you are instrumental in providing adequate warning toall concerned and in saving lives and property.”

During the time when these crews were flying into Kappler’sHurricane and sending reports to the Miami center,on September 15, the people of Florida were making last-minutepreparations. Windows were boarded up, streams ofrefugees filled the highways, the radios were full of warnings,and the venturesome stood on the street corners as thegales began roaring in the wires and big waves came boomingagainst the coast. Palm trees bent nearly double anddebris began to fill the air. There was great damage at theRichmond Naval Air Base. Three big lighter-than-air hangarswere destroyed. They collapsed in the wind at or near144the peak of the hurricane and intense fires, fed by highoctane gasoline, consumed the remains.

An investigating committee found that the winds must nothave been less than 161 miles an hour to account for thebending of the large steel doors. Weather records recoveredfrom the base indicated a two-minute wind of more than170 miles an hour and as high as 198 miles an hour for afew seconds.

The center of the hurricane crossed the southern tip ofFlorida and moved up the west coast on the sixteenth as itturned north-northeastward, and then swept over Georgiaand the Carolinas. Its center lay on the Georgia coast on theseventeenth. The boys who flew to Eglin Field had to takeit again as its center came near and some of them flew intothe hurricane after it passed Eglin. Among these was anotherweather officer, Lieutenant George Gray, who hadseen this storm in several different places and now viewed itfrom the air as it whipped the Georgia coast. His report isworth reading:

“Riding through ‘Kappler’s Hurricane’ was as rough a tripas I ever care to take. Admittedly, I know very little aboutflying from a pilot’s point of view—how hard it is to keep aship steady, the gyro, the cylinder head temperature, andall the rest that had the boys so worried. My criterion forroughness has always been how hard it is for me to hold onand how much the air speed fluctuates. We up front had tohold on with both hands when the going got bad. Some ofthe boys in back, we heard, with close to a thousand hoursreconnaissance 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—itwas the rain and the white sea below us.

“We saw the rain first from aloft. It looked absolutelyblack, as if a sudden darkness had set in in that part of the145sky. The blackness seemed to hang straight down like a thickdark curtain from a solid altostratus deck at about fifteenthousand feet. How much further above this layer thebuild-up extended, I do not know. I kept thinking, ‘We’renot actually going into that.’ We did though, and somehowwith all the rush, we didn’t have so much time to worry andbecome frightened as we expected. The rain was really terrific.It leaked in the nose and ran in a flood down the crawlway.The nose usually leaks and a soaking on a trip is not atall unusual, but this was different. I have never seen thewater pour in and spurt so before. Where the plexiglassmeets the floor section there was a regular fountain aboutsix inches high that flooded the whole area. The noise wasterrific. It pounded and crushed against the top and sidestill we thought it would all collapse in upon us. I didn’tnotice any particular temperature change in the heavy rainthough the pilots afterward all reported enormous coolingin the engines. Writing was almost impossible. The formsand charts on the table were like so much papier-mâché.There was no place that we could put them out of thewater’s way.

“We noticed the ocean particularly on the last day whenthe storm swept out to sea again off the Georgia coast. Theday before on our way back to Morrison Field from Eglinwhere we rode out the blow, we flew low over the Evergladesand saw roofless homes and millions of uprooted palmettos.The next day as we flew up the coast, we could seeother remnants of the storm—huge pieces of timber, trees,roofs of outbuildings, and maybe even houses. The interphonewas busy all the while as first one and then another of thecrew saw something also afloat. As we got nearer the stormbut still only in the scattered stratocumulus which is typicalof almost any over-water flight, the rubbish seemed to disappear.Whether it was simply that the water itself was too146rough for the timber to stand out or whether everything laybelow the seething whiteness, I don’t know. On our first tripinto a tropical storm, the navigator kept repeating over theinterphone, ‘That water gives me the creeps.’ It did. I keptthinking about ditching in it and floundering around in a‘Mae West’; I guess we all did. The waves were huge. Everynow and then one would crest up and just as it was aboutto crash, the wind would grab hold of the foam and mistand crash it back into the sea. I took several pictures of thegradually heightening sea, though I doubt that its seething,alive look could be transposed to paper.

“We saw the storm hit the Carolina Cape. It was easy tosee how trees in the Florida swamps without much root tograsp the earth were uprooted. Trees along the Carolina andGeorgia coasts—big ones, taller than the houses in thevicinity—were bending before the blow the way wheatseems to ebb and flow in a summer’s breeze. The seas werevery high and in occasional breaks in the lower clouds wecould catch glimpses of yellowish breakers and a litteredbeach. It looked as if the rain and thrashing surf hadchurned up the bottom, and mud had mixed with the foamywater. The shore was littered with debris, big trees, andblackened seaweed, mostly. As a sort of aside, on the matterof stirring up the bottom, we found several conch shells andbits of coral on the beach after the storm that are not considerednative in these parts.

“Whether this next is typical of hurricanes or merely evidencethat the storm had spent itself, I don’t know, but I dothink it worthy of mention. We noticed occasional breakupsin the clouds—not large areas, just a few seconds wheneverything brightened and when the firm outlines of a largecumulus could be seen through thin low scud. This was notin the center but as much as forty miles away where the stuffshould have been most solid and where the sea was near its147roughest. I have seen the ‘Eye’ of a hurricane on land as aweather forecaster. At that time we noticed a real breakupwith stars and moonlight visible. The wind and noisestopped for a while and we could see an occasional bulgingcumulus through the night. Whether this phenomenon is duemerely to less energy available over land than over water, Iwouldn’t even guess. In any event we noticed no such completebreak in the eye at sea. In the center, so-called calm,though for my money it was mighty rough, about all thatwe noticed was that the pounding rain stopped for a minuteor so. The clouds did not break clear through. There was aslight breakup to perhaps five thousand feet. There werebases of cumulus and several indefinite layers below thisovercast though. The terrific bouncing around also stopped.We were out of the place in just a minute or two, so the eyecouldn’t have been much more than five miles in diameter.Some of the other ships circled in the center, saw a flock ofbirds milling around there, and noted violent up and downdrafts near its edge. We were in and out of the thing so fastthat, frankly, we hardly had time to notice anything. I thinkwe could have fallen the seven hundred feet to the waterwithout my knowing it, we were so busy with the camera,papers, and instruments.

“I might say a little more about the cloud formations wenoticed since it was my job on this day to note them andtake pictures of them while the other observer tried to computepressure. Ahead of the storm here at Morrison Field onthe morning of the sixteenth, we got a good picture of pre-hurricanethunderstorms. Squalls with forty-mile gustsswept across the runways. The rain came down in sheets sothat we could watch it move toward us like a dark wall.Some of the boys out loading one of the ships for evacuationsaw one of these terrific showers bearing down on them and148they started to run for cover. The water was moving fasterthan they could run and before they’d moved fifty feet theywere soaked to the skin. On the morning of the seventeenth,it lay just off the Georgia coast and had started to re-deepen.We flew up the eightieth meridian though it was hard tohold any steady course. As some of the navigators have probablymentioned, we could see our own drift. After we noteda good windshift into the east to assure us that we were inthe northeast quadrant, we headed across current for thecenter and once there headed roughly for the great outsideto the west. With such terrific drift, I don’t see how anyoneknew where he was going.

“Heading north: The usual over-water five-tenths stratocumulusbases at two thousand, tops at thirty-five hundred,gradually began to lower at about one hundred twenty-fivemiles from the center to roughly eight hundred feet, and afairly solid lower layer of clouds. Flying above this layer atabout forty-five hundred feet we could see tall bulgingcumulus and thickening altostratus at about fifteen thousandahead. There were other thin layers of stratocumulus andaltostratus, but it wasn’t until we got within fifty miles or soof the center and the rain really began to come down andthe cumulus were as thick as trees in a forest that these intermediarylayers began to thicken and thatch in betweenthe tall cumulus the way they do in any well-developedstorm system. By fifty miles out we were in solid cloud andheavy rain. Picture-taking became impossible except in theoccasional breaks mentioned above. Even these breaks, ifthey should come out, would show little because continuousinstrument weather, to me at least, looks pretty much thesame whether it’s part of a violent hurricane or smoothcirculation stratus over a seaboard town. You can see thewing tips and not much more.

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“If a general conclusion is necessary, mine would simplybe that I’d just as soon not tempt fate in any more suchstorms.”

Sometimes birds such as Lieutenant Gray describes arecarried hundreds of miles before they escape from the hurricane.Species from Florida have been found as far north asNew England.

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11. TRICKS OF THE TRADE

After two years of probing tropical storms by air, nearlyeverybody connected with the operation agreed that it washazardous. But most of the men who were active in it hadone main idea. As soon as the winds, rain, clouds, seas, andcalm center of the average hurricane had been thoroughlymapped, a standard method should be devised for flying intothe center and getting the vitally needed weather informationen route with the least possible danger to the craft andcrew. They thought of something like a football team, eachman highly trained in a definite job, with faultless teamwork,and all members of the crew on the alert every moment.

Courses of instruction were organized. In all of them onefact became abundantly clear in the first two years. No two151hurricanes are exactly alike. All of them are big comparedwith thunderstorms and tornadoes, but some are much largerthan others. The recco crew may run into one in the uncertainstages of formation and at other times they may be nosinginto an old storm with strange and unsymmetrical parts.Of certain elements they were reasonably sure—all thesestorms have clouds, rain, squalls, and central low pressure,with strong winds spiraling more or less regularly in a directionagainst the motions of the hands of a clock.

With these thoughts in mind, the instructors tried to devisemethods that would prevent accidents. “What do youmean, accidents?” asked a junior weather officer at one ofthe conferences. “The whole thing is just one big accident,if you ask me. There’s only one rule that’s any good. Just becareful and don’t fall in the ocean!” As a matter of fact, mostof the rules had that one vital thought in mind, but therewere different ways of doing it.

The Air Corps and Navy soon developed their own specialmethods. From the beginning the Navy preferred the low-levelmethod; that is, they flew by the quickest route to thecalm center of the storm, going in at a low level, generally atan elevation between three hundred and seven hundred feet.There are good reasons for this. Weather information—especiallythe facts they want about tropical storms—is vital tothe safe operation of surface ships such as cruisers, destroyersand mine sweepers, and it is also used in the movementof aircraft from and to the decks of carriers. Task forceswant to know about the speed and direction of winds at sealevel, as well as the condition of the sea when storms areimminent.

It was the aim of the Navy to keep their weather reconnaissanceaircraft below the level of clouds, where the aerologistcould watch the surface of the sea as much of the timeas is possible within the limits of reasonably safe operation.152When in a tropical storm, the aerologist guided the pilotaround or into the center. Down near the water, say onehundred to three hundred feet altitude, turbulence is apt tobe very bad, sometimes extremely violent. Above seven hundredfeet, clouds are likely to interfere and this was extremelydangerous at that altitude in those early yearsbecause the altimeter which they used to indicate height ofthe aircraft by pressure of the atmosphere was sometimesbadly in error in a tropical storm. If the pilot and the aerologistlost sight of the water’s surface for a few minutes, they suddenlyfound the aircraft about to strike the precipitouswaves of a storm-lashed sea.

Pressure of the atmosphere falls with increase of elevation,roughly one inch drop in pressure for each one thousandfeet. If we put an ordinary barometer reading 29.90 inchesin a plane on the ground and go up one thousand feet, itwill read about 28.90 inches. The pressure altimeter is aspecial type of barometer that shows elevation instead ofpressure. When the pressure is 29.90 inches and the altimeteris set at 0, we go up to where the pressure is 28.90inches and it reads one thousand feet. But if the pressureover the region falls to 28.90 inches and the altimeter is notadjusted, it will read one thousand feet at the ground and beroughly one thousand feet in error when we go up to wherethe reading is 27.90 inches.

In ordinary weather, big changes in the barometer takeplace slowly and there usually is plenty of time for correction.In a flight into a hurricane, big changes take placerapidly. The change caused by the plane going up may beconfused with the drop in pressure in the hurricane. Ifthe plane is in the clouds when these changes take place, thepilot may have a frightening surprise on coming into theclear again. More recently, the hunters have been equippedwith radar altimeters which give the absolute altitude for153check. They send a radar pulse downward and it is bouncedback from the sea surface to the instrument. The time ittakes to go down and back depends on the height—thehigher, the longer it takes—and the instrument is designedto give the indication very accurately in feet. Thus, the radaraltimeter removed some of the dangers of low level flight.

So the Navy hunters moved in at low levels, preventingthe “mush from becoming a splash” as they put it, and althoughtheir experienced pilots were marvelously efficientin flying on instruments in clouds or “on the gauges,” theykept the white welter of the storm-lashed sea in view wheneverpossible. Of course, it is not possible to fly straight intoa storm center. The big winds carry the plane with themand so the pilot might as well use the winds to good advantage—hewill go with them to some extent, whether he likesit or not.

If we imagine ourselves in the center of the hurricane,facing forward along the line of motion of the storm itself—notthe motion of the winds around the center—we knowthat the safest sector to fly in is behind us on our left, andthe worst is in front of us on our right. At the left rear, thereis likely to be better weather—less dense cloudiness and notso much rain. The winds are not so violent. So the Navypilot flies with the wind. He goes in until he has winds of,say, sixty miles an hour. He puts the wind on the port quarterand this carries him gradually toward the center of thehurricane.

When he gets the wind speed to suit him, he brings thewind between the starboard quarter and dead astern andflies ahead to the point where he thinks he has the best placeto go for the center. According to Commander N. Brango,one of the Navy’s top specialists in hurricane navigation byair, “Choosing the proper run-in spot is tricky business, forit is the point at which the wind is the reciprocal of the154storm’s direction of motion. The pilot must watch for thispoint carefully, as he may pass it quickly; if he does there isimminent danger that the drift may carry the aircraft intothe most severe quadrant of the hurricane.” So the pilot goesinto the center without wasting any time. Delay results infatigue and it is important that the men be freshly alert. Thepilot puts the wind broad on the port beam and he cannotpossibly miss the eye. The next thing, the plane is in thatamazing region where the sea boils, the breezes are light ormissing altogether, the rain has ceased and the clouds arearranged in circular tiers, like giant spectators in a colossalfootball stadium.

This is a marvelous place. The crew is at ease. Coffee goesaround. In the last few moments before coming into the eye,the craft leaks like a sieve. Everything is wet but the squirtingfrom a hundred crevices in the plane ceases in the centerand now it is possible to do some paper work. The aerologistis busy with the weather code and the radio man beginspounding out a message. They circle around. The pilot takesthem up to maybe five thousand feet altitude and back downagain, circling around.

And then the time comes to leave the center. The pilotcalls a warning over the phone and there are two or threewisecracks. But this departure from the eye is dangerous.The plane begins to catch the shear of powerful windsaround the center. Here a man can get thrown around violentlyand be seriously hurt, if he fails to get a good grip onsomething or neglects his safety belt.

Now the pilot sets the wind broad on the starboard beamand both he and the co-pilot hang onto the controls. This isrough going and there may be some surprises, but after alittle they are out of the big wind circle and the navigatorthinks the gales are down to something like fifty knots. Thepilot sets course for the Navy airfield and the staccato notes155of the radio continue to carry vital weather information tothe forecasters. On this subject, Captain Robert Minter, anold hand, at one time in charge of aerology in the Office ofNaval Operations, is full of enthusiasm. He guaranteed thatthe Navy could get a ship off the ground on a hurricaneprobe within an hour after the Weather Bureau forecasterasked for the information.

The Air Force has a different problem. Like the Navy,they are dedicated to the task of getting vital weather datafor the forecasters, but their own problem is to evacuatemilitary aircraft from threatened bases and get informationneeded for aeronautics. Also, they have the responsibilityof giving weather forecasts and warnings to the Army. Untila few years after World War II, the Air Corps was a part ofthe Army, and when all three services were joined in theDepartment of Defense, the Air Force kept the weather jobfor both departments as a matter of economy and efficiency.Therefore, for this and other reasons, the Air Force followsa hurricane-probing plan which differs from the Navy’s.

Flying generally at higher levels in tropical storms, the AirForce, as much as the Navy, puts a great deal of reliance onradar, which has become a marvelous aid in watching theweather. In the beginning—years ago—radar was not designedfor weather purposes, however. During World WarII, radar was used to spy on enemy ships and aircraft in fogor in darkness, to distances of 150 miles or more. The high-frequencyrays sent out by the radar strike the object andare reflected back to the transmitter, where a sort of a silhouetteappears on a scope. It may be black with white areasshowing images of solid objects, such as planes and ships.In those days early in World War II, the weather was anuisance to the radar people. It often seemed to interferewith the use of radar for military purposes, but the operatorssoon learned that the interference came from rain drops in156local or general storms and that the rainy areas could belocated and followed on the scope and, with the proper design,the apparatus could be used as a weather radar.

The first experiments with radar carried on board aircraftin organized tropical storm reconnaissance were madein 1945. Within three years, all the planes were carryingradar sets and had crew members whose sole business it wasto watch the radar scope and tell the pilots and weather officerswhat kind of weather lay ahead.

Scarcely had these observations begun when the radarweather men discovered an amazing fact. On the radar, atropical storm looks like an octopus with a doughnut for abody and arms that spiral around the body as if the creaturehad been caught in a whirlpool. These arms are bands ofsqually weather, oftentimes violent turmoil. Between thebands (or octopus arms) the wind is furious, of course, butthere is less turbulence and cloudiness, and here the aircraftis in much less trouble than in the squall bands. The causeof these violent bands spiraling around the center has notbeen figured out yet for sure, but all tropical storms havethem, and the hunters are beginning to understand thembetter.

The distance you can see from the radar station dependson how much weather there is. If there are large patches ofdense rain, they may reflect all the rays back to the receiverand none may go through to show other rain areas fartheraway. Because of this, the radar shows the eye of the storm,but usually not the entire circle of clouds around a distanteye. Not enough radar energy is left to reflect from the oppositeside of the eye. For this and other reasons it is necessaryto have an experienced man to interpret the images onthe radar scope.

From a radar in an airplane at high levels, these limitationsare not so troublesome. Recently, too, the range of157military radars has been increased. Whereas the radar formerlywas very useful in getting a view of the eye from theaircraft, it did not give the eye’s geographical position,which had to be determined by other means, except whenthe eye was close enough to be seen from the coast. Withincreased range, the aircraft can get between the hurricanecenter and the coast or an island, and both appear on oppositesides of the radarscope. In such cases, the distance anddirection of the eye from a known point on a coast or islandcan be figured.

In the last two years, the Navy has used radar methods ofthis type extensively to obtain fixes of hurricane centers atnight. In these instances, the crews fly at greater heightsthan in daylight and can get the eye and the coast on thescope at the same time. This gives a good estimate of centerlocation to supplement the daylight penetrations withoutflying into the storm center in darkness. Actually, nightflights directly into hurricane centers were not profitable, asnon-radar observations of sea surface, clouds and winds werenot possible in darkness.

It is apparent that a plane going into a storm at some upperlevel soon gets into the clouds and the sea surface is nolonger visible. But the crew can depend on the radar to helpfind the center and they can go down in the eye of the stormand look around and, if necessary, the plane can descend inthe outer parts of the storm and get estimates of the wind bya drift meter. For this latter procedure, the Air Forces at onetime used what they called a “low-level boxing procedure.”On this we can get the facts from the instructions issued bythe head of the Air Weather Service, Brigadier GeneralThomas Moorman, Jr., a veteran of weather operations inWorld War II and in charge of weather reconnaissance inthe Pacific, including the work done so effectively during theKorean War.

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In 1953, Moorman directed that, in the interest of flyingsafety, there will be no low-level penetration of hurricanes.The Air Force pilots were asked to go into and out of theeye at the pressure level of seven hundred millibars which,under average conditions, is at about ten thousand feet altitude.Within 100 miles of a land mass, the flights in a hurricanewould be at a minimum altitude of two thousand feet.To put it, in part, in the General’s words, the hurricane missionwould be conducted as follows:

For high-level penetration, the first priority would begiven to obtaining an observed position of the storm center,either by a radar fix plus a navigation fix on the aircraft position,or a position found by penetrating the storm and obtaininga navigation fix in the eye. The storm would beapproached on a track leading directly toward the center. Ifthe storm center could not be reached at the seven hundredmillibar level, the low-level boxing procedure could be followed,but if the radar set was not operating, no attemptwould be made under these conditions to go into the eye.

For the low-level boxing procedure, the following instructionsapplied, quoting General Moorman in part:

“The storm area is approached on a track leading directlyto the storm center and may be approached from any direction.As the winds increase in velocity, corrections will bemade so that the wind is from the left and perpendicularto the track. The point at which the box is started is the mid-pointof the base side of the rectangular pattern to be flownaround the storm. When winds of sixty knots are encountered,the first leg will be started with a 90° turn to theright.

“The low-level box will be flown within the 45-60 knotwind area maintaining a true track for the first half of theleg, then a true heading for the succeeding legs. Surface159winds should be 45° from the right when the left turn ismade to the next leg. Double driftwinds should be obtainedon each corner observation and each mid-point when practical.Reconnaissance of an area of a suspected hurricanewill be flown with the same procedure.

“The weather observer will check the co-pilot’s altimeterat frequent intervals to insure that it is reading the same asthe radar altimeter.

“All flights will depart storm area prior to sunset, regardlessof the degree of completion of the mission.

“Flight altitude while boxing the storm will be a minimumof five hundred feet absolute altitude, or at such higher altitudeas will permit observations of the sea surface withouthazard to safety. If contact flight cannot be maintained atfive hundred feet, the legs will be flown a greater distancefrom the eye.”

The “boxing procedure” was used a great deal by the AirWeather Service in the early years but by 1954 it had beeneliminated. The seven-hundred-millibar method was revised,and as used in flights out of Bermuda in 1954 was describedby Captain Ed Vrable, navigator, in part as follows: “(1) Theaircraft flies down wind at right angles to the storm path toa point of lowest pressure, about twenty miles directly infront of the eye; (2) Flight is continued down wind forthree minutes beyond the low point and then the heading ofthe aircraft is changed 135° to the left; (3) The aircraft continueson this course until the pressure begins to rise andthen turns 90° to the left and into the center.”

This new Air Force plan of flying into the hurricane atseven hundred millibars (ten thousand feet, roughly) ismuch like the Navy’s low-level method, except that the AirForce crews enter down wind across the front of the storm,but this is nearly always an advantage for aircraft based at160Bermuda. From that island their most direct approach to anoncoming storm is into the front semicircle.

The Air Force has another aid in measuring weather in astorm. It is an instrument called a “dropsonde,” a speciallydesigned apparatus which works on the same principle asthe older “radiosonde.” A marvelously ingenious instrument,the radiosonde is a unit of very small weight containingminiature instruments for measuring pressure, temperatureand humidity. It also has a metering device, a battery, anda small radio transmitter. The apparatus is carried aloft bya rubber balloon filled with helium. As the balloon rises, theradio transmitter sends signals for pressure, temperatureand humidity at each level reached, and the signals arecopied on a register at the ground weather station.

The dropsonde is a radiosonde that is thrown out of theaircraft flying at a high level, and allowed to descend byparachute, instead of being carried up by a balloon. Thereis a special listening post in the plane, where the data arerecorded as the apparatus descends. The data are then putinto the form of a message for transmission by the plane’sradio operator to the forecasting base. This work with thedropsonde is usually done by the radar operator, in additionto his other duties.

Much of this fascinating work is done by the Air WeatherService of the Air Force on routine daily flights, whether ornot there is a tropical storm to be studied. As an example,they have made daily flights from Alaska to the North Poleand back, to keep tabs on the strange weather up there. Inthis way, there—and in other parts of the world—they getweather daily from places on land and sea where there areno weather stations, no merchant ships to report, and nopeople to act as weather observers. These flights are namedafter some bird common to the region. The North Pole flight161is called “Ptarmigan”; others are called “Vulture,” “Gull,”etc. Special flights into tropical storms in the Atlantic andCaribbean are called “Duck” missions.

Some of these improvements in the hurricane-huntingmethods of the Air Weather Service were mentioned in areport by Robert Simpson, a Weather Bureau meteorologist,who flew with the Air Force into “Hurricane George” in1947. This was a big storm which appeared first over theocean to the eastward of the Lesser Antilles. The squadronassigned to the job had been moved to Kindley Field, atBermuda. Simpson saw Lieutenant Colonel Robert David,who was in command, and arranged for the flight in one ofthe new planes piloted by an experienced officer, LieutenantMack Eastburn.

Hurricane George, so-called by the Air Force boys, althoughsuch names were not then official, moved slowly andmenacingly across the Atlantic, north of Puerto Rico, andheaded toward Florida. Simpson was in it several times withthe Air Force. On the first flight, they were in an old B-29which had too many hours on the engines and had been abad actor on previous missions, but this time it behaved likea lady and they picked up a great deal of useful information.On the next trip they had a new plane. Here is a partof Simpson’s story:

“Success is a marvelous stimulant. While we had everyright to be near exhaustion after our thirteen trying hoursthis first day in ‘Hurricane George,’ we did not get to bedearly that night. There was too much to tell, and too muchto discuss concerning the flight scheduled to leave early thenext morning. This second flight promised to be even morelucrative of results than the first, for we were scheduled tofly in the newest plane in the squadron. It had only 100hours or so in the air and contained many new features theother planes didn’t have. Moreover it had bomb bay tanks162and could leave the ground with nearly eight thousand fivehundred gallons of gasoline.

“There were a few changes in the crew but Eastburn wasthe pilot again on the second flight. The takeoff was scheduledfor 6:30 A.M. The storm was in a critical position as faras warnings were concerned, and the Miami office wasanxious to get information as early as possible upon whichto base a warning for the East Coast. ‘George’ was locatedover the eastern Bahamas and was moving slowly westward,a distinct threat to the entire Eastern Seaboard but immediatelyto the Florida coast.”

The first hint of what was in store for the hurricane huntersthat day turned up as they completed their briefing atthe ship and prepared to board the plane. The engineer, in alast-minute checkup, found a hydraulic leak and there was adelay of a little more than an hour before that could be repaired.Finally they pulled away from the line and out tothe end of the runway. Number 4 engine was too hot. Therewas another delay while further checks were made into thepower plant. Finally they were off—all one hundred thirty-fivethousand pounds. This was to have been a very longflight and every available bit of gasoline storage had beenutilized.

The plan on this day was once again to make a try for datanear the top of the storm, to verify and expand the startlinginformation gained the preceding day. This plane had de-icerboots and they were not concerned about the rime icethat might tend to accumulate, as it had the day before.First, they were anxious to get certain data from a low-levelflight, and to learn how effectively the radar could be usedfor navigating a large plane like the B-29 near the center ofthe storm. They went out at ten thousand feet again but continuedto a point about eighty miles north of the storm atthis elevation. By this time they had crossed about four of the163spiral rain bands (the spiraling arms of the “octopus”). Herethe plane turned downwind parallel to another of the rainbands and flew through the corridor to within viewing distanceof the eye. They gradually descended as the base ofthe middle-level clouds lowered near the storm center.Leveling off at seven thousand five hundred feet, they werein and out of clouds with horizontal visibility low much ofthe time. However, there was scarcely a thirty-second periodwhen the crew were unable to see the sea surface below.Navigation at this stage was entirely by radar. Again theamazing thing was the lack of turbulence throughout thisflight. This was a really big storm. They were flying at onlyseven thousand five hundred feet through one of the mostviolent sectors, only twenty to thirty miles from the eye itself,yet they encountered nothing that could be describedas important as moderate turbulence. Simpson’s early experiencein hurricane flying in 1945 in a C-47 had been repeated.They were flying in comfort under conditions which gavethem a command of all the information needed to report theposition and intensity of the storm. Simpson remarked:“What a difference this is from the battering flights at fivehundred feet in the B-17’s which have been standard operatingprocedure (‘SOP’) with the squadron until this season!”

The fascination of flying in comfort so near the stormcenter tempted them to continue this exploration of reconnaissancetactics somewhat longer. However, there weremany other important things to be done on this flight andthere was no time to waste. They picked their way acrossone of the bands to an outer “corridor” and retreated to apoint about 150 miles from the center and once again beganto climb. Perhaps in the fascination of traveling so close tothe eye in such comfort they had become complacent. Inany case, the events which followed in fast succession leftno room for further complacency. They had climbed no164higher than twelve thousand feet when someone spoke onthe interphone with a bit of a quiver in his voice, “I smellgasoline.” The hatches were opened and the plane ventedhurriedly. Eastburn went aft to investigate and returnedwith a worried look on his face. He spoke to the engineer,who scrambled through the tube (connecting the fore and theaft sections of the plane) on the double. It was not until afterhe returned, about twenty minutes later, that the rest of thecrew learned that they had developed a very serious gasolineleak in one of the hoses connecting the bomb bay tanks.Nearly a thousand gallons of gasoline had been streamedthrough the bomb bay doors. The engineer had completed therepair satisfactorily and, after a brief consultation withthe plane commander, the crew consented to go ahead withthe project.

“We climbed to twenty thousand feet,” said Simpson inhis report. “I was seated on the jump-seat between the radaroperator and the engineer, looking through the tube. I sawfrom the tube a wisp of smoke drifting lazily toward the aftsection. I do not recall my exact reaction but I am sure I wasnot a picture of composure when I called this to the engineer’sattention. Nor did he stop to check with the planecommander before demonstrating that he also was a handyman with a fire extinguisher. The cause was a simple thing.As we climbed, the engineer had turned on the cabin heater,the insulation of which was a bit too thin in the tube so thatthe padding in the tube began to smolder. Perhaps thiswasn’t a very important item but it didn’t contribute to thepeace of mind of any of the crew, especially when it wasremembered that only a few minutes earlier the bomb baygas tank immediately beneath that tube had been leakinglike a sieve. Again the plane commander checked with thecrew. Again, but with noticeable hesitation, it was agreedthat we would proceed with the project. Higher and higher165we climbed. This time we reached the forty thousand feetmark with the base of the high cirrostratus still above us.So we leveled out, trimmed our tabs and set our course forthe storm center. This time we were determined to descendfrom forty thousand feet in the eye to get a sounding thereand then return home at low levels.

“We soon reached the base of the cirrostratus and enteredthe clouds. The de-icers were working. Again the data beganto roll in along the same pattern as observed the previousday—at least for several minutes, until the interphone wasfilled with the excited voice of the right scanner with aspine-tingling report to the commander, ‘Black smoke andflame coming from number 4.’ At the same time the planebegan to throb, roll and yaw. In less time than it takes tosay it, the ‘boys’ in the front compartment of this B-29 becamemature men—wise, efficient, stout-hearted men, eachwith a job to do and each one doing it with calculateddeliberateness, yet speedily. There was grim determinationhere but no evidence of emotion. This magnificent tribute totopnotch training had an exhilarating effect upon me andtempered to some extent the abashment which I could nothelp feeling as a result of my helplessness in this situation,and the fear which clutched my heart.

“We were lucky! The single carbon dioxide charge releasedby the engineer extinguished the fire in the engine.Number 4 was feathered and began to cool but our troubleswere far from over. The engineer had manuals and technicalorders spread out on all sides of him and was workingfeverishly to restore some power to number 4, as the indicatedair speed dwindled from 168 to 166 to 164 or 5, hoveringprecariously above the deadly stallout at 163. We wereonly a few miles from north of the center by this time butno one had recorded the data. We were too busy worrying.The pilot was in the process of putting the plane into a long166glide to increase the air speed, when the left scanner claimedthe interphone circuit with, ‘Black smoke and flame comingfrom number 1.’ This time we were in real trouble. However,the engineer had anticipated further difficulty and was readyagain. It was only a matter of seconds before the fire was outand some semblance of power had been returned to number1. But we were still five hundred miles from the nearest landand very near the center of a granddaddy of hurricanes. Sowe declared an emergency and headed for MacDill Field.”

Altogether, this was an ironical turn of affairs. An oldplane had acted like a lady the day before and now a newone had frightened the crew with its mechanical troubles,but the newer methods of hurricane hunting, the “tricks ofthe trade,” had fortunately taken some of the danger out ofthe storm itself. Otherwise the mechanical troubles mighthave combined with the weather to spell disaster.

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12. TRAILING THE TERRIBLE TYPHOON

“The workshop of Nature in her wildest mood.”—Deppermann

So far as anyone knows, the most furious of the typhoons ofthe Pacific are no bigger or more violent than the worst ofthe huge hurricanes of the Atlantic and the West Indies.They belong to the same death-dealing breed of storms, butthe typhoons come from the bigger ocean; they sweepmajestically across these vast waters toward the world’slargest continent; and to the south and southeast lies alonger stretch of hot tropical seas than anywhere else onearth. Perhaps it is the enormous extent of the environmentthat explains the fact that in the average year there are threeor four times as many Pacific typhoons as there are WestIndian hurricanes. The greater excess of energy generatedin this enormous Pacific storm region by hot sun on slow-movingwaters is evidently released by a more frequentrather than a more violent dissolution of the stability of theatmosphere.

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But there is something about typhoons that causes thepeople to look upon them with even greater terror than inthe case of hurricanes. Likewise, the storm hunters tacklethe job of tracking them with less confidence. Typhoonscome from greater distances. Their points of origin may bescattered over a wider area. Much more often than is thecase with hurricanes, there may be two or more at the sametime. In their paths of devastation they fan out over a biggerand more populous part of the world. It takes more planes,more men and longer flights to keep up with typhoons thanwith hurricanes.

For many decades the people of the Far East struggled valiantlyagainst the typhoon menace without much interest onthe part of the Western World. Native observers reportedthem when they showed their first dangerous signs and thencame roaring by the islands in the Pacific, including the Philippines,as they swept a path of devastation on the way toChina or Japan. Men on ships equipped with radio sentfrantic weather messages to Manila, Shanghai or Tokyo asthey were being battered by monstrous winds and seas.Father Charles Deppermann, S.J., formerly of the PhilippineWeather Bureau, who did as much as any man to help peopleprepare for these catastrophes, made an investigation tosee why some of the typhoon reports from native observerswere defective. He listed a few of the reasons.

One observer said his house was shaking so much in thestorm that he was unable to finish the observation. He addedthat ninety per cent of the houses around him were thrownto the ground. Another common complaint was that theobservers could not read the thermometers because the airwas full of flying tin and wood. Another apologetic man puton the end of his observation a note that the roof of theweather station was off and the sea was coming in. Theobserver on the Island of Yap fled to the Catholic rectory169and looked back to see his roof, walls, and doors blowingaway, but he sent his record to the forecast office! Anotherobserver on Yap was reading the barometer when it was hitby a flying piece of wood and the observer was knocked tothe floor. One of the observers had excuses for a poor observationbecause he had to run against the wind in water kneedeep. In another place, the wind blew two rooms off theobserver’s house at observation time. But the most convincingexcuse for failure was from another town where theobserver was drowned in a typhoon before the record wasfinished.

It is a strange fact, too, that one can look at all theserecords and the reports written by the Pacific storm huntersafter they got going, and seldom see a vivid description ofthe fearful conditions in the typhoon. The white cloudsturning grayish and then copper-colored or red at sunset.The rain squalls carried furiously along. The roar of giantwinds and the booming sea as the typhoon takes possessionof its empire in huge spirals of destruction. With death andruin on all sides, nobody seemed to have the energy to writeabout it. The tumult passed, the wind subsided, the waterwent out slowly, and the observer wrote a brief apologyfor the bedraggled condition of the records.

In the same way, the typhoon hunters let their planesdown at home base too tired to do anything except compilea few technical notes. The vastness of the thing seemed toleave them speechless. The plane went out on a mission andthe base soon vanished, a shrinking dot on the horizon. Themind tired of thinking about the near-infinite expanse ofPacific waters, of thinking about running out of fuel in anendless search of winds, clouds and waves, of thinking aboutnever getting back to that little dot beyond the horizon.

Into this ominous arena the American fleet nosed its way,island by island, in the war against the Japanese. By methods170which had been handed down from older generations,strengthened by all the modern improvements that couldbe added, the Americans tried to keep track of tropicalstorms in this enormous region where trade winds, monsoonsand tropical winds hold their several courses across seeminglyendless seas, but here and there run into conflict orconverge in chaos. Twice when their predictions were notvery good, the fleet suffered and in the second instance thetyphoon humbled the greatest fleet that ever was assembledon the high seas. The Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, demandedreconnaissance without delay. As men do in timeof war, the Navy aerologists moved swiftly and effectivelyto meet the challenge. In fact, they had anticipated it inpart and had plans in the blue-print stage, even before thebig Third Fleet took its brutal beating in December, 1944.

Most of the stimulus came from the Atlantic side, whereorganized hurricane hunting had begun in the middle of theyear. But it was not long until the Japanese were driven outof the typhoon areas. In June, 1945, they were being blastedout of Okinawa as typhoon reconnaissance was beginning.In fact, the first men to go out to penetrate a typhoon hadto be careful to keep away from Okinawa. By that time theJapanese had committed all their fading sea and air power,including their last remaining battleship, to the defense ofOkinawa, and after June, the U. S. Navy had no real enemyexcept the typhoon.

Beginning in June, 1945, the Navy airmen and aerologistsflew two kinds of missions. Almost daily they went out tocheck the weather, and if they found a full-grown typhoonor one in formation in an advanced stage, special reccoswere sent out. One flight went out as soon as it was daylightand the second took off about six hours afterward, earlyenough to make sure that the second would be completedby nightfall. This was rather tough going. As one of the171aerologists pointed out, Pacific distances were so large thatif they were considered in terms of similar distances in theUnited States, a common mission would be like a take-offfrom Memphis and a search of the area of a triangle extendingfrom Washington, D. C., to New York City and back toMemphis.

Aircraft used by the Navy were Catalinas (PBY’s), Liberators(PB4Y-1’s), and Privateers (PB4Y-2’s). All were four-engined,land-based bombers, some fitted with extra gasolinetanks for long ranges. Before leaving base in the Philippinesor the Marianas, the aerologists briefed the crews. In flight,the aerologist directed changes in the course of the plane,but the pilot could use his own judgment at any time whenhe thought the change might exceed operational safety. FromJune through September, 1945, the Navy flew a total of onehundred typhoon missions, averaging ten hours each. LieutenantsPaul A. Humphrey (a Weather Bureau scientist afterthe war) and Robert C. Fite, both of whom flew constantly onthese missions, gathered data from all flight crews, and atthe end of the season wrote descriptions of five typhoonswhich were more or less typical.

Some of the most interesting of these missions weredirected into the big typhoon which came from the east,crossed Luzon in the Philippines and roared into the ChinaSea, in the early part of August. On the fourth of the month,one of the Catalinas was checking the weather three hundredmiles east of Leyte and saw a low pressure systemdeveloping a small tropical disturbance. It grew, waschecked daily, and on the sixth blew across Luzon andreached its greatest fury in the South China Sea on theseventh.

The first plane that went into the typhoon in this positionwas directed to the right and north of the center, to takeadvantage of tail winds and to spiral gradually into the172center. As it approached the center, the plane climbed toabout five thousand feet, and the crew had a beautiful panoramicview of the clouds piled up on the outer rim of theeye. On account of the awful severity of the turbulence theplane had experienced around the eye, they descended againand flew to home base at altitudes between two hundredand three hundred feet.

On examination of the aircraft after the battered crewhad let down at home base, it was found that the controlcables were permanently loosened, the skin on the bottomof the port elevator fin had been cracked away from thefuselage, one Plexiglas window was bowed inward, andthe paint was removed from the leading edges. Because ofthe violence of turbulence on this flight, the nervous crewof the second recco plane on that day was instructed toreconnoiter but not to try to go into the center.

On the fifth of September a violent typhoon formed betweenthe Philippines and Palau and moved northwestwardtoward Formosa. On the tenth a recco plane ran into troublein this storm. Twice while flying at two thousand feet, itmet severe downdrafts, losing altitude at five hundred toone thousand feet per minute while nosed upward andclimbing at full power. The eddy turbulence was extremelysevere and most of the crew members became sick. Thesecond recco plane on that date ran into violent turbulencealso, and at times it was almost impossible for the pilot andco-pilot to keep the plane under control.

And then disaster struck! By the end of September theNavy storm hunters had gone out on one hundred missionsinto the hearts of typhoons and, although many of them hadbeen frightened and badly battered, there had been nocasualties. They made up a report as of September 30, commentingon their phenomenal good fortune on these manyflights. But on the very next day, October 1, one of the crews173which had been making these perilous missions departed ona flight into a typhoon over the China Sea. Those men nevercame back. No one had any idea as to what had actuallyhappened, but the members of other crews could well imaginewhat might have happened, and whatever it was, itmust have ended in typhoon swept waters where none of thestorm hunters expected to have any chance of survival. Itcould have happened in the powerful winds around the eyeor in one of those bands extending spirally outward from thecenter, filled with tremendous squalls and fraught withdanger to brave men venturing into these monstrous cyclonesof the Pacific. The report—even before this sequel—hadstressed the hazardous nature of reconnaissance.

In these Pacific missions, the pilots and aerologists, evenwithout radar, had become aware of the doughnut-shapedbody of the storm with squall bands spiraling outward (theoctopus arms). But they got very little information that theythought would help in predicting the movements of typhoons,except the old rule that the storm is likely to continueon its course unchanged, tending to follow the averagepath for the season. The explorations by aircraft as a meansof getting data were far more useful in locating storms anddetermining their tracks, however, than any other methods.

After the end of 1945, the reconnaissance of tropicalstorms, both in the Atlantic and the Pacific, was in trouble,owing to demobilization. Many experienced men returnedto civil life and it was necessary to start training all overagain. The Navy set up schools for two squadrons of Pacificstorm hunters late in 1945, at Camp Kearney in California.The graduates were in action in 1946.

After the surrender of the Japanese, the Air Corps maintaineda Weather Wing in the Pacific, with headquarters inTokyo. Part of its job was to give warnings of typhoons174threatening Okinawa, where the United States had establisheda big military base. Here they thought they had builtstructures strong enough to withstand typhoons, but theylearned some bitter lessons. The most violent of all thetyphoons of this period was one named “Gloria” which almostwiped Okinawa clean in July, 1949.

A most unusual incident occurred over the Island ofOkinawa when the center of Gloria was passing. The AirForce was short of planes in safe condition for recco, butmanaged to get enough data to indicate the force and probablearrival of this violent typhoon. It happened that CaptainRoy Ladd, commander of Flight #3, was in the area,with Colonel Thomas Moorman on board, making an inspectionof recco procedures in the area. Their report gave thefollowing information:

“As Gloria roared over a helpless and prostrate Okinawa,weather reconnaissance members of Crew B-1 circled in theeye of the big blow and watched the destruction of theisland while talking to another eyewitness on the ground.That hapless human was the duty operator for OkinawaFlight Control, who, despite the fact that his world wasliterally disappearing before his eyes and the roof rippingoff overhead, nevertheless stuck to his post and eventuallycontacted three aircraft flying within the control zone andcleared them to other bases away from the storm’s path.”

Describing the situation, Captain Ladd stated that he hadattempted radio contact with Okinawa for some time butwas prevented from doing so by severe atmospheric conditions.After a connection had been established, one hundredmiles out from Okinawa’s east coast, the control operatorrequested them to contact two other aircraft in the area andadvise them to communicate with Tokyo Control for furtherinstructions.

Shortly thereafter, the RB-29 broke through heavy cloud175formations into the comparatively clear eye of the big typhoon.The southern tip of the island became visible, justunder the western edge of Gloria’s core. Gigantic swells werebreaking upon the coast and the control operator advisedthat winds had been 105 miles per hour just thirty minutesbefore and had been increasing rapidly. He reported thatthe control building’s roof had just blown off, all types ofdebris were flying by, and aircraft were being tossed aboutlike toys.

A little later, the ground operator had to crawl under atable to get shelter because nearly all of the building hadbeen blown away, bit by bit. Structures of the quonset typewere crushed like matchboxes and carried away like piecesof paper. Their roofs were ripped like rags. A cook at theAir Force Base hurried into a large walk-in refrigeratorwhen everything began to blow away. “It was the only safeplace I could find,” he explained afterward. “The buildingblew away but the refrigerator was left behind and hereI am.”

One of the meanest of the typhoons of this period wasknown as “Vulture Charlie.” It was dangerous to airmenbecause of the extreme violence of its turbulence. Ordinarily,the typhoons were known by girls’ names, and for thatreason the typhoon hunters in the Pacific were known as“girl-chasers.” But “Vulture Charlie” got the first word ofits name from the type of mission involved, and “Charlie”from the third word in the phonetic alphabet used in communications.

On November 4, 1948, an aircraft commanded by CaptainLouis J. Desandro ran into the violent turmoil of VultureCharlie and described it as follows:

“We hit heavy rain and suddenly the airspeed and rateof climb began to increase alarmingly and reached a maximumof 260 miles per hour and four thousand feet per176minute climb to an altitude of three thousand seven hundredfeet. The sudden increase in altitude was brought about bydisengaging the elevator control of the auto-pilot and raisingthe nose to control the airspeed. Power was not reducedbecause of our low altitude. After about thirty seconds toone minute of this unusual condition we hit a terrific bumpwhich appeared to be the result of breaking out of a thunderhead.The airspeed then decreased to 130 miles per hourin a few seconds due to the fact that we encountered downdraftson the outer portion of the thunderhead and weremomentarily suspended in air. At this point the left wingdropped slightly and I immediately shoved the nose downto regain airspeed. Before a safe airspeed was again reached,we had descended to an altitude of one thousand one hundredfeet.

“As a result of this turbulence my feet came up off therudder pedals. The engineer, who was sitting on the nosewheel door instructing a student engineer, came up off thefloor like he was floating in the air. The navigator andweather observer were raised out of their seats. A coffeecup, which was on the back of the airplane commander’sinstrument panel, was raised to the ceiling and came downon the weather observer’s table. Cabin airflow was beingused and the airflow meter exploded and glass hit bothengineers in the face.”

In December, 1948, a crew under the command of LieutenantDavid Lykins was instructed to use the boxing procedurein a typhoon called “Beverly.” On one of theirmissions, they flew into it on December 7. The following isbased on his report:

The operations office instructed the crew to climb to theseven hundred millibar level (about ten thousand feet) aftertake-off, penetrate the eye of the storm, take a fix in thecenter, then make a spiral descent and sounding down to177one thousand five hundred feet and proceed out of the stormon a northwesterly heading, to begin the pattern around thestorm center.

After the briefing, the crew ate dinner, while talking anxiouslyabout the trip, and returned to the aircraft to loadpersonal equipment. When they were airborne with the gearand flaps up, they made an initial contact with Guam Control.There was no reported traffic, so they were cleared.The instructions were complied with and a heading of 270degrees was taken up. Soon there was discernible on thehorizon a vast coverage of high, thin clouds at about thirtythousand feet. This indicated the presence of the storm,verified by the south wind and slight swells that were perpendicularto the flight direction of the plane. The wind wasincreasing and the swells were noticed to intensify. Theboundary of the storm area was very distinct as they approachedthe edge. At this point, the surface wind wasestimated to be thirty-five knots from 180 degrees.

A few minutes later they were on one hundred per centinstrument flying conditions and the moderate to heavy rainand moderate turbulence persisted until they missed the eyeand flew south for fifteen minutes. Because they were oninstruments and could not see the surface, they were unableto determine the highest wind velocity in the storm. It wasestimated close to one hundred knots. At this point theynoticed that they had a good drift correction for hitting thecenter satisfactorily, so they held the 270 degrees heading,relying on the radar observer to be able to see the eye onthe scope.

Approximately fifteen or twenty minutes later, the radarobserver reported seeing a semi-circular ring of clouds abouttwenty-five degrees to the right at about twenty-five milesrange. The same kind of ring was detected to the left, aboutthe same distance, however. Figuring they had drifted to178the right of the center, they elected to intercept the leftcenter seen on the radar and flew until they received anill-omened pressure rise, when it was apparent they hadmade a wrong choice!

To make sure they were not chasing circular rings ofheavy clouds or false eyes on the scope, they made a turn to180 degrees and held it long enough to enable them to seethe surface wind. After about ten minutes they saw the surfaceand judged the wind to be coming from approximatelywest-northwest. They headed back for the center of thestorm with the wind off their left wing, allowing fifteen totwenty degrees for drift. In approximately fifteen minutesthe radar observer reported the eye as being almost directlyahead. Lieutenant Lykins said:

“At 0906Z (1906 Guam time) we broke out into the mostbeautiful and well-defined eye that I have ever seen. It wasa perfect circle about thirty miles in diameter and beautifullyclear overhead. The sides sloped gently inward towardthe bottom from twenty-five thousand feet and appeared tobe formed by a solid cloud layer down to approximatelyfive thousand feet. From one thousand feet to five thousandfeet were tiers of circular cumulus clouds giving the effect ofseats in a huge stadium.”

They descended in the eye, made their observations andthen prepared to depart. Lieutenant Lykins continued:

“As we entered the edge of the eye we were shaken byturbulence so severe that it took both pilots to keep theairplane in an upright attitude. At times the updrafts anddowndrafts were so severe that I was forced down in myseat so hard that I could not lift my head and I could notsee the instruments. Other times I was thrown against mysafety belt so hard that my arms and legs were of no usemomentarily, and I was unable to exert pressure on thecontrols. All I could do was use the artificial horizon momentarily179until I could see and interpret the rest of theinstruments. These violent forces were not of long durationfortunately, for had they been it would have been physicallyimpossible to control the airplane.

“Since the updrafts and downdrafts were so severe, wewere unable to maintain control of the altitude; all we coulddo was to hold the airspeed within limits to keep the airplanefrom tearing up from too much speed or from stalling outfrom too little. After the first few seconds, we managed tohave the third pilot, who was riding on the flight deck, advancethe RPM to 2400 so we could use extra power in thedowndrafts, and so we could start a gradual ascent from thearea. Neither of us at the controls dared leave them longenough to do it ourselves.

“The third pilot received a lump on his forehead when hestruck the rear of the pilot’s seat, and bruised his shoulderfrom another source in doing so. Since he had no safety belt,he was thrown all over the flight deck.

“This area of severe turbulence lasted between five andsix minutes and every second during this time it was allboth of us could do to keep the airplane in a safe attitudeand to keep it within safe airspeed limits and maintain ageneral heading.

“It is almost impossible for me to describe accurately orto exaggerate the severity of the turbulence we encountered.To some it may sound exaggerated and utterly fantastic, butto me it was a fight for life.

“I have flown many weather missions in my thirty monthsin the 514th Reconnaissance Squadron, I have flown nightcombat missions in rough winter weather out of England,and I have instructed instrument flying in the States, butnever have I even dreamed of such turbulence as we encounteredin typhoon Beverly. It is amazing to me that ourship held together as it did.”

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When the severest turbulence subsided the hurricanehunters found they had gained an altitude of about sixthousand feet. At this point they decided to climb to 10,500feet and proceed directly to Clark Field. It was night timeand, since they were shaken up pretty badly, this seemedthe most sensible course of action to be taken. They had noway of knowing the extent of any damage they might havesustained. The engineer reported that the booster pumpshad all gone into high boost; one generator had quit. Theradar observer said that the rear of the airplane was a massof rubble from upturned floorboards, personal equipment,sustenance kits, and such. The flight deck had extra equipmentall over it. In addition, the co-pilot had twisted off afluorescent light rheostat switch when the plane hit theturbulence as he was adjusting it. The radar observer reportedhis camera had been knocked to the floor.

After his experience in leaving the eye of Beverly at onethousand five hundred feet, the lieutenant had one statementto make and he said it could not be overemphasized.

“An airplane with human beings aboard should never berequired to fly through the eye of a typhoon at an altitudebelow ten thousand feet. If a pattern must be flown at onethousand five hundred feet in the storm area, it should beclearly indicated that the area of the eye be left at the sevenhundred millibar level and the descent be made at a distanceof not less than seventy miles from the center. Fulluse of radar equipment should be exercised in avoiding anydoubtful areas.”

On inspection after landing, the following damage to theairplane was found: A bent vertical fin, warped flaps, tearsin fairing joining the wing and fuselage, untold snappedrivets on all parts of the airplane, fuselage apparentlytwisted, and one unit in the center of the bomb bay was tornfrom its mountings.

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Reports of this kind leave some doubt as to whether thetyphoon actually is not more violent than the West Indianhurricane.

Another typhoon of extraordinary violence which gavethe storm hunters serious trouble struck Wake Island onSeptember 16, 1952. Wake is a little island in the PacificOcean, a small dot on the map, the only stopping-place betweenthe Hawaiian Islands, more than two thousand milesto the eastward, and the Marianas, more than one thousandmiles to the westward. This spot, a stop for Pan Americanplanes, was captured by the Japanese and then recapturedby the United States in World War II. When the KoreanWar opened, military planes used this small island as arefueling place en route from the Pacific Coast of the UnitedStates to Japan.

Before taking off from Honolulu, the airmen wanted aforecast for this long route and a report of the weather atWake. Also, before taking off from Wake, they asked fora forecast for the trip to the next stop at Guam, Manila orTokyo. The military called on the Weather Bureau andCivil Aeronautics Administration to furnish the weatherservice and the communications. They started operations atWake very soon. By 1952 men from these two agencies wereon the island, some with their wives and children. TheStandard Oil Company and Pan American Airways also hadpeople there. For the most part, they were housed in quonset-typestructures, but some old pillboxes constructed duringthe war still dotted the island and could be used forrefuge from typhoons if the wind-driven seas did not risehigh enough to flood them. There were only three concretebuildings and they were used for offices and storage.

On the morning of September 11, 1952, the WeatherBureau forecaster drew a low center on his weather chartfar to the southeast of Wake. His analysis was based largely182on two isolated ship reports, the only information availablefrom a one million square-mile ocean area lying to the east-southeastof his tiny island station. Here was just enoughdata to arouse suspicion and alarm that a developing tropicaldisturbance was somewhere—anywhere—within this vastexpanse of sea and air; but not enough information to indicatea position, or probable intensity, or actually to confirmthe existence of a well-defined storm.

During the next three days, the question of continuing thelow on successive charts, and the problem of deciding itsposition, were mostly matters of guesswork on the part ofthe Weather Bureau staff at Wake; there was only one shipreport from the critical area during the time. Then on September14 the existence of a vortex was established. A singleship report, together with reports from Kwajalein andEniwetok, gave good evidence of cyclonic circulation.

From this time on, until the storm struck at daybreak onthe sixteenth, everybody on the island worried about it, andthe weathermen went all out in tracking it and disseminatinginformation. Meanwhile the typhoon—which had beennamed “Olive”—grew into the most destructive storm to hitWake since it was first inhabited in 1935. The forecasters’job was a difficult one because of meager observational data.There were heartbreaking delays in securing airplane reconnaissancedue to mechanical breakdown that grounded theB-29 stationed at Wake for that purpose until an engine partcould be flown in from Tokyo.

Early on the morning of the sixteenth, strong winds ofthe typhoon began to sweep across the island, a very roughsea was breaking on the shores, and debris was flyingthrough the air. One can easily imagine the alarm of thesepeople in the vast Pacific, on a tiny island beginning toshrink as the waters rose, and giving up its soil, rocks, andparts of buildings to the furious winds, steadily increasing.183A large power line fell across several quonsets just north ofthe terminal building, and huge sparks began flying wherethey touched the Weather Bureau warehouse.

The account which follows is condensed from the reportmade by the Weather Bureau man in charge, Walton Follansbee:

The wind indicators in the Weather Station shorted outearly, and expensive radiosonde and solar radiation equipmentwas badly burned by the runaway power. The indicatorsin the tower, however, remained operative until thelast weatherman abandoned it. They took turns climbing thetower steps to check the velocities, calling the readings offover the interphone from tower to weather station. OnFollansbee’s last trip to the tower, the strongest gusts observedwere eighty-two miles per hour, although one of theobservers had caught gusts to ninety miles per hour shortlybefore. The strain on the structure was severe, and he washappy to get down the stairs safely. Soon afterward, JimChampion, observational supervisor, took full responsibilityfor this unwanted task. He then reported over the interphonethat the wind was north-northwest at eighty miles perhour with gusts to 110. Follansbee advised him to abandonthe tower. He replied that he believed he was safer stayingthere than trying to come down the stairs, which were wideopen to the elements. He was told to use his own judgment,since it was his life at stake.

Women and children had been taken to the terminalbuilding or other safer places than the quonsets, which nowbegan to break up. Anybody who ventured in the open waslikely to be blown off his feet and that was exceedinglydangerous, for the sea was close by, and now and then theroof of a quonset went off and was carried dangerouslyacross the island and out to sea. Winds of hurricane forceblew the water from the lagoon which began engulfing the184south and east parts of the island. The wind reached a steadyvelocity of 120 miles an hour, with gusts up to 142 at theheight of the storm.

By that time, most of the women and children werehuddled in the operations building and they were terrifiedwhen the roof went off, leaving them exposed to the torrentialrain and furious winds, but the walls held. About thistime, a report was received from a reconnaissance plane thathad come from Guam and made its way into the center ofthe typhoon. The crew put the center about thirty-five milesnortheast of Wake but said the plane was suffering structuraldamage and was heading for Kwajalein.

By evening the winds were subsiding and a check showedthat owing to such preparations as they had been able tomake and the constant struggle of all on the island to preventdisaster, not a single life was lost and no one wasseriously injured. Wake Island, however, was a shambles,and there was very little food not contaminated and practicallyno drinking water. The water distillation plant hadbeen destroyed.

But soon one of the Air Force B-29 planes ordinarily usedin typhoon reconnaissance flew in from Kwajalein andbrought three hundred gallons of water in GI cans lashedto the bomb bays and two tons of rations for distribution tothe battered and hungry people of Wake Island. Before long,the little island was back in business, serving the big planeson the way from Hawaii to the Far East.

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13. GUEST ON A HAIRY HOP

“On the rushing of the wings of the wind. It is indeeda knowledge which must be felt to be in its very essencefull of the soul of the beautiful.”—Ruskin

A hurricane flight which proves to be rougher than usualis known among the hunters as a “hairy hop.” It is an amazingfact that there are men who want to come down to theairfield when a big storm is imminent and “thumb a ride.”Mostly, they are newspaper reporters, magazine writers,photographers, civilian weathermen, and radio and televisionpeople. Usually they are accommodated, if they have madearrangements in advance. Some of these rides have beenquiet, like a sightseer’s trip over a city, while others havebeen “hairy.”

One of the first newspapermen to take a ride into a full-fledgedhurricane was Milt Sosin of the Miami Daily News.In 1944, Milt read about men of the Army and Navy whowere just beginning to fly into hurricanes and he becameobsessed with the wish to go along. When he asked for permission,the editor said “No” in a very positive tone. Hecould see no point in having a good staff correspondent186dropped in the ocean during a wild ride in a hurricane.Sosin insisted and he was told to see the managing editor.He did and there was another argument. Sosin told him,“If I don’t, somebody else will and we’ll be scooped.” Reluctantly,the managing editor gave permission. But when Sosinasked the immigration authorities, they said “No. You haveno passport, and you don’t know what country you may fallin.” They refused. Sosin hung around and argued. Hepointed out that if the plane went down at sea, he wouldn’tneed any passport to the place he was going, and they finallyagreed.

Milt Sosin got his wish in full measure on September 13,1944, in the Great Atlantic Hurricane which had developeda fury seldom attained, even in the worst of these tropicalgiants. It had crossed the northern Bahamas and was headednorthwestward on a broad arc that was to bring its death-dealingwinds to New Jersey, Long Island and New England.Already we have told the story of Army and Navyplanes probing this big storm, including the pioneering tripby Colonel Wood and others of the Washington weatherstaff. At the end of this trip, Sosin was glad to be back onland and vowed, “Never again!” But, somehow, he still hadthe urge to see these storms from the inside and afterwardwas a frequent guest of the Navy and Air Force.

One of Sosin’s most interesting trips was on September14, 1947, in a B-17. They took off from Miami. Al Topel, alsofrom the Miami Daily News, went along to take pictures,and Fred Clampitt, news editor of Radio Station WIOD,was the other guest. The big hurricane was roaring towardthe Bahamas with steadily increasing fury and the people ofFlorida were worried—and for good reason, for three dayslater it raked the state from east to west, killing more thanfifty people and causing destruction estimated in excess ofone hundred million dollars. By many observers it was187eventually rated as the most violent hurricane between 1944and 1949.

They ran into it east of the Bahamas. As the plane burrowedits way through the seething blasts, Sosin wrote inhis shaking notebook:

“This airplane feels as if it’s cracking up. Ominous crashesin the aft compartment accompany every sickening lurchand dive as, buffeted by 140-mile-an-hour winds and suckedinto powerful downdrafts, the huge bomber bores throughto the core of the storm.”

Sosin said that the pilot, Captain Vince Huegele, and theco-pilot, Lieutenant Don Ketcham, were literally wrestlingwith the hurricane in clothes sopping wet from perspirationand, as soon as they came into the center, began to take offtheir wet garments. Ketcham had “pealed down to his shortsbefore the plane plunged back into the mad vortex.”

At this point they were surprised to see another plane inthe storm, a B-29, flying in the eye at thirty-six thousandfeet, trying to discover the “steering level” where the maincurrents of the atmosphere control the forward movement oftropical disturbances such as this one. The radio man, SergeantJeff Thornton, was trying to contact the B-29, milesoverhead, but with no luck. Sosin wrote in his notebook:

“But here at this low level we have more to worry aboutthan trying to reach the other plane. We are getting an awfulkicking around. Wow! That was a beaut. Al Topel wasfoolish enough to unfasten his safety belt and stand up fora better angle shot of the raging turbulent sea below. Wemust have dropped one hundred feet and his head hit thealuminum ribbing of the plane’s ceiling. Then, trying toprotect his camera, he skinned his elbows and knuckles.Now he’s given up and has even strapped a safety beltaround his camera.”

The crew was busy plotting positions and checking on the188engines. To them it was an old story, except that none couldrecall such violent turbulence. The craft was low enoughfor them to get glimpses of the sea but they wanted a betterview and they began to descend cautiously. Sosin wrote:

“The turbulence is getting worse. The sea is streaked withgreenish-gray lines which look like daubs made by a childwho has stuck his fingers into a can of paint. Now we areclosed in. We are flying blind. Capt. John C. Mays, theweather observer, starts giving the pilots readings from hisradar altimeter while Huegele sends the plane lower andlower in an effort to establish visual contact with the sea.

“‘Five hundred feet,’ Mays calls into the plane’s intercom.

“‘OK,’ replies the skipper.

“‘Four hundred feet.’

“‘Roger.’

“‘Three-fifty.’

“‘Roger.’

“‘Two-fifty.’

“‘OK.’

“‘Two hundred feet,’ Mays’ voice is still even.

“‘OK,’ comes Huegele’s voice.

“It may be OK with him but it isn’t with me. I justfound myself tugging tentatively on the pull toggles whichwill inflate my ‘Mae West’ life jacket if I yank hard enough.I checked a long time ago to make certain the CO cartridgeswere where they should be.

“Fred Clampitt, WIOD news editor, is turning green.

“No, it’s not fear. He’s sweating so much that the coloredchemical shark repellent in a pocket of his life jacket is startingto run.

“Then we sight the sea again. From this low level thewaves are frightening. They are traveling in all directions,not in just one, and they break against each other, dashingsalt spray high into the air. It’s all too close.

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“Now the ceiling is lifting and we are climbing—250, 300,500, 700 and we level off. It grows less turbulent and ObserverMays looks up from his deep concentration.

“‘I may be wrong,’ he says, ‘but it looks to me as if it’smade a little curve toward the north.’

“Which is very interesting—but more interesting is the factthat the day’s work is over and we’re on our way home.”

In 1947, the Air Forces were assigning B-29’s to theirKindley Base at Bermuda, to replace the B-17’s. The bigsuperforts had room for guests and it soon became commonto have somebody hanging around Kindley to get a ride.When a big storm was spotted east of the Windward Islandson the eleventh of September of that year, two newspaperreporters and a photographer from Life Magazine, FrancisMiller, were waiting at Bermuda for a hop. The big hurricanebecame even more violent as it turned toward thesouthwest and swept across Florida. It was September 14thwhen Milt Sosin of the Miami Daily News got his “hairyhop” in this same blow. As it crossed the coast, winds of fullhurricane force stretched over a distance of 240 miles andthe wind reached 155 miles an hour at Hillsboro Light. Bythis time the hurricane hunters were fully occupied and theriders were left on the ground. Miami communication lineswere wiped out and control of the hunters had been shiftedto Washington. In charge of a B-17 at Bermuda was MajorHawley. His co-pilot was Captain Dunn, who had learnedhurricane hunting in “Kappler’s Hurricane” and other earlierstorms. Late on the seventeenth, as the storm roared acrossFlorida with night closing in, Hawley had heard nothingfrom Washington about his plane going into it, so he gaveup and told the riders to come back in the morning.

Early the next morning, one of the reporters, a staff writerfor the Bermuda Royal Gazette, was sitting around in hisshorts and thinking about breakfast when Lieutenant Cronin190rushed in and said they were ready to take off. The reporterstarted to get dressed, but Cronin said, “Let’s go. Just as youare. You may drown but you won’t freeze.” They stopped inHamilton, got the other reporter and the photographer, andfound Hawley walking up and down, impatiently waitingfor last instructions. So the reporter took a trip of 3,350 milesin his shorts and had a bird’s-eye view of the southern Seaboard,the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico and a bad-actinghurricane.

It was a “hairy hop.” They had orders to refuel at Mobile,so they put down at the airfield there, all other planes havingbeen evacuated the day before. An Air Force man came outand asked, “Where you goin’?” They told him and he turnedaround and shouted, “Some dang fools think they have a kiteand can fly through a hurricane.” More men came out andthey got gas in the plane. One big fellow said, “You can haveyour dern trip. But keep the storm away from here.” Intwenty minutes they were in the storm. The crew memberswere bare to the waist, perspiration pouring down, watercoming through the panel joints, and everything was wetand shaking. One of the reporters described it this way:

“Suddenly the plane keeled over on one side, the left wingtip dipped down vertically, and for a moment I thought theend had come. I gulped for breath as the plane dropped. Thesea rushed up towards us; huge waves reared up andmocked us, clawing up at the wing tip as if trying to swallowus in one. A greater burst from the engines, a hovering sensationfor a second and then, with the whole plane shudderingunder the strain, our nose once again tilted upward. Ifelt weak and with difficulty breathed again.”

The plane had no radar and the crew had a lot of troubletrying to locate the center of the hurricane. The forecastersat Miami were anxious for an accurate position of the center.At that time airborne radars were being installed as standard191equipment as rapidly as they could get around to it but theB-17’s came last. Low pressure guided them, and they weretrying to get into the part of the hurricane where they foundthe pressure falling rapidly. It was a big storm and they werehaving little luck in the search. “Lashed by winds and rain,the B-17 staggered across the sky,” one of the reporters saidafterward. He went on to tell his story:

“I was growing sick in the bomb aimer’s bay stretchedover a pile of parachutes and hanging onto the navigator’schair for dear life. Some baggage, roped down beforehand,now lay strewn across the gangway. Parachutes, life jackets,water cans and camera cases were thrown about into heaps.The photographer, trying in vain to take pictures out of thewindow, was knocked down and sent flying across the fuselage.His arms were bruised from repeated efforts. Mystomach was everywhere but where it should have been.Everything went black. The plane was thrown from side toside and the floor under my feet dropped. We emerged froma big cloud into an eerie and uncanny pink half-light. Thephotographer clambered from the floor and tried to look out.He thought the reddish light was an engine on fire.

“Before we touched down at Tampa, after four hours offlying around in the hurricane, we reporters and the photographerwere exhausted. And even then they had failed toget into the calm center, although they had sent back toWashington a lot of useful information on the storm’s position.”

More than anything else, the preliminaries unnerve theguest rider. They tell him about the “ditching” procedures;that is, what to do if the plane is on the verge of settlingdown on the raging sea. Two or three hours before take-offthey are likely to have a ditching drill, along with the briefingon the storm and the check on the equipment. The guestis told that if they bail out, he will go through a forward192bomb bay door. There is hollow laughter as someone makesit clear that there is very little chance of survival. But theywant the guest to have every advantage.

Commander N. Brango of Navy reconnaissance says:“Yes, we get a good many requests from men who want togo along. Would you like to go on an eight- to ten-hourflight in a four-engine, thirty-ton, Navy patrol plane? Youwill probably see some of the beautifully lush islands of theAntilles chain, waters shading gradually from pale green toa deep clear emerald, shining white coral beaches, nativevillages buried in tropical jungles, and many other sightsusually referred to in the travel advertisem*nts.

“Doesn’t that sound enticing? There is just one catch. Youmay have to spend four to five hours of your flight-timeshuddering and shaking around in the aircraft like an icecube in a co*cktail shaker, with rain driving into a hundredpreviously undiscovered leaks in the plane and thence downthe nearest neck. You may bump your head, or other morepadded portions of your anatomy, on various and sundryprojecting pieces of metal (of which there seem to be atleast a million). You may not be able to see much of anything,at times, since it will be raining so hard that yourhorizontal visibility will be nil, or you may be able to catchglimpses, straight down about 300 feet, of mountainouswaves and an ocean being torn apart by winds of 90 to 150miles per hour. There’s one thing I will guarantee you, youwon’t be writing postcards to your friends saying, ‘Havinga wonderful time, wish you were here,’ because you won’t beable to keep the pen on paper long enough to write muchof anything.”

You have guessed by now that the carefully phrased invitationwas just a trap to get you aboard one of the Navy’s“Hurricane Hunter” patrol planes as it departs on a hurricanereconnaissance mission. According to Brango, these193flights have been described by visiting correspondents, using“thrilling,” “awe-inspiring,” “terrifying,” and other equallyimpressive adjectives. Actually, it is difficult to find words todescribe such a flight. That it is hazardous is obvious, but thefeeling that accomplishing the mission may mean the savingof many lives and much property makes it seem worth doing—notto mention the lift received from an occasional“well-done” from up the line.

Just to indicate to the prospective guest what it may belike, Brango gives “Caribbean Charlie” of 1951 as an example.

Charlie was spawned several hundred miles east of theWindward Island of Trinidad. The first notice the Navy hadof its presence was a ship reporting an area of bad weather,and almost immediately one of the hurricane hunter planesfrom the advanced base in Puerto Rico was in the air to getthe first reports on Charlie. For the next nine days Charlieled them a wild, if not a merry chase. He slipped by nightthrough the Windward Islands and into the Caribbean,loafed across this broad expanse of water, then slammedinto Kingston, Jamaica, dealing that city one of its mostdevastating blows in history. Then Charlie headed acrossthe Yucatan Channel and over the Yucatan Peninsula, wherehe lost some of his push. Some sixteen hours later he brokeinto the Gulf of Campeche with renewed fury, stormedacross the Gulf and into the Mexican coast at Tampico, onAugust 22, again costing lives and millions in propertydamage.

During his long rampage, he was being invaded almostdaily by Navy planes. On Tuesday, August 21, Brango hadthe fortune of being assigned to the reconnaissance crewfor that day.

They departed Miami at noon of a bright sunny day. Forthree hours they flew over a calm ocean, flecked with sunlight.194By then they could see the looming mass of cloudsahead, which indicated Charlie’s whereabouts. Droppingfrom seven thousand feet cruising altitude to six hundredfeet, they started getting into the eye. The sun had disappearedand the winds jumped rapidly to seventy miles anhour. For almost an hour they swung around to the west andsouth, feeling for the weaker side, as the winds got up toone hundred miles per hour and the rain and turbulencebecame terrific for about ten minutes before they brokethrough the inner wall and into the eye.

According to Brango, “The eye is a pleasant place! Manyof them have blue sky, calm seas and air smooth enough tocatch up on your reports and even drink a cup of coffee.Charlie’s eye wasn’t too good—big, but cloudy; still it wasbetter than what we had just come through, so we hungaround for about thirty-five minutes, watching the birds.There are usually hundreds of birds in the eye of a hurricane.Probably they get blown in there and have enough sensenot to try to fly out. But not us, we want out.”

Soon the decision to start out was made, and the orderwent over the inter-com: “Stand by to leave the eye—reportwhen ready.” This always brings the stock answer, whichhas become a standard joke in the squadron: “Don’t worryabout us mules, just load the wagon!”

The flight out was rough. Sunset was nearing, and in thestorm area night falls rapidly. For almost two hours theybeat their way through one hundred mile-per-hour windstoward the edge of the storm and in the general direction ofCorpus Christi, their destination. The turbulence and rainon the way out were so severe that they were unable tosend out messages and position reports, so someone in thecrew, catching a glimpse of the waves beneath, camethrough with the scintillating remark that “We’re still lost,but we are making excellent time.”

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About nine hours after they had left Miami, they landedat the Naval Air Station, Corpus Christi, Texas. An hour laterthey were out of their dripping flight suits and “testing thequality of Texas draught beer.”

At dawn the next morning, another crew and anotherplane from the squadron was into the hurricane, only a fewhours before it struck Tampico and then swirled inland, todissipate itself on the mountain range to the west of thatcoastal city.

Shortly before the middle of September, 1948, theWeather Bureau in Washington had a long-distance callfrom the Baltimore Sun. A staff correspondent, GeoffreyW. Fielding, wanted to fly into a hurricane. The WeatherBureau arranged it through General Don Yates, in chargeof the Air Weather Service, and on September 20, Fieldingwas authorized and invited to proceed to Bermuda at suchtime as necessary between that date and November 30, togo with one of the crews on a reconnaissance mission. TheAir Force offered transportation to Bermuda and return atthe proper time.

On the day of Fielding’s call, a vicious hurricane wasthreatening Bermuda and the B-29’s were exploring it, butit was too late to arrange a trip. On the thirteenth it passeda short distance east of the islands, with winds of 140 milesan hour. The next tropical disturbance was found in theCaribbean west of Jamaica and became a fully developedstorm on September 19. As it raked its way across the westernend of Cuba on the twentieth, and southern Florida onthe twenty-first and twenty-second, Fielding flew to Bermuda.By the time they were ready to take off, the stormwas picking up force after crossing Florida and was headedin his direction.

Not the worrying type, Fielding made notes of everything:196the ditching tactics, the lifesavers and parachutes,sandwiches for lunch, the weather instruments, and theexact time of take-off, 12:03 P.M., Bermuda time. Already,high, thin cirrus clouds were seen, spreading ahead of thestorm. Southward, the clouds lowered and thickened. Andthen the aircraft commander, Captain Frank Thompson, sawa tanker wallowing in the heavy swells a quarter of a milebelow, and everybody had a look. Big seas swept over thebows of the ship and crashed on deck. The crew of the B-29felt sorry for the men on the tanker.

“Watch that old ship roll down there,” said the pilot.“Those poor guys may be in this a couple days. They makevery little headway as the hurricane drives toward them. Iwouldn’t like to be in their place.” The super fortress flew astraight course into the teeth of the hurricane and low,ragged, rain-filled clouds soon hid the tanker from view.Increasing winds buffeted the big aircraft, which nowseemed like a pigmy plane in this vast wind system. Theywere instructed to follow the “boxing” procedure and wereheaded for sixty-knot winds in the northeast sector.

Over the inter-communications suddenly came the excitedvoice of the navigator, Lieutenant Chester Camp: “I’ve gotthem—there they are—sixty-knot winds. Bring the planearound.” The plane banked in a right turn as the pilotbrought the winds on the tail and shot fuel into the enginesto force the plane through winds that would become moreviolent. So they started the first leg of the box.

The weather officer, Lieutenant Chester Evans, was seatedin the bomb-aimer’s position in the glass nose of the plane,practically in the teeth of the gale. In addition to keepingtrack of the weather, he guided the pilots by reading thealtimeters to get the height of the plane above the sea. Inspite of the jostling he was getting from the bouncing plane,197Fielding investigated these operations and wrote in his notebook:

“In addition to the regular altimeter, Lieutenant Evanshas a radar altimeter, which works on the principle of theecho sounding machine used by ships. A radar wave is transmittedfrom the small instrument to the surface of the seaand bounces back again. The time elapsed between transmissionand reception is computed by the gadget in feet,giving an accurate height reading. The information is passedback to the pilots who adjust their pressure altimeters. Insome cases the error of the pressure altimeter measures upto three or four hundred feet in a hurricane.

“The second leg of the box started at 3:05 P.M. and wasquite short, lasting only thirty minutes before the plane hadrun through the low pressure and then to a place where itwas six millibars higher. Low gray ragged clouds increasedin this sector and the ceiling lowered. On order from thecommander, called Sooky by the crew, the plane went downto two hundred feet. Below, seen through a film of cloud,the water raged and boiled. Huge streaks, many of themhundreds of feet long, etched white lines on the beatenwater, which was flatter than a pancake. The roaring, tearingwind scooped up tons of water at a time which, as itrose, was knocked flat again by the force of the wind. Sometimesthe wind would literally dig into the water, scoopingit out. From this, huge shell-shaped waves of spume wouldcareen across the water.”

At this point, someone yelled, “Sooky, take a look at thewater. You’ll never see this again. Wind is ninety miles anhour now.” All the crew peered through the windows. Thesea was absolutely flat, except for huge streaks, some ofwhich the weather observer estimated to be at least fivefeet below the surface of the water. The time was 3:45 P.M.,198according to Fielding, who kept precise notes on everything.Instead of being thrown all over the place as he had expected,the plane was being lifted up and flopped downagain in a series of sickening jolts. To stand upright calledfor an acrobat, not a newspaperman. He found it useless tostand, anyway. It resulted only in a hard crack on the headwhen the plane dropped.

At 3:55 P.M., the navigator screeched over the interphone:“It’s up to one hundred miles an hour, now. Gee, isthis some storm!” The rain came in torrents. “Driven by asmashing, battering wind, it hammered on the skin of theplane. The wind joined in the noise, howling and screechingoutside and the roar of the engines was drowned out by themad symphony of nature,” wrote Fielding. The planebucked and yawed but it was designed for high-altitudeflying, with pressurized cabins for use when needed, and norain came in.

They were on the third leg now and it became hotter inthe plane. Everybody was sweating profusely. Fieldingwrote that the “storm bucked and tossed the heavy bomberthrough the skies like a leaf in autumn.” At 3:58 P.M., thewind was up to 120 knots. In the midst of all the noise,Fielding heard a voice on the inter-com. “How are you feeling?”came a question. “Not so good,” was the miserablereply. “I wish Sooky would get the plane out of this. Thatblue cheese I ate in a sandwich for lunch is turning over. AllI can taste is that stinking stuff.” Others admitted havingfluttering stomachs.

The radar operator was unable to get the eye of thehurricane on the scope. The co-pilot, Captain Hoffman,commented on the scene: “This is a big storm. It has reallypicked up in size.” Hardly were the words out of his mouthbefore he yelled, “Hey, look, it’s clear outside! The sun’s199coming through.” A shaft of sunlight probed through theclouds and filled the cabin with a reassuring glow. They ranthe fourth leg but there was nothing new. Fielding thoughtthat they had seen all that this hurricane could produce inthe way of violence. The radio operator got Kindley AirBase on the 42-20 frequency and learned that all other militaryplanes in the area were warned to head for the nearestmainland base. They asked for clearance to MacDill Fieldand got it at 6:25 P.M. Stars appeared in a clearing sky andthe plane leveled off and roared through the darkness. It wasgood to be able to hear the engines again. Tins of soup wereopened and legs were stretched. Stomachs had settled andthere was light chatter over the inter-com. The plane toucheddown at MacDill at 10:45 P.M. The men went to bed withaching bodies but they slept. As Fielding said at the end ofhis notes, “We had been eleven hours in the air, much of itin violent weather, and the constant strain tells on you.”

Finally, in 1954, the so-called “hairy hop” was projectedinto the living rooms of people all over the country. WhenHurricane Edna was headed up the coast toward New England,Edward R. Murrow and a camera crew of the ColumbiaBroadcasting System flew to Bermuda, and the Air Forcesucceeded in getting the entire group—Murrow, three assistantsand one thousand five hundred pounds of cameraequipment—in the front of the plane. While everybody onthe crew held his breath and Murrow used up all thematches aboard and wore out the flint on a lighter, the bigplane was skillfully piloted through the squall bands andpushed over into the center. The cameras ground away andMurrow asked endless questions. The eye was magnificent,called a storybook setup, clear blue skies above, the centerbeing twenty miles in diameter, with cloud walls rising to200about 30,000 feet on all sides. The return was as skillful asthe entrance, through the squall bands, out from under thestorm clouds and back home above blue waters and in thesunshine. The film brought to television viewers some ideaof the majesty and power of a great storm.

Murrow described their passage into the eye of the stormin these words:

“The navigator (Captain Ed Vrable) asked for a turn tothe left, and in a couple of minutes the B-29 began toshudder. The co-pilot said: ‘I think we’re in it.’ The pilotsaid: ‘We’re going up,’ although every control was set totake us down. Something lifted us about three hundred feet,then the pilot said: ‘We’re going down,’ although he wasdoing everything humanly possible to take us up. Edna wasin control of the aircraft. We were on an even keel but beingstaggered by short sharp blows.

“Then we hit something with a bang that was audibleabove the roar of the motors; a solid sheet of water. Secondslater brilliant sunshine hit us like a hammer; someoneshouted: ‘There she is,’ and we were in the eye. Calm air,calm, flat sea below; a great amphitheater, round as a dollar,with white clouds sloping up to twenty-five thousand orthirty thousand feet. The water looked like a blue Alpinelake with snow-clad mountains coming right down to thewater’s edge. A great bowl of sunshine.

“The eye of a hurricane is an excellent place to reflectupon the puniness of man and his works. If an adequatedefinition of humility is ever written, it’s likely to be donein the eye of a hurricane.”

The Air Force man who made the arrangements for thisbroadcast, Major William C. Anderson, said that this relativelysmooth flight was the best possible testimonial to theprogress the hurricane hunters had made in flying these big201storms, for Edna was no weakling. But he worried about itday and night until the flight was finished, for many strangethings can happen. When Murrow and his crew were safelyback in New York, Anderson turned in for his first goodnight’s rest in two weeks, duly thankful that it hadn’t turnedout to be a “hairy hop.”

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14. THE UNEXPECTED

“There is not sufficient room for two airplanesin the eye of the same hurricane.”—Report to Joint Chiefs of Staff

Twenty-five years before men began flying into hurricanes,it was the main purpose of the aviator to keep out of stormsof all kinds. If he ventured any distance out over the oceanin a “heavier-than-air” machine, he expected to see shipsguarding the route, to pick him up if he fell in the water.In 1919, when the Navy had planes ready to fly across theAtlantic, they had a “fleet” of ten destroyers and five battleshipsstationed along the line of flight from Trepassey Bay,Newfoundland, to Portugal via the Azores, to furnishweather reports that would help the pilot to avoid headwinds,stormy weather and rough seas, and to take part inrescue operations in case of accident.

Three airplanes, the NC-1, 3 and 4, used in this flight weredesigned and built through the joint efforts of the Navy andthe Curtiss Aeroplane Company. These four-engined seaplanes,the largest built up to that time, exceeded thepresent-day Douglas DC-3 airplane in size and weight. Although203sufficient fuel could be carried for a sixteen-hourflight, cruising airspeed was but eighty miles an hour. Duringthe winter months of 1918 to 1919, plans were made by theNavy, in co-operation with the Weather Bureau, for securingas complete and widely distributed weather reports as possiblefor the Atlantic area immediately prior to and during theflight. Through international co-operation, observations wereavailable from Iceland, Western Europe, Canada, andBermuda.

From this network of reports, it was possible to drawfairly complete weather maps and to follow in detail thevarious weather changes which might affect the flight. Therewere several special features that required consideration.For example, because of the heavy gasoline loads aboardthe planes, it was necessary that the wind at Trepassey Baybe within certain rather narrow limits, strong enough toenable them to get off the water, but not so vigorous as todamage the hulls or cause them to upset. Similarly, theplanes would need the help of a moderate westerly wind inorder to reach the Azores on the first leg of the flight, butan excessive wind would cause rough seas, making an emergencylanding extremely hazardous. Thus the problem wasto select a day on which reasonably favorable conditionswould be encountered, and to get the planes away as earlyas possible, to minimize the cost of maintaining the fleet attheir positions. After four days of careful analysis and waiting,the Weather Bureau representative at Trepassey issuedthe following weather outlook on the afternoon of May 16,1919:

“Reports received indicate good conditions for flight overthe western part of the course as far as Destroyer No. 12(about six hundred miles out). Winds will be nearly parallelto the course and will yield actual assistance of about twentymiles per hour at flying levels. Over the course east of Destroyer204No. 12 the winds, under the influence of the Azoreshigh, recently developed, will be light, but mostly from asouthwesterly direction. They will not yield any materialassistance.

“Weather will be clear and fine from Trepassey to DestroyerNo. 8 (about four hundred miles out); partly cloudythence to the Azores, with the likelihood of occasionalshowers. Such showers, however, if they occur, will be fromclouds at low altitudes, and it should be possible to fly abovethem.

“All in all, the conditions are as nearly favorable as theyare likely to be for some time.”

It is a strange fact that the Weather Bureau forecaster onthis flight was Willis Gregg, who became Chief of theWeather Bureau in 1934, and the Navy forecaster for thesame flight was Ensign Francis Reichelderfer, who becamethe Chief of the Bureau in 1938 after Gregg’s death.

In accordance with this advice, the three planes departedthat evening and flew the first leg of the flight almost uneventfullyuntil the NC-1 and 3 attempted to land on thewater near the Azores due to very low clouds. Upon landing,although both crews were picked up by near-by ships,heavy seas damaged the planes to the extent that they couldnot continue the flight. Fortunately, however, the NC-4 wasable to make a safe landing in a sheltered bay, and after aweek’s delay, awaiting favorable weather, continued fromthe Azores alone, arriving at Lisbon, Portugal, on May 27.

No one at that time would have believed it possible forthis situation to be reversed. Instead of waiting to be surethat the weather is favorable, planes now assigned to hurricanehunting wait to be sure the weather out there somewhereis decidedly unfavorable before they take off in thatdirection. But even in hurricane hunting the unexpectedhappens and, as in the old days, the crews are intensively205trained and all precautions are taken so that they are notlikely to be caught by surprise in an emergency. In a periodof years there are hundreds of missions into dozens of tropicalstorms and, unfortunately, a few have met with disaster.So the intensive training goes on without interruption.

It seems strange but it is a fact that some men fly intohurricanes and typhoons without seeing much of what isgoing on outside the plane. They are too busy with theirjobs to spend time looking around. In the first year some ofthem learn more about these big storms before and aftermissions than they do while flying. There are lists of readingmatter to be consulted, including books and papers on tropicalstorms, and there are hints, suggestions, advice and warningsbased on the experiences of other men. Also, they read thereports that usually are gathered from the members of othercrews after their flights are finished. At the end of the season,all these pieces of information may be assembled in a squadronreport, with recommendations. New men are expectedto study this material. Before each flight, the crew gathersin front of a large map for a “briefing.” Here an experiencedweather officer shows them a weather map, points out thelocation and movement of the storm center at the last report,and indicates the route that seems most favorable for anapproach to the storm area and for the dash into its center.

Most of this training is aimed at the development of crewsthat will be ready for any emergency—for the “unexpected,”so far as that can be realized. Their performance in recentyears shows that this special training enables them to survivemost of the frightening experiences which probably wouldbe disastrous to crews on less spectacular types of missions.

Usually there has been separate training for the men mostconcerned with each of several jobs—weather, hurricane reconnaissance,engineering, communications, navigation,photography, radar and maintenance. Before departure, the206ground maintenance men see that the plane is in good workingorder and that the equipment is operating properly. Atthe beginning of each season, for example, some of the Navymaintenance men get the city to turn the fire hose at highpressure into the front of the plane, to see how it reacts.The effects of torrential rains in high winds of the stormare simulated in this manner. After every flight, the planeneeds very thorough examination. One of the troubles is thatsalt air at high speed causes rapid corrosion. Salt may accumulatearound the engines. Also, severe turbulence causesdamage to the plane.

After the take-off, the pilot and co-pilot can see what isahead most of the time, but for considerable intervals theyare on instruments, or, as they say in the Navy, “on thegauges.” They see nothing or very little of what is ahead ofthe plane in such cases and, the sea surface being hiddenfrom view, they are uncertain as to their altitude until theweather officer, or aerologist, gives them a reading fromthe radar altimeter. Sometimes in darkness a pilot has had thebright lights turned on so that a flash of lightning will notleave him completely blinded at a time when he must knowwhat the instruments show because of the violent turbulencethat may be experienced when there is lightning. Then, too,they always have in mind that there may suddenly be torrentialrain that will lower the cylinder head temperaturesto a dangerous level. They must accelerate and heat theengines without traveling too fast. The landing gear isdropped to catch the wind. By using a richer mixture tofeed the engines, the cooling effect may be lessened. It isalways necessary to be on the alert. Altogether, it is just asimportant, and oftentimes more so, for the men to see thegauges than to see the weather.

Although the Air Force and Navy have different methodsof flying into tropical storms, there are certain dangers that207are common to both systems. Ahead of time, the pilots andothers make a last-minute check to see that the crew areprepared. They also check instruments, lights, pitot andcarbureter heat, safety belts, power settings, emergencyequipment, current for communications and radar, and otherthings. In flight, the pilot does not use the throttle unnecessarily,but chiefly to maintain air speed. Actually it may besaid that there are three pilots. The third one, sometimesknown as “George,” is the auto-pilot, which may do most ofthe flying, except in rough weather and in landing and take-off.Keeping the plane on course on a long flight would bevery tiring otherwise. The limits of air speed vary. In theB-29’s, which have been used generally for Air Force hunting,the limits are between 190 and 290 miles an hour,roughly. Air-speed readings may be affected by heavy rain.Also, increased humidity of the air will result in an increasein fuel consumption. There are numerous other items on thelist of things that may cause trouble. But the pilots arehighly competent and thoroughly trained and experiencedbefore being put on the hurricane detail.

The radio operator, of course, is fully occupied and seldomhas much time to see what is going on in the weather. He hastwo main troubles. One is static. When it is bad, all he cando is send a message blind and ask the ground station towait. This may last for an hour or more. Various devices areused to reduce static interference but without complete success.As soon as the plane starts bouncing around, he hasdifficulty keying the message, not only because his body isshaking and swaying, but because it produces variations inthe transmitter voltage and, on very high frequency, a dropbelow a certain critical voltage is likely to render the equipmentinoperative.

To overcome a little of the trouble from turbulence, someradio operators in the early days tried strapping one arm to208the desk, but one radio man, having just experienced arough flight, said in his report that his arm didn’t do a verygood job unless he was there! Besides, he needed the armto hold on with. More recently, it has been necessary tocarry two radio men, and in fact this has become standardpractice in most areas in the last year or two. It is veryseldom that communications fail entirely but a plane on astorm-hunting mission that was out of contact with theground station for much over an hour usually returned tobase. Some aircraft on storm missions carry extra receiversand transmitters.

One navigator interviewed said that he is as busy as aone-armed paper hanger. He keeps track of the position ofthe plane by dead reckoning and by loran, which is “longrange navigation,” accomplished by receiving pulsed signalsfrom pairs of radio stations on coasts or islands. It works wellin the center of the storm, not so well elsewhere; in someparts of the hurricane belt, loran coverage has been poor.If it fails, the plane may go out to a point where the navigatorcan get a good fix by loran and do the dead reckoningfrom the center to this point.

Every few minutes, the navigator writes in his log a noteabout drift, compass heading, indicated air speed and time,and when it is rough bumps his head on the eye piece ofthe drift meter, the radar or something else. He takes doubledrift readings to get the speed of the strongest winds, figuresthe diameter of the eye and the exact location of the aircraftwhile in the eye, and passes this information to the weatherofficer or aerologist for his report. The duties are so numerousthat the Navy usually carries two navigators “to producepinpoint accuracy with limited celestial or electronic aidswhile being buffeted by one hundred-knot winds.” Two arerequired largely because of frequent changes in headingand the nature of the winds in the Navy low-level style of209reconnaissance. The Air Force uses two on daily weatherreconnaissance and sometimes on storm missions.

In many respects, the weather officer, or “flight aerologist”as they call him in the Navy, is the key man on the mission.The plane is out for a series of weather reports and it is upto him to decide which is the best way to get what he wants.Within the limits of operational safety, his decisions are accepted.It is his job to keep track of the weather in everydetail. He has a complicated form containing many columnsin which he enters figures taken from code tables to fit thevarious elements—flying conditions, time, location, kinds ofclouds, heights of cloud bases and tops, direction and distanceof unusual phenomena, rain, turbulence, temperature,pressure, altitude, and every other conceivable detail thatmight be of use to the forecaster on shore. If he put this inplain language, the message would be as long as a man’sarm and the radio operator might never get it off. There isan international code in figures for this purpose which makesit possible to put a very large amount of data in a brief message.And this is a continuous operation. Hardly does theaerologist get one message into the hands of the radio operatoruntil he begins another one. It is his job to keep thepilot informed of the correct altitude. The weatherman isseated right out in front where the oncoming weather beatsa terrific hubbub against the Plexiglas.

The radar operator may be one of the navigators. Hekeeps his eye on the scope. Many queer shapes come and goas the plane speeds along and the radar man has to knowhow to interpret them. He keeps the weather officer informed.Also, it may be his job to help the navigator guidethe pilot around places where turbulence is likely to be excessive.Now and then, he or another crew member releasesa dropsonde to get temperature, pressure, and humidity inthe air between the plane and the sea.

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The photographer has his troubles. Conditions are farfrom favorable and oftentimes impossible for taking pictures.One of his important jobs, and one that has been done exceedinglywell by Navy photographers in the squadronheadquartered at Jacksonville, is to get photos of the seasurface in winds of various forces from eight knots up to onehundred thirty knots. These photos are extremely useful inestimating the force of the wind by watching the effects onthe sea.

In addition, there is an engineer. He looks after the overalloperation of the plane and watches the many instrumentson the panel. Usually he is a man of long experience whohas worked up from crew chief. He adjusts power to fit thefuel load. If an engine catches on fire, he knows how to putit out. If a bail-out is imminent, he is the man on the job.Sitting behind the second pilot, he has his restless eyes concentratedon the mechanical equipment. All of these men onthe plane work as a team, any of them being ready to helpsomebody else in an emergency, and alert and resourceful totake quick action when the unexpected happens, and itoften does.

The crews are usually organized as follows: The seniorpilot is in command—in the Navy he has the title of “PlaneCommander” and the other pilot is the “Co-Pilot.” In theAir Force the man in charge is the “Aircraft Commander”and his assistant is “Pilot.” In any case, both of these menare heavily engaged in keeping the aircraft under controlwhen the weather is rough. The pilots, together with twoother men, the engineer and the crew chief, keep the planein the air, though these latter two jobs may be combined, inwhich case the crew chief has an assistant—a flight mechanic.

Under the crew chief, or crew captain, there is one exceedinglyimportant duty—watching the engines. On each211side a man looks constantly for signs of trouble—oil leaks,fire, or whatever. These two men are sometimes called“scanners.” White smoke or black smoke, as the case may be,on issuing from an engine signals a dire emergency. It maybe only one or two minutes from incipient fire to explosion,and action must be immediate to put the fire out or correctother troubles. It is a very definite strain on the scanners tobe alert every instant on a long flight, and various membersof the crew may be rotated on these jobs. On routine dailyreconnaissance in non-hurricane weather, the Air Forceflights are long and some of the men feel decided relief ontaking a hurricane mission, which is rougher but usuallymuch shorter.

With this training and organization of the crews, most ofthe emergencies are met quickly and efficiently. Now andthen, the unexpected happens, however, as is evident in thefollowing instances.

In September, 1947, a number of missions by the Navy andAir Force had secured data in Hurricane George and the bigstorm was headed ominously toward Florida. An Air Forcecrew was in it on September 16 and had been in trouble.There were gasoline leaks, several fires, and engines actingup. They decided it was an emergency and set course forMacDill Field. Everything went well until they approachedthe field for a landing. There, in the middle of the runway,sat a big turkey buzzard. In the twinkling of an eye, whenthey were only fifty feet away, the great bird took off andsmashed into the leading edge of the right wing. The impactmade a sizable dent and the wing dipped. After six tries, thepilot skillfully got the plane down without an accident butthe crew was more upset by this bird than by the averagehurricane.

Sometimes the unexpected leads to disaster. One of themost unfortunate of these incidents occurred at Bermuda in2121949. There was a report of a disturbance in the westernCaribbean on November 3. It was late in the season, but afew very bad hurricanes have struck in this region in November,so the forecasters at Miami asked for reconnaissanceand the request was passed to the Air Force at KindleyField, in Bermuda. It was afternoon when the messagecame. A B-29 with a crew of thirteen men was cleared for aflight through the storm area and thence to Ramey Air ForceBase, in Puerto Rico, where they were to spend the night.

The plane took off at 6:17 P.M., Bermuda time, climbedto ten thousand feet and leveled off. Almost immediatelythe crew saw an oil leak in the No. 1 engine and it wasfeathered. The radio operator got in touch with the towerand airways and the aircraft commander prepared to returnto the field. The pilot brought the plane over the island andreported at four thousand feet, descending. But just at thattime a Pan American Stratocruiser was cleared to land. TheB-29 circled and reported at one thousand five hundred feetat a distance of seven miles west of the island. Next the planewas four miles out, coming straight in at one thousand feetand was cleared to land on Runway 12.

There was a gusty cross wind and there were scatteredclouds at one thousand feet. The plane then reported that itwould pass over at one thousand feet and get lined up, butalmost immediately said to disregard the last message. One-halfmile away, the flaps were raised, the landing gear waslet down, and power was applied on the three remainingengines. The plane made a left turn which became steeperand altitude was lost rapidly until the left wing hit thewater. This was a quarter of a mile offshore. Fire broke outas the plane hit the water and rescue boats rushed to thescene. Only three men escaped, two of them miraculouslythrough a hole in the fuselage, as was determined by a Bermudadiver who went down sixty feet in the water to examine213the wreckage. The other man, captain of the aircraft,was pulled out but died later in the hospital. It was the tworadar men who were fortunately in a position to get outthrough the hole in the fuselage and both survived.

In this incident at Bermuda the plane was not being affectedby a storm. It is an amazing fact, in consideration ofthe very large number of weather missions flown by the AirForce after World War II, that their first plane to be lostwhile on reconnaissance in a tropical storm was in 1952. OnNovember 1, a B-29 left Guam to fly into a typhoon calledWilma. The crew of the superfort was instructed to penetratethe storm, report by radio, land at Clark Field in thePhilippines, and be prepared to fly through the typhoonagain on the following morning. The same day, however,radio contact was lost. Seventeen rescue planes and numeroussurface vessels searched the typhoon-torn waters nearSamar Island for survivors without success. Natives on theisland of Leyte reported that a four-engined plane was seenflying low in that vicinity but the report could not be verified.

The squadron to which this plane was assigned had mademore than five hundred reconnaissance flights into typhoonsbetween June 1, 1947, and the date on which it was lost.

Lieutenant A. N. Fowler, an experienced Navy pilot, wasthe man who said that a hurricane flight was like going overNiagara Falls in a telephone booth. Describing one of hismost dangerous trips, he told a newspaperman:

“I have seen the hurricane-swept sea on many occasions,but it never fails to impress me in exactly the same way. Itwould be sheer turmoil, like a furious blizzard. While experiencingthe jarring turbulence, the heat and drummingof torrential rain which seeps in by the gallon and tastessalty, the inside of a hurricane can be like a bad dream. Like214having been swallowed by an epileptic whale, or going overNiagara Falls in a telephone booth.”

On a less serious note but illustrative of the unexpected,there is the tale of the Navy crew and the hot water. Theytook off in a Privateer to fly into the center of a hurricane,each member of the crew having been assigned certainspecific duties, as is always the case on these missions. Theradar operator, among other jobs, was given the coffeedetail. After a considerable period of moderate to heavyturbulence, with heavy rain leaking into the plane untileverybody was thoroughly soaked, they broke into the clearin the eye of the hurricane, about twenty-five miles in diameter.The weather officer was busy with the coding of hislatest observation, the radio operator was sending two messagesthat had accumulated, and the navigator was figuringthe position of the eye and computing a double drift forwind. The co-pilot had the controls and was flying aroundthe eye, preparatory to a descent as soon as the coffee hadgone around.

The pilot called for coffee. The radar man dragged outtwo jugs, both still hot, and began to pour. He threw the firstcupful under his seat and poured one from the other jug.Then he saw that he had brought two jugs of hot water andno coffee. “What the heck!” exclaimed the weather officer.“Why, you poor ——!” The navigator’s words were scathing.He said that, according to the Bible, Noah was tossed overboardfor less reason.

From the very beginning of reconnaissance, these missionshave been co-ordinated according to instructions issued bya trio who serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and also on theAir Co-ordinating Committee. Today the men are BrigadierGeneral Thomas Moorman of the Air Force, Captain J. C. S.McKillip of the Navy, and Dr. Francis W. Reichelderfer,Chief of the Weather Bureau. There have been no serious215accidents on the Atlantic side when planes actually were inhurricanes and there was no confusion in assigning planesuntil September, 1947. The men on the Committee at thattime were Brigadier General Donald Yates and CaptainH. T. Orville, in addition to Dr. Reichelderfer. They co-ordinatedmany operations in addition to hurricane reconnaissanceand all had had long experience in aviation. Dr.Reichelderfer was formerly in charge of weather operationsin the Navy, after long experience at sea and in the air. Hewas weather officer for Hindenberg on his flight around theworld in a dirigible.

On September 18, 1947, the committee was surprised andalarmed by a report of reconnaissance. An Air Force planeout of Bermuda flew into a big hurricane which was movingwest-northwest to the south of Bermuda and, after a roughtime in the outer parts of the storm, finally found its wayinto the eye. Immediately they saw a Navy Privateer flyingaround in the center, also on reconnaissance, and they gotright out of the eye and returned to base. There they madean official protest that there is not sufficient room for twoplanes in the center of the same hurricane. New instructionsfor co-ordination were issued immediately to all concerned.It is not surprising that this has happened on at least twoother occasions, once with two Air Force planes and onanother occasion with a commercial airliner.

In 1953 there was another bad accident, but not directlyin a hurricane area. It resulted from a moderate hurricanenamed Dolly, which came from the vicinity of Puerto Ricoon September 8 and moved toward Bermuda with increasingintensity. On the tenth, aircraft in the center estimated thehighest winds at more than one hundred miles an hour, buton the eleventh it weakened and passed directly over Bermuda.There were strong gales at Bermuda, although the216storm was diminishing in force so fast that no serious damageresulted.

On the tenth an Air Force plane from Bermuda flew intothe hurricane. A Weather Bureau research man, RobertSimpson, went along to follow up on some studies he wasmaking of the circulation at high levels in tropical storms.He reported:

“Dolly was an immature storm with most of the cloudinessconcentrated in the northern sector. On the south and westsides, clouds rose only to around seven or eight thousandfeet near the eye, except along the spiral rain bands whichencircled the eye. The plane first investigated conditions atone thousand five hundred feet in the eye, where it was observedthat there was a huge mound of cloud near the centerwith a moat or cloudless area which encircled this centralcloud and separated it from the walls of the eye.”

After this low-level exploration, the plane climbed to 29,500feet, completing a spiral sounding in the eye. At thiselevation or slightly lower, a complete navigation of thestorm area was made, with dropsondes being released instrategic quarters, pressure and temperature gradients beingmeasured along the track of the plane. There were two outstandingthings observed during this flight at high levels:first, the sheer beauty of the storm itself, which could beviewed in excellent perspective, insofar as the cloud formswere geared to the wind circulations over hundreds of milessurrounding the eye. The only obstructions to vision at thiselevation were the tall cloud walls which rose from thenorthern side of the eye. The second was a strong cycloniccirculation near thirty thousand feet over the eye itself whichwas surprising. Most theorists had figured that the cycloniccirculation would cease at high altitudes and possibly at veryhigh levels become anticyclonic.

Simpson continued:

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“By the time the plane had returned to Bermuda it wasevident that Dolly was bearing down upon the island itselfand that everything had to be evacuated. All of the planeswere flown out to the mainland and the buildings batteneddown for the big blow. I spent most of the time in theweather station with my eyes glued to the radar scope. Asthe storm approached, and the winds rose, one rain bandafter another passed over the station, each with evidence ofa little more curvature than the preceding band.

“Finally, the scope indicated a circle with a five-mile areafree of any radar echoes. It was bearing down directly uponKindley Field. Oddly enough the pressure had not begun tofall and the wind was holding steady. Another odd thing wasthat during the reconnaissance the eye had been twenty-fivemiles in diameter. However, this eye was only four to fivemiles in diameter. The eye arrived, the rain stopped andthen resumed as the eye passed over the station, yet the pressureonly leveled off briefly and the wind only subsidedslightly without shifting. We had been tricked! This was notthe real McCoy, it was a false eye. Subsequently, two otherfalse eyes appeared on the radar scope and we had aboutdecided that the storm had no organized central circulationleft when the real thing finally showed up on the scope, stilltwenty-five miles in diameter.”

In the reconnaissance of Hurricane Dolly, many feet ofradar pictures were made of the spiral bands of the storm.When it became clear that all planes would have to be flownto the mainland because of the approach of Dolly to Bermuda,the film pack used on the reconnaissance was left inthe plane so that additional pictures could be made on theflight back to the mainland. Not only was this done, but alsoan additional eye dropsonde was obtained during the tripto the mainland. It was agreed that as soon as the plane returned218to Bermuda after the storm had passed, the film andadditional records would be mailed to Washington.

On its flight from the mainland while returning to Bermuda,the plane exploded in mid-air 150 miles off the coast,near Savannah, Georgia. It had the records, the radar film,the dropsondes taken in the eye, and other data. In this case,the No. 4 engine had “run away,” throwing its prop, whichstruck Engine No. 3, and the latter exploded. The plane fellout of control. Eight of the crew were rescued but none ofthe records or data of the reconnaissance was saved. Thisplane, however, was not on a storm mission at the time.

The unexpected appearance of a small eye on the radarscope is not uncommon. The Navy’s instruction to its crewssays: “During the final minutes of the run-in, radar mayprove to be more of a hindrance than a help. There can bea number of open spots close to the true eye which mightappear as eyes on the radar screen. You should not chasethese false eyes!”

Out in the Pacific, the typhoon chasers say: “False eyesare often found in weak storms and care must be taken notto confuse them with the true eye of the typhoon. On theradar scope they may present an appearance much like thetrue eye but will not remain on the scope for any length oftime. By continually scanning the suspected eye with severalsweeps, the radar observer will see that the false eyes aresurrounded by fuzzy cloud formations rather than a heavyring of cloud characteristic of the eye.”

When Hurricane Carol of 1954 was approaching the NewEngland Coast, the last penetration was made by a Navyplane with Lieutenant Commander R. W. Westover as pilotand Lieutenant C. W. Hines as co-pilot. On the way into thestorm circulation, Hines was telling Westover about hisfamily’s experience in the New England hurricane of 1938.219The family residence was on Cape God. It was blown intothe water and drifted until it lodged against a bridge, obstructingnavigation. Finally, it was necessary to dynamitethe wrecked house to clear the channel. The Hines familyrebuilt their home and took out hurricane insurance. Theycarried the insurance until June 1, 1954, and then let it lapse.

As the recco plane flew into the center of Carol on August30, the crew was watching a Moore-McCormack ship in thestormy seas below and sympathizing with the people onboard who were suffering such rotten weather, but Hineswas saving his sympathy for his family on Cape Cod. Hewas sure that Carol was going to blow their home into thewater again, and afterward he learned that it did.

Although Carol of 1954 received a great deal of publicitybecause of death and destruction in New England, Westover,who also flew into Hurricane Carol of 1953, says thatit was a much more violent hurricane than the one in 1954.The first Carol was so bad that only one low-level penetrationwas attempted. His crew recorded pressure 929 millibarsin the center—about 26.80 inches—and they recorded 87½°drift. But fortunately the earlier Carol remained out at seathroughout its course.

Hurricane Hazel, later in 1954, gave another Navy pilot,Lieutenant Maxey P. Watson, an experience of the samekind that Lieutenant Hines had. The storm was approachingthe coast of South Carolina when Watson flew his planeinto it and he saw the center passing inland not far from thetown of Conway, which was his home.

Hazel was responsible for other unexpected incidents hereand there during its ravages from the Caribbean to thenortheastern part of the United States. One case was on aNavy plane commanded by Lieutenant G. J. Rehe. Watsonwas the pilot on this trip, also. They took off from Puerto220Rico and flew into the storm as it was turning northward andpassing out of the Caribbean.

Up to that time, Hazel was not much of a storm. Westoverflew into it after it passed Grenada and found that it was nota well-organized cyclone. Rehe had gone into it on the firstpenetration and reported winds of eighty-five knots. Westoverfound the area almost cloudless but ninety-knot windsin one area. However, after its northward motion began, itwas a very dangerous wind system, which was responsiblefor the only injury to a Navy crewman in their many flightsinto this particular hurricane.

Because of the severe turbulence that had developedquickly in Hazel, all the crew members on this flight werefastened in with safety belts, as is usual in such cases, butthe photographer wanted to get up and take a picture. Sohe got out of his safety belt and had another crew memberunfasten himself and hold him while he took the picture.In the sudden very violent turbulence, both were thrownagainst the overhead. On his descent, the photographercaught his arm between the cables and the fuselage andbroke his shoulder blade. The other crewman was knockedunconscious.

Out in the Pacific, an Air Force pilot, Captain Leo S.Bielinski, had an experience which induced him to go togreat lengths of experiment and ingenuity in an effort to findan easier way to track typhoons and hurricanes. It was inMay, 1950, when a typhoon called Doris was growing tomaturity while near the island of Truk and showed signs ofchanging its path, threatening the base at Guam. On May8, an RB-29, under the command of Captain Cunningham,was sent out to penetrate the storm. Bielinski went along.

At that time Leo had a fine wrist watch in which he tookmuch pride. A man in uniform has few things that are differentfrom the other men, but Leo secured an expression of221individuality through a wrist watch. He bought a veryspecial one for a hundred dollars and admits that he frequentlylooked at it when he really didn’t care what time itwas.

On this first trip into Doris, everything went smoothly.The crew members were instructed to land at Iwo Jima,when another plane would take over. But before landingthey found that the hydraulic system needed repairs. Cunninghambrought the plane down skillfully and they workedall night making repairs with parts salvaged from anotherplane on the field. The plans were changed and they wereassigned to the next mission. The next morning they wereairborne again for another penetration. This confirmed thenorthwest movement of Doris, which would take the mostviolent winds away from Guam, so they returned to IwoJima, well worn-out by two successive flights and thinkingabout a little rest, when Commander Cunningham receivedthe following message: “Unable to get relief; request youmake afternoon fix.” So the same crew turned around andstarted the third mission. The other two flights into thisstorm had been uneventful, they were tired, and Leo didn’tbother to fasten his safety belt.

Wham! Suddenly he found himself floating in the airaround the co*ckpit. Before he could get his bearings, he wasthrown violently against a bulkhead and slowly came to therealization that the bits of junk dangling in his face werethe remains of his hundred-dollar wrist watch. This botheredBielinski more than a broken arm or a twisted vertebrae. Hestarted studying typhoons with a determination to find abetter way to keep track of them. The results are describedin Chapter 17.

In other ways the unexpected can be serious. One experienceis cited by Captain Ed Vrable, who was navigator on a222flight into a hurricane in 1953. After a careful approach, theaircraft suddenly popped into the eye, but it was only abouteight miles in diameter. It was not easy to circle a superfortressin this small eye. At one point, the turning arc wasa little too broad and the aircraft edged out into the windson the border. It was instantly tossed back into the eye, almostupside down, and he had the worst fright of his careerin the reconnaissance business. But the pilots made a skillfuldescent until they managed to get the plane into the correctattitude and finished the flight.

In Hurricane Edna, in 1954, a crew of hunters in a WB-29,in command of Captain Charles C. Whitney, had an unexpectedduty. They had spent part of the morning and theafternoon of September 14 in the eye of the hurricane. Theyflew in tight little circles, dodging the wing-shudderingwinds on the periphery. Because the Weather Bureau forecasterswere afraid of a repetition of a sudden speed-up likethat of Hurricane Carol two weeks before, they had askedfor a continuous watch. Captain Whitney and his crew werein there for nine hours.

And then, with gas getting low, they ran into the unexpected.Some eleven hours after take-off from Bermuda, theaircraft picked up a radio message that the Nantucket lightship,torn from her moorings by terrific winds, was adriftand at Edna’s mercy. The WB-29 plunged into 145-mile-an-hourwinds in search of the vessel.

Picking up the lightship by radar, the weather plane shepherdedthe hopelessly lost ship, remaining overhead until aCoast Guard rescue plane arrived.

Waves seventy feet high seemed to toss the stricken vesselinto the air to meet the low-flying aircraft pressed down byEdna’s raging winds. It felt, the crew said later, as if theplane were dancing on her tail.

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With the arrival of the relief plane, the WB-29 turnedlandward. After sixteen hours in the air, and with the gasgauge hitting the low side of the dial, the weather planemade a landing at Dover, Delaware.

According to the Air Force, “This flight was one of themost dramatic missions in peacetime Air Force history.”

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15. FIGHTING HAIL AND HURRICANES

At first thought, most people would say that fighting hailhas nothing to do with hunting hurricanes, but in one instanceit did. It is an interesting story which shows how menwill take risks in trying to control the weather. The storyends with one man giving up his life in a sensational adventurewith a mysterious conclusion.

Destructive storms are not very frequent in any one placebut most people are under the impression that they are.They are apt to remember bad weather and forget about thegood. Losses of life and property and failures of plans andbusiness enterprises are caused by storms or the wrong kindof weather and such things are impressed on their memories.When rain is needed, it may fail altogether or come in such225quantities that fields and roads are washed out and thereare floods in the rivers. A thunderstorm brings rain butsometimes hail comes with it, destroying crops and damagingproperty.

People have tried to overcome these bad effects of theweather in many ways. Irrigation has long been practiced inregions with scanty rainfall. Air conditioning affords relieffrom excessive heat. In many other ways, some foolish andsome dangerous, men have tried to influence the weather.An interesting case of this kind which appealed to the imaginationof people in many countries started near the beginningof the present century. It was an international battleagainst hail. Its origin was in the vineyards of Italy. Hailhad done great damage there year after year, and finally anItalian got the idea that he might destroy hailstorms byshooting into them when they were just beginning.

In those years, cannon were used in battle. Loaded withbig charges of gunpowder, these cannon hurled solid, heavyballs at enemy cities, forts, fleets, and troops. In time ofpeace, there were many of these old cannon around, servingno useful purpose, and the Italian had no trouble in gettingone to try on hailstorms. But he was not permitted to use acannon ball. It might have crashed into a neighbor’s houseor killed somebody in the vineyards. So he loaded it withgunpowder and fired it at the storm cloud, hoping it wouldcreate a disturbance in the atmosphere and weaken the hailstorm.

It is an amazing fact that the vineyard of this Italian wasdamaged far less by hail than those of any of his neighbors,and the next year others tried firing a cannon with similarsuccess. They became expert at it and learned how to load acannon so that it cast a big, whirling smoke ring into thethunderstorm cloud. The news spread to other countries andin two or three years there was a lot of hail shooting in226different parts of the world. So they held an internationalhail-shooting congress where they exchanged ideas andnarrated their experiences. By the time the second worldcongress on hail was held, a great deal of uncertainty haddeveloped. It seemed that the first hail shooters had begunwork at a time when it just happened that there was muchless than the usual amount of hail. Also, there were explosionsand people were hurt. One man was killed and anotherhad an arm blown off. After a few years, all the hail shootingceased.

Even today, there is a good deal of mystery about theformation of hail and many people think there are ways ofpreventing it or causing the storm to make little hailstonesinstead of big ones and thus having much less destruction.Hail causes many millions of dollars worth of damage everyyear in the United States and almost any effort to reducethe losses seems to be justified.

Scientists believe that hailstones are very small in the beginningbut grow in size as they go up and down severaltimes in the thunderstorm clouds. Even in hot weather, it isvery cold in the top layers of one of these great clouds.Raindrops freeze and in falling gather more water or snowin these high regions. Soon they are caught in rising air currentsand carried up into freezing temperatures again. Oneach trip up and down, another layer of water or snowgathers on the outside and is frozen. At last the multi-layeredstones become so heavy that they fall to the ground, in spiteof rising currents, and as they leave the cloud they comedown with great rapidity and may beat crops to the ground,batter automobiles, break glass and bruise and sometimeskill livestock. A hailstone the size of a baseball falling manythousands of feet is a very dangerous thing.

For many years after the hail-shooting experiments, it wasthought that nothing could be done about it except to carry227hail insurance. Then, shortly after World War II, scientistsof the General Electric Company announced that they hadconducted some successful experiments in controlling theweather and this led to efforts to control rainfall, preventhail, and stop hurricanes.

The man who started this new effort at weather controlwas Vincent Schaefer. He observed the weather on top ofMt. Washington, in New Hampshire, a place where it isvery cold and windy in winter. The observatory is fastenedto the solid rock of the mountain top by steel cables, to keepit from being blown off. Vast quantities of ice accumulateon the building. Snow comes down in great quantities attimes but is generally carried by high winds which havereached terrific speed, on one occasion going up to 231 milesan hour. Conditions there are in some respects like theweather in the top of a big thunderstorm.

One of the peculiar things that happens up there on Mt.Washington and in the top of a thunderstorm is the formationof liquid water droplets, which are colder than freezingbut they do not turn to ice. These droplets are said to besupercooled. Schaefer found in his experiments at GeneralElectric that a small pellet of dry ice, the size of a pea, whendropped into air containing a cloud of supercooled waterdroplets could produce untold billions of small ice nuclei.So he carried some dry ice up in an airplane and dropped itinto the top of a cloud with supercooled water droplets, anda trail of snow was seen falling from the bottom of the cloud.Many others tried the same experiment and some had similarresults. The snow turned to rain as it came down towarmer levels, and the process was called “rainmaking.”

There is one disturbing fact. Before dry ice will work on acloud, it must be very near the point of making rain withoutany outside help. But many of the rainmakers believe thatdry ice makes more rain fall or causes it to fall sooner than228it would otherwise. Thus, as the cloud moves along, the rainmakermay be able to cause a shower in a certain place,whereas the cloud might have moved far away before itbegan to rain. In this story the important point is that someof the experimenters believe that dry ice or some otherchemical will cause the rain to fall but will make it muchless likely that nature’s process will develop to the point ofproducing hail.

The news of all this rainmaking in the West arousedintense interest on the part of a young man named GordonClouser. He thought he might be able to prevent hail, andif he succeeded, he might stop tornadoes. In the Midwestthere is an old story about a farmer who knocked the lifeout of a tornado by hitting it with a two-by-four. On hearingthis story, many people have gotten the idea that the governmentmight destroy a tornado by gunfire. More recentlythere have been serious proposals that these vicious localstorms with funnel clouds and violent winds be destroyedby guided missiles. There is no evidence that any of theplans offered so far would be successful in breaking up hailstormsor tornadoes, but they are extremely small when comparedwith hurricanes, and the government has receivedthousands of proposals that these great storms be wiped outor rendered harmless by gunfire.

Behind most of the suggestions for killing hurricanes isthe idea that they begin as small whirls in the atmosphereand go through early stages of growth to the size of a tornadoor a thunderstorm, and if they could be hit with greatforce in a vital place while small, they might die out. Onthis assumption, there have been a great many proposalsthat the Navy send battleships into the hurricane area tosearch for incipient hurricanes and fire broadsides into them.No test of this kind has been made for two reasons. Thehurricane region is so large that the entire Navy would be229insufficient for such a patrol. On the other hand, there is nota shred of evidence that hurricanes begin as small stormslike tornadoes or thunderstorms. Actually, they seem to developas mildly disturbed weather over an area of thousandsof square miles. The experts say that shooting at the weatherin such a large region would certainly be futile. After theWorld War II, the atom bomb stimulated some new ideasand thousands of letters were written to the governmentabout knocking a hurricane out with an atom bomb at theright time and place.

When the New Mexico atom bomb was exploded, theweather was bad, with rain in torrents, strong winds, lightningand thunder. Afterward, the weather was much betterand this led to a lot of speculation. The fact is, however,that the scientists waited until the weather improved beforethey exploded the bomb; hence neither the bad weather northe improvement could be attributed to the explosion.

Before the tests at Bikini in 1946 and Eniwetok in 1948,the scientists received numerous letters, warning them thatthe explosions would start storms and might cause a typhoon.But the effects of explosions of this kind are soonover, while the forces that maintain a hurricane or typhoonmust be applied continuously day and night for a week ortwo, to keep one of these big tropical storms going in fullfury. One of the scientists who witnessed these tests estimatedthat it would take a thousand atomic bombs at anymoment to equal the energy of motion in a hurricane. Noscientist has figured what would happen if one thousandatomic bombs were exploded at one time in a storm area!

After a year or two of rainmaking with dry ice and anotherchemical, silver iodide, the conviction grew that it would bepossible to kill a hurricane by dropping some of this materialin a vital spot. Some of the bolder students of weathercontrol actually tried it. One of them was Gordon Clouser.230Just what he did when he flew into the storm and what happenedto it afterward make a mystery, for he gave his life inthe effort. It is a good example of the fearless activities ofthe hurricane hunters.

Gordon Clouser was born in 1912, in Gibraltar, Pennsylvania.He grew into his teens as an active, good-looking boywith many diverse interests. Quick to learn, he finished highschool at fourteen. His family moved to New Mexico, wherehe worked several years as a surveyor, then took two degreesat the University of New Mexico. After that, he hadmany activities—teacher, librarian, writer and director ofplays. He made a movie, composed music, wrote poetry, wasin the Air Corps reserve one year, taught meteorology andaeronautics at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle for a year and a half.He learned to fly in Idaho and then was a teacher in JuniorCollege in Yakima, Washington.

It was 1950 when Gordon became excited about the workthat was being done in rainmaking in many parts of thecountry. By April of the next year, he had moved to Plainview,Texas, and had begun to organize airplane operationsto prevent hail on the high plains of the State. Havingdeveloped his own secret formula for the chemicals to bedropped into thunderstorm clouds, he experimented in hiscar, in airplanes and in the home freezer. Once he camehome for dinner, carrying some denim to be used in connectionwith an experiment, and his wife discovered that hehad taken all the food out of the freezer so he could dropchemicals in it, to see what might happen in the atmosphere.When he asked what they were having for dinner, she replied,“I guess it will be frozen denim.”

The year 1951 was not an easy one for Clouser. Thethought of preventing hail was new to most people and hehad some difficulty in getting enough money to finance the231necessary plane operations. He asked farmers for twenty toforty cents an acre for protection from hail and comparedthis cost with the much higher rates for hail insurance. But,he argued, the prevention of hail would lower the insurancerates, which are based on the frequency of such storms inany area and the amount of damage done.

To prevent hail, Gordon and his pilots flew into and overthunderstorms, to see if they contained hail in dangeroussizes and, if so, they dropped his secret chemicals into thetops of the clouds. This is called “seeding” by the rainmakers.Gordon was sure that he was preventing hail damage fromthe clouds they seeded. By 1952 he had nine planes at hiscommand. In that year, from June 1 to October 1, theychecked 421 thunderstorms and found ice in dangerous sizesin eighty-two of them, which were seeded. He reported tothe farmers that there was no appreciable hail damage fromany of them and there were no complaints on that score.

During this time he was watching the reports of tornadoesand getting the Weather Bureau’s forecasts and warnings.On May 26, he heard a prediction of tornadoes in an areawhich included the two counties where he was working toprevent hail. Without regard for the danger of flying amongthunderheads in tornado weather, his planes were in the airfor a total of nearly ten hours that day, seeding clouds thatlooked dangerous. That night, a half hour after the last ofGordon’s planes landed, the Weather Bureau issued an “allclear.” There had been no tornadoes in either county. Gordonsaid, “We can’t prove that we prevented a tornado—maybenone would have formed anyway—but we do knowthat conditions were right for one, and we changed thoseconditions.”

For a man of Clouser’s adventurous spirit, this was just aside issue. He occupied much of his spare time studying232hurricanes and making plans for the day when he would beoperating a large company to kill these storms before theyreached the Coasts of the United States. He hoped to havehis main office in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with planes stationedalso at Pensacola, Florida, on the coast of Mexico,in Cuba, and at two or three other strategic places. He wouldget the government reports, talk to the weather men, and atthe right time drop a mixture containing his secret formulainto the eye of the storm or some other vital spot that hewould find by flying above the storm clouds and studyingthe wind circulation.

His wife, Olive, took this philosophically. With their threechildren, she was living at Norman, near Oklahoma City.Like the wives of most adventurous pilots, she knew thatany one of these trips might be her husband’s last. She encouragedhim in his hail prevention but worried abouttornadoes, and especially hurricanes. She knew that theyform and move over vast sea surfaces on which the windsimpress violent motions, a deadly place for a man to landwhen in trouble. After Gordon flew into the tornado cloudsin May, he came to Oklahoma City by bus and called heron the phone to come and get him in the car. Instead ofgoing home, he asked her to drive him to the WeatherBureau Office at the airport, where he checked on the reportsto see if they knew what had happened to the tornadoes.Then she found out what he had been doing and heard himtalking about hurricanes.

Olive had something special on her mind. She wanted topaint the kitchen-yellow, but he was against it. She tried toget a compromise. If he was going to fly into tornadoes andother storms against her advice, why not paint the kitchenyellow, even if he didn’t like it very much? He offered strongobjections and she put it off for a while.

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In the meantime, Gordon was in trouble. September ofthat year—1952—was very dry in Texas. The farmers inFloyd and Hale Counties in that state got the idea that hisagitations against hail had prevented rain. Anyway, he wasout of work, for, as he said, “There is no point in a hail-bustingbusiness when there are no clouds.” A delegation offarmers called on him to protest his activities. They said thathe and his men had deprived them of rain and they weregoing to lose a lot of money.

Gordon convinced them that his work on the clouds earlierin the year had nothing to do with the drought. He pointedout that only 82 out of 421 storms had been seeded; therefore,339 of them had acted exactly as nature had intended.Besides that, he showed them news reports that nearly allof Texas was dry, some parts being much drier than thecounties he was working. They went home satisfied, butGordon had time on his hands, with no thunderheads orclouds to work on. So he gathered data on hurricanes andspent a good deal of time at home, making experiments inthe freezer. He wanted to work on big storms. The littleones in Floyd and Hale Counties gave him trouble. All rainmakersknow that it is possible to seed a cloud and have rainon the farm or ranch of a man who refuses to pay for seeding,and have no rain on a farm next to it, owned by a manwho has paid for the service.

October came and it proved to be the driest month for thecountry as a whole since weather records began. All therainmakers were in trouble and the “hail-busters” were outof work. Gordon sat at home, listening to the radio andworking on his formula. He and Olive talked about manythings but neither mentioned hurricanes or yellow kitchens.Then on Tuesday, October 21, Gordon left for Plainview.The next day he heard a news report from Lubbock that234there was a hurricane in Cuba, moving toward the UnitedStates. On Wednesday he left for Florida in a Luscombeplane, saying nothing to anybody except Bill and PaulineSeirp. Bill was not a pilot but Gordon had been teachinghim to fly.

Knowing nothing about the trip to Miami, Olive was havingthe kitchen painted yellow and wondering what Gordonwould say when he came home from Plainview. That was onThursday. On Sunday, the twenty-sixth, she and the childrenhad a late breakfast but managed to get to Sunday Schooland remained for church service. During the hymn at thebeginning of the service, there was a long-distance call forOlive from Plainview. Gordon was lost at sea. Later in theday, she heard the story in full.

Gordon was not satisfied with the plane. When he reachedFlorida he tried to get one better suited for storm work. Hehad plans for building a special plane for the purpose butnow he was anxious to get into the hurricane. It might bethe last one of the season, he thought. It had done a greatdeal of damage in Cuba. He went to the Weather BureauOffice in Miami and got the latest information on the position,strength and movement of the storm. At 3:45 P.M.(October 25) the center of the hurricane was about seventy-fiveor eighty miles east of Miami when Gordon took off inhis Luscombe plane. At 8:56 P.M., a radio station in Miamipicked up a message from him, saying that he was fifty orsixty miles east-southeast of Miami, still in the edge of thestorm. The radio station talked with him for twenty-sixminutes as he flew toward Miami, making poor headwayagainst the winds. The last message was, “Out of fuel—descending—givemy love to my wife and family.”

The Civil Air Patrol and the ships and planes of the CoastGuard searched the area for forty-eight hours without finding235any trace of the missing man. Olive went to Miami and didher best to keep the planes looking for him. Whether or nothe had any effect on the storm will never be known for sure.The weather forecasters in Miami did not think so. But thehurricane soon afterward took an erratic course. It wasdestructive early on the twenty-sixth as it turned into theBahamas, then lost force, and turned northward. The officialreport of the Weather Bureau said that “it moved northeastwardthereafter as a disturbance of no great violence.”

The uncertainties and the tragedy in this case brought tomind the Savannah storm of 1947, which Gordon may havestudied. It began far to the southward, near the Isthmus ofPanama, early on the ninth of October. On the eleventh, itcrossed the extreme western end of Cuba, and on the twelfthpassed over southern Florida. From this time on, its course wasvery unusual. Reconnaissance planes followed it going northeastwardover the Atlantic until the night of the thirteenth,when it was east of Wilmington, North Carolina. Early onthe fourteenth, a plane got into the storm area and found itmoving southwestward. With considerable force it struckSavannah, Georgia, early on the fifteenth, causing about twomillion dollars’ worth of damage. Citizens of Savannah andsome of the city officials complained to the government forcausing the hurricane to strike the city.

At about the time, or just before the hurricane changedits course abruptly to the southwest, military planes hadcarried out an experiment in dropping dry ice into its upperlevels. There was a great deal of discussion in the press. Atfirst it was said that the dry ice had caused the storm to takea new course, but after the Savannah complaints were heard,little more was said by the military about the experimentand it remains something of a mystery. Few scientists believethat dry ice could have such an effect on so large a236storm. Actually, there were few observations in the stormarea during the night of the thirteenth to fourteenth andprecise information about the time and nature of the changeof course was not available for an investigation. It belongsin the same class as the Clouser storm.

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16. CAROL, EDNA, HAZEL OR SAXBY!

At the end of August, 1954, when the hurricane named“Carol” devastated Long Island and the southern coast of NewEngland, it did a tremendous amount of property damage,principally on the shores of Rhode Island and southeasternMassachusetts. There was sharp criticism of the weathermenand the hurricane hunters. People claimed that the warningcame only a few hours ahead of the big winds and the highstorm tides. The weathermen answered that there really wasno delay on their part in giving out the warning. They saidthat the hurricane hunters had been tracking Carol forseveral days and everybody had been warned that it wason the way. The hurricane simply started to move withgreat rapidity during that final night and there was no way238of getting the warning to large numbers of people that earlyin the morning. It was after daylight when they got out ofbed and turned on radio and television.

Of all the criticism, the sharpest and most prolonged wasabout the name of the hurricane. A newspaper in Massachusetts—theNew Bedford Times—ran an editorial sayingthat it was not appropriate to give a nice name like Carolto a death-dealing and destructive monster of this kind.Other newspapers and many citizens here and there aroundthe country joined in, partly in complaint and partly out ofcuriosity and the wish to get into the argument. A NewOrleans woman wrote to the editor of the New BedfordTimes that she would rather a storm would hit her housenameless than to run a chance of having it named after oneof her husband’s old girl friends. Other women were incensedbecause storms had been called by their given names.The weathermen had a good explanation, but not manypeople seemed to sympathize with them. Persons whosuffered losses of property were the most critical, sayingthat the name Carol gave the impression that the storm wasnot dangerous and that its winds and tides would not bemuch out of the ordinary.

The hurricane hunters were amazed by this reaction. Useof names for storms was not new. For a great many yearsthe worst of the world’s storms have been given names, somebefore they struck with full force, but mostly afterward.Many were named after cities, towns or islands that weredevastated. Others had gotten their names from some unusualweather that came with them or from ships that weresunk or damaged. One of them, as already has been related,was named “Kappler’s Hurricane” after a weather officernamed Kappler who discovered it.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, a NewEnglander, Sidney Perley, collected all the available records239of storms and other disasters, together with strange phenomenain New England, starting with a big hurricane in 1635,when there were only a few settlers, and continuing down to1890. His book, Historic Storms of New England, was publishedin Salem, in 1891. He listed floods, earthquakes, darkand yellow days, big meteors, eclipses, avalanches, droughts,great gales, tornadoes, hurricanes, and storms of hail andheavy snow. Prominent among them were the “Long Storm”of 1798, the “September Gale” of 1815, and the “LighthouseStorm” of 1851.

The “Long Storm,” as the name suggests, was of longduration. It began on the seventeenth of November and continuedwith terrific gales and heavy snow until late on thetwenty-first. This violent weather was unprecedented soearly in the winter. From Perley’s account it seems that thecenter of the storm crossed Cape Cod. A great many vesselswere lost and there was much suffering among the people.

The “September Gale” of 1815 became famous becauseof a poem written in later years by Oliver Wendell Holmes,who was six years old at the time of the big gale. Holmesremembered and lamented the loss of his favorite pair ofbreeches, in part as follows:

Holmes entitled the poem The September Gale and so thisbecame the name of the storm. Actually, it was a hurricane240quite like those that struck New England in 1938, 1944 and1954. Years afterward, a New Haven man named NoyesDarling became interested in the storm of 1815 and tracedits course by a collection of newspaper accounts from manyplaces and by the logs of ships which had been in the westernAtlantic when the hurricane passed. In 1842, he plottedall this information on a map and was able to figure itscourse. This was rather remarkable, for a study since thattime shows that the tracks of hurricanes which do greatdamage in New England must adhere closely to one path—farenough eastward to clear the land areas as they go northwardand far enough westward so that they do not go outinto the ocean before they reach the latitude of Nantucket.Those which strike shore to the southward may reach NewEngland but passage over land causes them to lose much oftheir fury on the way. Darling’s plotted path was correctaccording to experiences since that time.

The “Lighthouse Storm” of 1851 commenced in the Districtof Columbia on Sunday, April 13, reached New Yorkon Monday morning, and during the day struck New England.It came at the time of the full moon and so the storm-drivenwaters joined with the high tides, and the sea, risingover the wharves at Dorchester, Massachusetts, came intothe streets to a greater height than had ever been knownbefore. All around the coasts of Massachusetts and NewHampshire there was much property damage. The eventwhich gave the storm its name was the destruction of thelighthouse on Minot’s ledge, at Cohasset, Massachusetts. Itwas wrecked and swept away. At four o’clock the morningafter the storm some of the wreckage was found strewnalong the beach. Two young men, assistant light keepers,were killed. Since this was a very dangerous rock and manyvessels had been lost there, a new lighthouse was erectedat the same point soon afterward.

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One of the most noted storms of the nineteenth centurywas “Saxby’s Gale,” which caused a great amount of destructionin New Brunswick on October 4, 1869. The amazingfact was that this storm was predicted nearly a year beforeby a Lieutenant Saxby of the British Navy. In November,1868, he wrote to the newspapers in London, predictingthat the earth would be visited by a storm of unusual violenceattended by an extraordinary rise of tide at seveno’clock on the morning of October 5, 1869.

Saxby wrote the following explanation of his forecast tothe newspaper:

“I now beg to state with regard to 1869 at 7 A.M. October5th, the Moon will be at the part of her orbit which is nearestthe Earth. Her attraction will be therefore at its maximumforce. At noon of the same day the Moon will be on theEarth’s equator, a circ*mstance which never occurs withoutmarked atmospheric disturbance, and at 2 P.M. of the sameday lines drawn from the Earth’s centre would cut the Sunand Moon in the same arc of right ascension (the Moon’sattraction and the Sun’s attraction will therefore be actingin the same direction); in other words, the new moon will beon the Earth’s equator when in perigee, and nothing morethreatening can, I say, occur without miracle. The earth itis true will not be in perihelion by some sixteen or seventeenseconds of semidiameter.

“With your permission I will during September next(1869) for the safety of mariners briefly remind your readersof this warning. In the meantime there will be time for therepair of unsafe sea walls and for the circulation of thisnotice throughout the world.”

It seems that Saxby had made other similar forecasts.Commenting on one of his predictions, a London newspaper,the Standard, said:

“Saxby claims to have been successful in some of his predictions,242and he may prove either lucky or clever on thepresent occasion. As the astronomical effect will operate overthe entire globe, it is exceedingly likely there will be a galeof wind and a flood somewhere.”

The extraordinary fact is that a citizen of Halifax, NovaScotia, disturbed by Saxby’s prediction for October 5, 1869,wrote to the local newspaper the week before:

“I believe that a heavy gale will be encountered here onTuesday next 5th October beginning perhaps on Mondaynight or possibly deferred as late as Tuesday night, but betweenthese two periods it seems inevitable. At its greatestforce the direction of the wind should be southwest, havingcommenced at or near south.

“Should Monday the 4th be a warm day for the season anadditional guarantee of the coming storm will be given.Roughly speaking the warmer it may be on the 4th, the moreviolent will be the succeeding storm. Apart from the theoryof the Moon’s attraction, as applied to Meteorology—whichis disbelieved by many, the experience of any careful observerteaches him to look for a storm at next new moon,and the state of the atmosphere, and consequent weatherlately appears to be leading directly not only to this blownext week, but to a succession of gales during next month.”

Actually the fourth began as a warm day in New Brunswickand later in the day the storm became violent, as predictedby the Halifax citizen, named Frederick Allison.

There were high tide and heavy rain at Halifax but theweather in general was a disappointment, for the citizens,after seeing the warning in the newspaper, had made manypreparations about the wharves, moving goods to higherfloors in warehouses, and anchoring boats out in the streamor securing them with lines in all directions.

Near by in New Brunswick, however, the storm on October4 was severe. The gale rose to hurricane strength between2438:00 and 9:00 P.M. The tide at St. John was aboveany preceding mark. Vessels broke away from their mooringsand some were badly damaged. Buildings were flooded andin St. John and other cities and towns in the area, buildingswere demolished or unroofed, tracts of forest trees were uprooted,and cattle were drowned in great numbers.

All of this was rather remarkable as the storm reached itsheight at about 9:00 P.M. on October 4th, which was actuallyafter midnight by London time and therefore on October5th. Regardless of these circ*mstances, this is an instanceof a storm that had a name—“Saxby’s Gale”—long before itoccurred and for years afterward. Some weathermen thoughtthat it was of tropical origin and had been a hurricane inlower latitudes, but if so, it came overland in its final days,for it was felt at Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, andin parts of New England on the third and early on thefourth, with heavy rains and gales in many localities.

A few hurricanes have been named for the peculiar pathsthey followed. One that was very unusual was the “LoopHurricane” of October, 1910. It was an intense storm thatpassed over western Cuba, after which its center describeda small loop over the waters between Cuba and SouthernFlorida. When it finally crossed the coast of western Florida,it caused tides so high that many people had to climb treesto keep from drowning. The “Yankee Hurricane” was sonamed by the Mayor of Miami. It was first observed to theeast of Bermuda in late October, 1935, moving westward.On approaching the coast of the Carolinas, it took an extraordinarycourse, almost opposite to the normal track at thatseason, and went southwestward to southern Florida, withits calm center over Miami on the fourth of November. Inthe same year, another unusual storm known as the “HairpinHurricane” started in the western Caribbean, movednortheastward to Cuba, and then turned sharply southwestward244to Honduras, describing a track shaped like a hairpin.It caused one of the worst disasters of that region. Loss oflife exceeded two thousand.

Examples of storms named after ships are “Racer’s Storm”in 1837, named after a British sloop of war which was caughtin its hurricane winds in the Yucatan Channel. Another oneof great violence was called “Antje’s Hurricane,” because itdismasted a schooner of that name in the Atlantic in 1842.

In Puerto Rico, a hurricane may be given the name of thesaint whose feast is celebrated on the day on which it strikesthe island. The most famous are: Santa Ana, July 26, 1825;Los Angeles, August 2, 1837; Santa Elena, August 18, 1851;San Narcisco, October 29, 1867; San Felipe, September 13,1876; San Ciriaco, August 8, 1899; and the second SanFelipe, September 13, 1928.

Doubtless the worst hurricane during the twentieth centurywas the one in 1928, “San Felipe.” It caused damageestimated at fifty million dollars in Puerto Rico, and laterstruck Florida, causing losses estimated at twenty-five milliondollars. Puerto Rico lost three hundred lives, Floridanearly two thousand.

One of the well-known storms of the West Indies was the“Padre Ruiz Hurricane,” which was named after a priestwhose funeral services were being held in the church atSanta Barbara, Santo Domingo, on September 23, 1837,when the hurricane struck the island, causing an appallingloss of life and property destruction.

Before the end of the nineteenth century, a weathermanin Australia named Clement Wragge had begun giving girls’names to tropical storms. Down in that part of the SouthernHemisphere, hurricanes are called willy-willies. They comefrom the tropics on a southwest course and turn to the southand southeast on approaching or passing Australia. Theirwinds spiral inward around the center in a clockwise direction—the245opposite of the turning motion of our hurricanes.

Wragge was the government meteorologist in Queensland,and later ran a weather bureau of his own in Brisbane. Atall, thin, bewhiskered man who stammered, he was knownall over Australia as a lecturer on weather and similar subjects.Australians of that time said that, as likely as not, whendue to talk about big winds, he would arrive at the lecturehall with “too many sheets out” and fail to keep on his feetduring the lecture. Though his name was Clement, he wasbetter known in Australia as “Inclement.”

Storms which did not come from the tropics were calledby men’s names. Generally, Wragge called them after politicianswho had earned his disfavor, but for some reason heused girls’ names for the willy-willies. As an illustration forhis weather journal called “WRAGGE,” he had a weathermap for February 2, 1898, with a willy-willy named “Eline.”He predicted nasty weather from a disturbance named“Hackenbush.”

E. B. Buxton, a meteorologist for Pan American Airways,went to the South Pacific in the late thirties and, after hearingabout Wragge and his names for willy-willies, adoptedthe idea for his charts. He recalled particularly using thename “Chloe” for hurricanes.

With few exceptions, the hurricanes of the twentiethcentury went unnamed in the United States until 1951, althoughsome were referred to in terms of place and date;for instance, the “New England Hurricane of 1938.” Unofficially,a few had names of people. In 1949, while PresidentTruman was in Miami addressing the Veterans ofForeign Wars, the first hurricane of the season was called“Harry,” and a little later a bigger one which the newsmensaid had greater authority struck southern Florida and itwas called “Hurricane Bess.”

In sending out advices and warnings of West Indian246storms, it was not considered necessary to have names, as itwas seldom that more than one was in existence at the sametime. In 1944, when aircraft reconnaissance began, it becamecustomary to get reports by radio-telephone and voicewas used increasingly in other ways by the hurricane hunters.But this gave no particular trouble until September,1950, when there were three hurricanes in progress at thesame time.

Two were in the Atlantic, one north of Bermuda and theother north of Puerto Rico. The third appeared in the easternGulf of Mexico. When aircraft were dispatched intothese storms and began reporting, there was increasingconfusion. Other communications and public advices becamemixed and there was much uncertainty as to which stormwas meant. Use of letters of the alphabet to identify themwas no help, for letters B, C, D, E, and G sound much alikeby radio-telephone; also A, J, and H. Numbers were nobetter because weather reports are sent by numbers andthe advisories issued on each storm are numbered, so thatthe number 3 could be the number of the storm, the numberof the advice, an element of the weather, the hour, etc.

The agencies involved in weather and communications inconnection with hurricanes met early in 1951 and decidedto identify storms by the phonetic alphabet, which gaveAble for A, Baker for B, Charlie for C, etc., in accordancewith the following table:

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In the 1951 season, this worked very well in the communicationsand the public began to speak of hurricanes bythese names. At the start of the 1952 season, the agenciesbegan to use the same list of names, starting with Able forthe first storm, but soon ran into difficulty. A new internationalalphabet had been introduced as follows:

Some of the agencies had begun using the new alphabetin their communications, while others stuck to the old one.So the third storm of the season was “Charlie” part of thetime and the rest of the time some wanted to call it “Coca.”At the end of the season there was no agreement as to whichphonetic alphabet should be used and there was criticismfor having continued an alphabet which was obsolete internationally.

After a long discussion, military members of the conferencesuggested adoption of girls’ names, which had beenused successfully for typhoons in the Pacific for several years.Just how this practice originated is not known, but it wasthought by some persons to have come from the book Storm,by George R. Stewart, which was published in 1941. In thisbook a fictitious Pacific storm is traced to the United States248and its effects on the people are narrated in the style of anovel. A young weatherman at San Francisco, according tothe story, called the storm Maria. Also there was Wragge’suse of girls’ names for willy-willies in Australia and PanAmerican Airway’s practice in connection with hurricanesas early as 1938. At any rate, with these Pacific precedents,the weathermen and hurricane hunters adopted the followinglist for 1953 for hurricanes in the Atlantic, Caribbeanand Gulf of Mexico:

This list worked perfectly in 1953; the public was pleased;the communicators were happy about it; the newspapersthought it was colorful; and use of the same names beganto spread in Canada and some of the countries to the southward.The same list was adopted with enthusiasm for the1954 season.

In 1954, Alice and Barbara were minor hurricanes in theGulf of Mexico, although Alice broke up in tremendous rainsin the upper watershed of the Rio Grande, after movinginland over Mexico. There were floods which broke recordsfor all time as the water moved down the river. The thirdstorm, Carol, started a controversy in the press and manyletters were written to the editors and to the WeatherBureau, some favoring the scheme or trying to get a littlefun out of it, but most of them finding objections of onekind or another. It was almost impossible to change in the249middle of the season, even if the hurricane hunters hadwanted to, so it was continued during 1954 and each newhurricane aroused further comment. Later Hazel came alongabout the middle of October, a very severe hurricane fromthe Caribbean Sea. It turned northward between Cuba andHaiti and caused terrible damage and much loss of life.Later it struck the coast of the Carolinas and crossed theeastern states northward to New York. Loss of life in theeastern states was variously estimated from fifty to eighty,and the damage to property, especially from falling trees,was enormous. There was another flood of complaints, thistime about the name Hazel.

Before the argument was ended it threatened to be almostas stormy as some of the smaller hurricanes so named.Early in 1955 the Weather Bureau had a meeting with theAir Force, Navy and others interested in deciding the question.By that time the opinions received by mail were overwhelminglyin favor of continuing girls’ names. In themeantime, there had been a surprise. A storm having someof the characteristics of a hurricane was sighted in theCaribbean Sea in January and, in the absence of a decisionon names to be used in 1955, it was called Alice from the1954 list. Later, the names for others in 1955 were decidedas follows:

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17. THE GEARS AND GUTS OF THE GIANT

“he that wrestles with us strengthens our nervesand sharpens our skill”—Burke

All through this book we have talked about hurricanehunters. By now it is clear that the crew on the plane thatgoes into the storm at the risk of destruction of the craft anddeath to the men is not really “hunting” a hurricane. It isthe exception rather than the rule when they discover atropical storm. The first hint comes from some distant islandor a ship in the gusty wind circle where the sea and the skyreveal ominous signs of trouble. Somewhere in a busyweather office a large outline map is being covered withfigures and symbols. Long, curving lines across a panoramaof weather take shape as the radios vibrate and the teletypewritersrattle with the international language of weathermen—themost co-operative people in the world’s family of nations.

Hurricane hunting is done on these maps. Day after day,without any fanfare, the weathermen search the reports251spread across this almost boundless region where hundredsof tropical storms could be in progress if nature chose tooperate in such an eerie fashion. Even the experienced observerson islands and the alert officers on shipboard mightnot see the real implications in the weather messages theyprepare. In the enormous reaches of the belt of trade winds,where the tremendous energy of the sun’s heat and the irresistibleforce of earth rotation dictate that the winds shallblow as steady breezes from the northeast, somebody mightput in his report, for example, that there was a light windcoming from the southwest. That fact alone would beenough. In season, the weathermen would know, almostwith certainty, that there was a tropical storm in the area.

There are many things to watch for, in the array of elementsat the surface, in the upper air, the clouds, sea swells,change of the barometer, faint earth tremors. A hint fromthis scattering of messages in the vast hurricane region startsthe action. And the planes go out to investigate.

This is an extraordinary procedure. Looking at it as anoutgrowth of the insistent demands of citizens along thecoasts in the hurricane region for warnings of these storms,as the population increased and property losses mounted, itseems that the flight of planes into these monstrous winds isjustified only until a safer method can be found. All otheraircraft are flown out of the threatened areas, obviously becausethe winds are destructive to planes on the ground.The lives of men and the safety of the plane in the air shouldnot run a risk of being sacrificed if it can be avoided. Ofcourse, it is argued by some men that there is a possibilitythat a method may be discovered to control hurricanes bythe use of chemicals or some other plan requiring planes tofly into the centers. And it is true, also, that for the timebeing at least there is certain information that can be obtainedin no other way.

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At the end of World War II, there was a grave requirementfor more information about hurricanes. Little wasknown except in theory about their causes, maintenance,or the forces which determine their rate and direction oftravel. Since that time, literally thousands of flights havebeen made into hurricanes and typhoons. Scientists havestudied the detailed records of these many penetrations.

We have learned a great deal in these years but by nomeans enough. Herbert Riehl, a professor of meteorologyat Chicago University, has examined as large quantities ofthe data as any man. Recently he said, “Our knowledge regardingthe wind distribution within tropical storms andthe dynamical laws that guide the air from the outskirts tothe center of the cyclone is so deficient as to be deplorable.”

From the scientific point of view, remarks of this kind arefully justified, but progress in the issuance of warnings isquite another matter. Hurricane prediction for the presentand the near future is an art and not a science. Very greatprogress has been made in recent years in sending out timelywarnings. There are figures to show the facts. At the beginningof this century, a hurricane causing ten million dollarsin property damage was likely to take several hundred lives.Twenty-five years later, the average was about 160 lives.Ten years later (1936 to 1940 average) the figure had beenreduced to about twenty-five and was steadily going down.After men began flying into hurricanes, the figure was reducedto four (1946 to 1950). This is astonishing, not only inshowing how the warnings were improving after hunting byair got started, but also the big gains shortly before thattime, especially after the hurricane teletypewriter circuitwas installed around the coast in 1935. Experience in prediction,on-the-spot operation, and fast communications arevital.

In fact, the record was so good at the beginning of World253War II that most forecasters despaired of their ability tokeep it up. It had consistently been below ten lives for tenmillion dollars’ damage and one serious mistake could haveraised this rate considerably for several years. For thisreason, as well as many others, the forecasters were extremelygrateful for the information from aircraft.

The main hope for greater savings in the future is thatthe solution of some of the mysteries of the hurricane willenable the forecasters to send out accurate warnings muchfarther in advance. In such an event, it will be possible toprotect certain kinds of property and crops which are beingdestroyed at present. Heavy equipment can be moved andcertain crops can be harvested in season, if plenty of time isavailable. These precautions are time-consuming and costly,and the advance warnings must be accurate in detail. Andit will help to make sure that no hurricane different from itspredecessors will come suddenly and catch us off guard andcause excessive loss of life. Now and then we have one whichis called a “freak.”

One thing we have become increasingly sure of and itwill stand repetition. No two hurricanes or typhoons arealike. Scientists may find some weather element that seemsto be necessary to keep the monster going, and then arefrustrated to find that not all tropical storms have it. If somecan do without it, maybe it is not necessary, after all. Andyet all of them fit a certain direful pattern; there is nothingelse that resembles these big storms of the tropics. Like theexplosion of an atom bomb, with its enormous cloud recognizedby everyone who sees a picture of it, the hurricane haswell-known features—unlike anything else—but of suchenormous extent that no one can get a bird’s-eye view of thewhole. Putting together what we know by radar, upper airsoundings, aircraft penetrations and millions of weather observationsin the low levels, we can draw a sketchy word254picture. Looking down from space, we could see it as agiant octopus with a clear eye in the center of its body,arms spiraling around and into this body of violent windsaround the eye—all of the monster outlined by the cloudswhich thrive as it feeds on heat and moisture. We feel sureof that much.

The birth of the THING has not been explained. Thereare plenty of times when all the ingredients are there. Nothinghappens. Observation and theory flourish and swell intoconfusion. No scientist can say, “Everything is just right;tomorrow there will be a hurricane.”

Why it moves as it does is another grim puzzle. Ordinarily,the great storm marches along with the air stream in whichit is embedded, changing its path with the contours of thevast pressure areas which outline the circulation of the atmosphere,but too often it suddenly changes its mind, orwhatever controls it, or shifts gears, and comes to a halt, ordescribes a loop or a hairpin turn. Nobody can see thesequeer movements ahead of time. Going out there in anairplane to look the situation over does not help in thisrespect. It is a vital aid in keeping track of the THING andprotecting life and property, but it ends there.

Where does all the air go? When the big storm beginsout there over the ocean, air starts spiraling inward and thepressure falls, showing that the total amount of air abovethe sea to the top of the atmosphere is lessening, even as itpours inward at the bottom. For a hundred years scientistsargued that it must flow outward at the top, that at someupper level the inflow of air ceases and above that theremust be a powerful reversal of the circulation. Here againwe have frustration. Going up with one of the investigators,we get the facts. Strangely enough, this is one of the menwho want to get into hurricanes, who come down to thecoast to look, and who finally “thumb a ride” with the255airmen into the big winds. A brief of his story will illustrate.

This story begins with the big Gulf hurricane of 1919. Itcame from the Atlantic east of the Windward Islands, movedslowly to the northward of Puerto Rico and Haiti and thenceto the central Bahamas, a fairly large storm threatening theAtlantic seaboard. Then it took an unusual path, generallywestward, with increasing fury. It was a powerful storm asits central winds ravaged the Florida Keys and took a westwardcourse across the Gulf. It happened shortly after WorldWar I and there was little shipping in the Gulf. The slow-movinghurricane, now a full-fledged tropical giant, dawdledin the Gulf and was lost; that is, lost as much as a monsterof its dimensions can be, but its winds were felt all aroundthe Gulf Coast and its waves pounded the beaches as itspent four days out there without disclosing the locationor motion of its calm center.

Warnings flew all around the coast and the week draggedto an end with the people extremely tired of worrying aboutit and the weathermen worn out with continuous duty.Saturday night came and the center seemed to be no nearerone part of the coast than another. Late at night, an annoyingthing happened. It was customary in those days forthe forecaster, in sending a series of messages from Washington,to stop them at midnight and begin again early thenext morning. It was the rule that no reports came in betweenmidnight and dawn. The clerk sending the last messageadded “Good Night,” to let the coastal offices knowthat there would be no more until morning.

In this case, the forecaster ended his advisory with anotice putting all Gulf offices on the alert and the clerkadded “Good Night.” And so the offices received a messageending with these words: “All observers will remain on thealert during the night. In case the barometer begins to falland the wind rises, Good Night.” This created a furor in256coastal cities on the West Gulf and it was several weeks beforethe criticism subsided. By Sunday morning, however,the gusty wind had not risen much and there was no greatfall in the barometer, so the weathermen had no answer atdaybreak. Soon afterward, however, the weather deterioratedrapidly at Corpus Christi, and hurricane warningswent up as big Gulf waves pounded over the outlying islandsinto Corpus Christi Bay and the wind began screamingin the palms.

Around noon the worst of it struck the city. The tidemounted higher than in any previous storm of record, exceptin the terrible Galveston hurricane of 1900. Much ofCorpus Christi was on a high bluff above the main businesssection, but the latter and the shore section to the northwere low. It was after church and time to sit down to Sundaydinner when the final rise of the water began to overwhelmeverything. The police, sent out by the WeatherBureau, were knocking on people’s doors and telling themto get out and run for high ground. But these low sectionshad survived a big, fast-moving hurricane three years before,without nearly so high a tide, and most people thanked thepolice but determined to stay and eat. This decision wasfatal in the North Beach section. The road was cut off andnearly two hundred were drowned.

Down on Chaparral Street lived a man named ClydeSimpson, with his wife and seven-year-old son Robert. Theboy’s uncle and grandmother were there also. They wereabout to sit down to a big platter of chicken, and the boyhad his eye on a pile of freshly fried doughnuts. They hadbeen out standing with other nervous people to look at thegreat waves roaring across the beach, but after a little thestorm waters had forced them back and covered the streets.Now the water was rising fast. Several houses had come upoff their foundations. A large frame residence on the opposite257side of the street floated across, and, while they heldtheir breath, missed them by a few feet, struck the housenext door, and both collapsed. The elder Simpson said itwas time to get out, dinner or no dinner.

The family went through the back yard, the nearest routeto higher ground. The boy’s mother put the dinner in a largepaper sack and held it above her head as she struggled throughthe water. The father carried the seven-year-old on his backand brought up the rear, swimming a little as the watercontinued to rise. The grandmother, an invalid strapped ina wheel-chair, was pushed and floated ahead by the uncle.The boy worried as his mother got tired and let the papersack hang lower and lower. Finally it hit the water and thechicken and doughnuts sank or floated away. That scenewas etched in Robert’s memory, along with the battering ofthe winds and the tremendous rise of the waters over thestricken city. The family survived.

Looking out of the windows of the courthouse on the edgeof the bluff above the business section, the boy watchedothers struggling toward higher ground. Afterward thefamily returned to their house, smeared with oil and tar andby dirty water, floors covered with sand, mud, and debris.Robert saw death on every hand—dead dogs, birds, cats,rodents, and one neighbor who failed to get out.

In 1933, when one of the hurricanes of that year crossedthe Gulf and threatened the lower Texas Coast, much likethe big one in 1919, a young fellow drove all the way fromDallas to have a look at it. He was Robert Simpson. Henever got it out of his mind. Finally, he joined the WeatherBureau, worked at hurricane forecasting offices and in 1945“thumbed” his first ride into a hurricane. After that hisenthusiasm and persistence annoyed some of the olderweathermen and bothered members of the air crews whoflew the big storms both in the Atlantic and Pacific.

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Simpson made up his mind that he would use every opportunityto find out how the big storms were organizedand what they were geared to in their movements, regularand irregular—the gears and guts of the THING. WhenMilt Sosin lurched into the center of the big storm in 1947in a B-17 and looked up to see a B-29 high in the eye of thesame hurricane, Simpson was up there with the men fromBermuda, trying to find out what steered the monster. Andon this flight, with a B-29, they expected to come out on topat twenty-eight to thirty thousand feet, according to thetheorists and the textbooks, but they broke out just belowforty thousand, still one hundred miles from the center.From there the high cloud sheet should have sloped downwardto the center, if they were to believe the accepteddoctrine of circulation in the top of the hurricane. But theywere shocked and chagrined to find that the high cloudsheet—the cirrostratus—sloped sharply upward in front ofthem, rising far above the extreme upper operational ceilingof the B-29.

And so the superfortress turned toward the center androcketed into the high cloud deck with misgivings on thepart of Pilot Eastburn and Simpson. The latter reported:

“Through this fog in which we were traveling at 250 milesan hour there loomed from time to time ghost-like structuresrising like huge white marble monuments through the cirrostratusfog. Actually these were shafts of supercooled waterwhich rose vertically and passed out of sight overhead as weviewed them from close at hand. Each time we passedthrough one of these shafts the leading edge of the wing accumulatedan amazing extra coating of rime ice. This kind oficing would have been easy to shake off if the plane hadbeen fitted with standard de-icing equipment. But it was not.We were so close to the center of the storm by the time the259icing was discovered that the shafts were too numerous toavoid.

“Pilot Eastburn punched me and pointed to the indicatedairspeed gage. It stood at 166. ‘At this elevation this planestalls out at 163,’ Eastburn said, ‘and in this thin air there isno recovery from a stall.’ He continued, ‘We have got to getout of here fast!’ I nodded agreement, feeling a bit sheepishabout the whole thing. After all, hadn’t Vincent Schaefer,of General Electric, just a few months earlier demonstratedin the laboratory that water vapor could be cooled to a temperatureof -39° before freezing set in? But in the turbulentcirculation of a hurricane—this was fantastic! Unbelievable!But there certainly was no guesswork about that six or eightinches of rime ice on the leading edge of the wing!

“We got out of there all right, and fast, but we had to doit in a long straight glide; the plane was simply too loadedwith ice and too near stall-out to risk the slightest bankingaction.”

After all, the atmosphere is a mixture of gases and it obeysthe laws of gases. If the scientists assume that the big stormhas a certain structure and a certain circulation of air in itscolossal bulk, there are definite conclusions to be drawnconcerning the physics of this giant process in the tropicalatmosphere. But if it turns out that the assumptions aboutthe structure and circulation are wrong, the conclusions ofthe physicists may be exactly opposite to the truth. The resultsof years of study, calculation and discussion seem to be overthrownin one moment as a superfortress plunges into a vitalsection and the crew sees things that ought not to be there!

Most important in the 1947 storm was the fact that conditionsat a height just below forty thousand feet were such asto go with a circulation against the hands of a clock atmaybe 130 miles an hour. The plane going in that directionhad a tail wind of ninety miles an hour. And yet, the students260of hurricanes during the past century were sure thatat some height well below that level the winds blew outwardin a direction with the hands of a clock. In agreement withthis conclusion, most of the scientists had made up theirminds in recent years that the circulation in the lower partof these storms usually disappears at twenty to thirty thousandfeet. And so, if we are to account for the removal ofair in this great space extending down to the sea surface,it must have been done well above forty thousand feet inthis case. And up at this height the air is so thin that it isalmost inconceivable that it could blow hard enough toaccount for air removal in the average hurricane. On theother hand, this was a mature storm and it may be that atthis stage no air was actually being removed from the systemand that the gigantic circulation of the full-grown monsteris self-contained.

While it would be extremely interesting to understand themagic by which nature so slyly removes the air from thehurricane under our very noses, the practical question iswhether or not its escape at the top is geared in any wayto the forward motion of the main body of the storm. Theanswer to the first question may give the answer to thesecond, and possibly also to the third question: what causesa hurricane to increase in intensity—to deepen, as theweatherman says, having reference to the fall of pressure inthe center? He thinks of it as a hole in the atmosphere.

This 1947 hurricane illustrates the great difficulty of findinganswers to our questions. But in any case, this was justone storm and all of them are different in one way or another.

But to go back to the story of the guest rider from theWeather Bureau, Robert Simpson, the story is not completewithout a brief account of the flight into Typhoon Marge.It raised its ugly head in the Pacific in August, 1951, and on261the thirteenth had passed Guam, a storm not well developedbut of evil appearance, showing signs of growth. That eveningSimpson arrived from Honolulu, where he was incharge of the Weather Bureau office. He accepted an invitationfrom the Air Force to visit Marge and on August 14,six hours after he alighted from Honolulu, was airborne ina B-29 and on the way.

In a few hours Marge had grown into a colossus. It wasnearly one thousand miles in diameter, with winds exceedingone hundred miles an hour in an area more than twohundred fifty miles in diameter. When the hurricane huntersentered the center and measured the pressure, it proved tobe one of the deepest on record—26.45 inches at the lowestpoint. From plane level, the eye was perfectly clear above,forty miles in diameter and circular. The massive cloud wallsaround the eye rose on all sides to thirty-five thousand feet,like a giant coliseum. The west wall was almost vertical, withcorrugations that suggested the galleries of a gigantic operahouse.

In the center, below the plane, they saw a mound ofclouds rising to about eight thousand feet, an unusual feature,but one that has been observed in other tropical storms.The crew spent fourteen and a half hours in the centralregion of this huge typhoon, getting data at levels from fivehundred feet up to twenty thousand. Down in the lowerlevels, they found a horizontal vortex roughly five thousandfeet in diameter, extending from the cloud wall of the eyelike a tornado funnel, in which they encountered very severeturbulence. Another collection of data was added to thegrowing accumulation and with it the notes of unusualphenomena observed. Since that time Simpson has flownseveral hurricanes in the Atlantic.

Now it is abundantly clear that the hurricane hunters arelooking for many important facts aside from the location of262the tropical storm and a measure of its violence. There aremany questions unanswered. Here in the warm, moist windsthat blow endlessly across deep tropical waters there aremysteries that have challenged man for centuries. Turningto their advantage every discovery that science has pointedin their direction, the hurricane hunters have cheated thebig storms of the West Indies of a very large share of theirtoll of human life. In struggling to solve the remainder ofthe problem, they have two virtues that will ultimatelybring success—ingenuity and persistence. They push on tirelesslyin several hopeful directions.

The Navy has taken advantage of the strange fact thatwhen a tropical storm comes along it literally shakes theearth. There are little tremors like earthquakes but verymuch smaller. The Greek word for earthquake is seismosand by putting micro in front, meaning very small, we havethe word microseism. And so, the storm-caused little tremorsare called microseisms or slight earthquakes. The instrumentwhich registers these tremors is called a seismograph. Whenthe earth moves, even a very little, a body on the earthtends to hold its position and the earth moves under it. Ina small earthquake, a chair will move across the floor. Thiskind of motion can be registered by instruments.

In 1944 the Navy installed seismographs and began keepingrecords of the slight tremors caused by hurricanes andtyphoons. These studies have shown that a tropical storm ata distance produces a small tremor which becomes strongeras the storm center gets nearer. No one knows exactly howthe storm shakes the earth and causes the tremors. Thereare some strange things about this. It seems that thesemicroseisms are carried along in the earth until they cometo the border of a great geological block and then do notpass readily into the next block. So there are places in theCaribbean where the tremors weaken as they come to a263different earth block and this interferes with the indicationspicked up by the instruments. The fact is that microseismsgive signs of the existence of a tropical storm and sometimesserve to alert the storm hunters, but they are by nomeans good enough to replace the use of planes in trackingthem. But the studies of microseisms are being continued.

For many years static on the radio, better known as atmosphericsor just “sferics,” has been used in the endeavorto locate or keep track of storms. At first the Navy tried iton West Indian hurricanes. The instruments used will findthe direction from which the sferics come when they arereceived in a special tube. In more recent years, the AirForce has used this scheme. It works to advantage in findingthunderstorms, but tropical storms are so big and thesferics are not found in any regular pattern around the centralregion. After years of trial, it has been concluded thatthis scheme is not good enough to replace other methods.

Of all the methods of this kind, radar is by far the best.But as the radar stations on shore and the radar equipmenton aircraft have increased in numbers and have been improvedto reach greater distances, some new troubles havearisen. For many years the hurricane hunters took it forgranted that a hurricane has a clear-cut center which movessmoothly along a path that is a straight line or a broadcurve, but in a few cases is a loop or a sharp turn. In otherwords, the center does not change size and shape or wigglearound. In the past, when an observer on a ship or on aplane reported a center of an odd shape or had it off thesmooth path the hunters were plotting, they said the observerhad made an error.

Now as the hunters have begun watching hurricanecenters close by on the radar, they see them changing shapeand wiggling around. In fact, as stated in a few cases inearlier chapters, they have seen false eyes and have been264confused by them until the true eye came into view on theradar scope. If the true eye describes a wiggly path andchanges size, the hunters can draw the wrong conclusionsabout its direction of motion unless they wait a while to seeif it comes back to the old path. The hurricane is a little likean eddy or whirl in water running out of the bottom of abowl. It is a violent boiling eddy that twists and changesshape, and in a substance as thin as the atmosphere thesemotions are not steady to such a degree that the observercan reach a quick decision. At any rate, it is now apparentthat the observers on ships and aircraft did not make asmany errors as was thought several years ago.

There is another aspect that must be kept in mind. Radarshows areas where rain is falling around the center of ahurricane and so the center, having no rain, stands out asan open space on the radar scope. This is very good if thestorm has rain all around the center, but some of them havevery little rain on the southwest side, and in some casesthere is none to return an echo to the radar. In such a case,there is only one side to the storm echo and the location ofthe center is not revealed. Of course, these facts are knownto the experienced radar men, but they should be known toeverybody interested in hurricane reports; otherwise theyare likely to expect too much accuracy from observations ofthis kind.

For these and other reasons, the man on the aircraft hasa very great advantage in daylight, for he can see clouds ofall kinds, measure the winds and, by moving through thestorm area at the speed of the modern plane, he can see alarge part of it in a short time. To find a substitute for aircraftreconnaissance is going to be extremely difficult. Butat night the situation is quite different. The airman is unableto see much without radar, except on a moonlight night andthat is not very good.

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One suggestion that has been put forward by a numberof different people in recent years is that a balloon be flownin the calm center and followed by radar or radio, thus keepingtrack of the storm’s motion. It is possible, of course, tofix a small rubber balloon (perhaps eight to ten feet indiameter) so that it will remain at the same height for afairly long time. By one method the rubber balloon is partlyfilled with helium and covered loosely with nylon. Theballoon expands as it rises, becoming less dense as the atmospheregets thinner. It continues to rise until it fills thenylon cover and cannot expand further. After that, itsdensity becomes the same as the air at some level previouslychosen, and from there it drifts along without rising ordescending.

It is the idea that the obliging balloon would drift hereand there in the vagrant breezes of the eye, but when itcame to the edge of the powerful wind currents around theoutside of the eye it would be guided back in. No experimenthas been carried out to prove that this would happenbut such trials have been scheduled and will be made at thefirst opportunity. There is one difficulty. The question is howto get an inflated balloon into the center and release it underproper conditions. One of the men who has worked ona scheme of this kind is Captain Bielinski, the Air Forceofficer who broke his hundred-dollar watch in a typhoonand solemnly swore he would find an easier way to do it.He calls his device “Typhoon Homer.” He has worked on itfor four years, spending much of his own time and money.

There are reasons to believe that, after a few experiments,a height could be found where the balloon would stay inthe eye. So far as we know, birds trapped in the center areheld there. After battling hurricane winds, they are so exhaustedon getting into the center that they could not remain266there if the wind circulation tended to suck them outinto the surrounding gales.

Bielinski concluded that the balloon could not be thrownout from a plane in even a partially inflated condition. Theblast of air on leaving the aircraft would destroy it or putit out of commission. So he has an uninflated balloon andbottles of gas, a small radio transmitter, and a float, all attachedto a parachute.

The bottles and radio would be thrown out, the parachutewould open, and the gas would go through a tube from thebottles into the balloon. The float, with a long line to theballoon, would rest on the water and provide an anchor forthe apparatus. The radio would send signals every hour, theoperators on shore would figure its location by directionfinding, and there would need to be no further aircraftflights into that storm. The device, according to Bielinski,would continue to operate for seven days.

Robert Simpson and others have had similar ideas, somefavoring a device that could be followed by radar, butSimpson prefers the radio transmitter. To find out how theair circulation in the calm center would affect the balloon,he planned experimental flights in hurricanes to release achaff made of a substance that could be followed by radar.He tried it in 1953 and again in 1954, but something happenedin each case to prevent the experiment from beingcarried out. In one case, for example, nearly everything wasin readiness for an experimental flight to take off whenEdward Murrow of CBS arrived in Bermuda with his crewand apparatus to put Hurricane Edna on television, andSimpson was moved to the back of the plane. He and allothers connected with it, including Major Lloyd Starret,who had been brought in from Tinker Air Force Base towork with Simpson, were glad to make way for a publicservice program. But this shows one of the reasons why267developments of this kind, which depend on opportunitiesin only a few hurricanes a year, take a discouragingly longtime. There was no chance to test Bielinski’s device, or anyother, for that matter. There have been laboratory experimentsalso on a device to deflect the air streams around thebomb bay of the aircraft so that a partially inflated ballooncould be safely released in the eye of a storm.

These devices are mentioned here to show the trend ofthought. Something similar to this may eventually serve toreplace a large share of the hazardous aircraft flights, buteven if the center is satisfactorily located in such a manner,much useful information on the size of the storm, the forceof its winds, and other data will be determined in manycases only by aerial reconnaissance. With this in mind, boththe Air Force and Navy are substituting bigger and betteraircraft for this purpose.

The old B-29 Superfortress is being “put out to pasture,”as they say in the Air Force. The higher, faster, and fartherflying Boeing B-50’s are replacing them, not only in hurricanereconnaissance but in the daily flying of weather routesto help fill in the blank spaces on the world’s weather charts.The B-50’s will go ten thousand feet higher than the B-29’s.Another advantage that appeals to the hurricane hunterswho fly on these missions is the electric oven, standardequipment on the B-50, which will furnish hot meals atfavorable times on the route, instead of sandwiches andthermos coffee. The Navy, not to be outdone, is coming outwith the Super Constellation, which is being modified forhurricane reconnaissance to replace the P2V LockheedNeptune recently used.

As each new season comes, the hunters are wiser andbetter equipped. The battle with the hurricane is joined. Itis something to worry about, like war and the H-bomb. Atthe end of the 1954 season, the executives of the big insurance268companies were in conference with grave faces. Propertydamage from Carol, Edna and Hazel had mountedupward to around a billion dollars. Reports had beencirculated to the effect that the slow warming of the earthin the present century is bringing more hurricanes withgreater violence and paths shifting northward to devastateareas with greater populations. There was speculation aboutthe effects of A-bombs and H-bombs on hurricanes.

All this trouble comes from water vapor in the atmosphere.Without it, the earth would be a beautiful place but uselessto man. Even over the tropical oceans it rarely exceeds fiveper cent of the bulk of the air. In other regions, it is muchless. But it is this vapor, constantly moving from the oceansinto the air and spreading around the world, that builds thestormy lower layer of our atmosphere—the troposphere—whereclouds and storms, snow and ice and torrential rain,thunderstorms, hurricanes and tornadoes thrive in season.Such tremendous energy is needed to carry billions of tonsof moisture from the oceans to the thirsty land that all ofthese rain and storm processes are maintained on the borderlineof violence.

Here at the bottom of the atmosphere the vapor absorbsthe heat radiated from the sun. There is a swift drop intemperature as we go aloft. Moist air pushed upward becomescooled and ice crystals, water droplets, snowflakes,are squeezed out. Clouds form, beautiful in the sunset,gloomy on a winter day, threatening as the summer thunderstormshows on the horizon, fearsome as the winter blizzardtakes command of the plains and valleys. Here is watervapor coming to the end of a long journey from the surfacesof distant seas. From here it goes to the land and beginsanother long journey, in the rivers and back to the oceans.But on the way to us, violence may be one of the principal269ingredients. We can’t live without it and we have troubleliving with it.

When this lush flow of water vapor from the tropicalocean to the atmosphere becomes geared in some specialmanner to swiftly-moving air from other regions, the processseems to get out of nature’s hands. Upward motion beginson a grand scale. Converging streams of air are twisted bythe spinning of the earth on its axis. And just as men beginto see the picture, nature draws a veil by the condensationof water vapor. Under this darkening canopy, violence growswith startling swiftness. The water vapor that drew the curtainnow releases energy alongside of which the A-bombshrinks to insignificance.

Far below the sea surface, the solid earth trembles. Avalanchesof water are torn from the ocean and hurled downthe slopes of the gale. A colossal darkening storm begins tomove across the ocean. It sucks inward the hot, moist loweratmosphere and brings it along with it, using the vapor tofeed its monstrous, seething caldron. Down here at the surfaceof the earth, its winds are warm and humid. Its tentacles—octopus-likearms—reach out with gale-driven torrents ofrain and begin picking everything to pieces. After hoursthat seem like days, the central fury of the earth-blastingstorm begins its devastation of man’s possessions.

And as it has proved to be unquestionably true that notwo hurricanes are exactly alike, so it is evident now thatthe same hurricane is subject to massive changes from dayto day. It has a life history. Like the caterpillar that is transformedinto the cocoon and then into the butterfly, thetropical storm goes through definite stages. The problemsinvolved for the hurricane hunters in each of these distinctstages demand separate solutions. Like a living thing, themonster has infancy, youth, middle age and decline.

In infancy, its malevolent forces are directed vigorously270toward the mysterious removal of large quantities of airfrom above its gale-swept domain. The excessive heat andmoisture of its birthplace yield far more energy than isneeded to keep its mighty low-level winds in motion.

In youth, it is extremely violent and the removal of airbrings exceedingly low pressure into its center. Its outerparts become ominously visible through the condensation ofmoisture on a grand scale, cloaking its internal mechanism.Its destructive forces spread. In this stage, the removal ofair in upper regions continues in excess of the inflow at thebottom in proportion to the horizontal expansion of thesystem.

In middle age, its violent forces are directed towardmaintenance of the colossal wind system. The total energyit can derive from heat and moisture no longer produces anoutflow above in excess of the inflow of air at the bottom. Itexpands in the vertical and its visible parts push againstthe stratosphere. As it moves farther away from its birthplaceand the available energy begins to decline, it dies. Fora few days nature’s processes for the transport of moisturefrom the oceans to the thirsty continents have run amuck.Life and property suffered while torrential rains fell.

So it is clear that in life the monster thrives on heat andwater vapor. Down at sea level it is a warm phenomenon.Only the heated air of the tropical regions can hold enoughmoisture to feed the giant.

But up above, the full-grown hurricane is not a warmstorm. Hunters perspire at low levels but not in the top ofthe storm. There are icy corridors through currents of airrobbed of their heat by the monster below. Pillars of supercooledwater push upward into the thin atmosphere. Snowflies with the shuddering winds at the top of the troposphere.It is colder up here above the tropics than it is above thepoles. The fingers of the gale tremble with the cold and271seem to make gestures in defiance of the sun shining throughthe stratosphere. Water vapor in great quantities has beencarried high in the atmosphere and nature seems powerlessto bring equilibrium until land or cold water at the earth’ssurface below shuts off the abundant supply of energy. Andwhen it does, the monster dies as it was born, hidden behinda veil produced by lingering cloud masses derived from thevapor that gave it life.

In the last few years, men have had the courage to fly intothese monsters. Some day, when other methods are used,people will look back in amazement at these brave events.Here they can see how it happened, how it was done,and feel admiration for the men who did it—the hurricanehunters.

was born in Ohio, where he obtained both his degrees in science atDenison University. While a boy in his early teens, he became intenselyinterested in birds, stars and the weather. After finishing college, hejoined the Weather Bureau in Texas and a year later went through avicious hurricane at Galveston.

This experience led Dr. Tannehill to study hurricanes for the next fortyyears. Twenty years ago he became chief of the marine division of theU. S. Weather Bureau, then he was chief of all the Bureau’s forecastingand reporting and finally was assistant chief of the Bureau, in charge ofall its technical operations.

Dr. Tannehill is the author of several authoritative books on theweather, including a world-recognized classic, HURRICANES; THEIR NATUREAND HISTORY, now in its eighth edition. He has represented the UnitedStates at many world conferences on weather and served several yearsas president of the international commission on weather information.Citations, medals, awards and commendations have come to him for hiswork on weather, including the honorary degree of Doctor of Science,granted in recognition of his leadership in the study of hurricanes.

His hobbies continue the same as in his boyhood—watching thebirds, the stars and the weather.

THE HURRICANE HUNTERS

By
Ivan Ray Tannehill
Author of “Hurricanes: Their Nature and History,” Etc.

Illustrated with Photographs

This is the lively account of the hair-raisingexperiences of the men who have probed by seaand air into the inner mysteries of the world’s mostterrible storms. Here a world authority writes avivid story of the hurricane hunters and the warningsgoing out to terrified people in the path ofthese tropical giants of the storm world—warningswhich have brought comfort and safety in themidst of the terror, because the threat is no longerunknown and unchartered and defenses may bebuilt up against it, thanks to our Weather Bureau.

Ivan Tannehill tells how thousands of lives havebeen saved and why enormous property losses,running into hundreds of millions of dollars, continueas a direful challenge to the hunters. Hereis the first intimate revelation of what the humaneye and the most modern radars see in the violentregions of the tropical vortex. The descriptions ofthe activities of these valiant scouts of the stormsare taken from personal interviews with militaryflyers and weathermen who have risked their livesin the furious blasts in all parts of the hurricane.

The author has made a special study of hurricanesfor over forty years. He has served with theWeather Bureau as chief of the marine division,chief of all forecasting and reporting and assistantchief of the Bureau, in charge of its technicaloperations.

JACKET DRAWING BY JAMES MacDONALD

Books by Ivan Ray Tannehill

HURRICANES; THEIR NATURE AND HISTORY

PREPARATION AND USE OF WEATHER MAPS AT SEA

WEATHER AROUND THE WORLD

DROUGHT; ITS CAUSES AND EFFECTS

ALL ABOUT THE WEATHER

THE HURRICANE HUNTERS

SUMMITS OF ADVENTURE
The Story of Famous Mountains and Mountain Climbers

By JOHN SCOTT DOUGLAS
Author of “The Secret of the Undersea Bell,” “Fate of the Clipper Westwind,” Etc.
Illustrated with sixteen pages of stunning photographs

$3.00

Through the pages of this stirring book move ever upwardthe colorful figures who have conquered the world’s greatmountain peaks; and in it are graphically described themost celebrated ascents of nearly two centuries, from theAlps to the Andes and from the Himalayas to the Rockies.No other sport has attracted such notable figures, for thegreat mountain climbers include justices, members of Parliament,princes and many renowned scientists. Nor has anyother sport proved so useful. Mountain climbers have contributedto many sciences; also to aviation by their pioneerstudy of oxygen deficiency, and thrillingly to our literature.In addition, mountaineers were among the first to explorethe remote Alpine valleys, the Caucasus, East Africa, theAlaska wilderness, the Andes and the Himalayas.

John Scott Douglas makes us share in the very feelingsof the intrepid men who have had that unquenchable urgeto conquer the seemingly unconquerable, no matter whatthe hazards or physical hardships. His story ranges from theearly days of the first ascent to the summit of Mont Blanc,when the climbing equipment consisted of alpenstocks andmeat cleavers and an ordinary bed blanket was the onlyprotection against the icy blasts during the nights spentaloft on the mountainside, to the up-to-the-minute scientificequipment, including oxygen feeders and insulated suits,used in the recent ascent of Mount Everest.

The author is an enthusiastic mountaineer himself. Hehas enjoyed “scrambles” in the Alps, the Andes, the CentralAmerican Cordilleras, Alaska, the Catskills and the ColoradoRockies, the Olympics, Cascades and High Sierras. He writeson a favorite subject with zest and informative accuracy.His book provides “high” adventure in more than one way!

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

Transcriber’s Notes

• Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook is public-domain in the country of publication.
• Silently corrected a few palpable typos.
• In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by _underscores_.