hurricanes wanted to know what it was like in the upper levels and in
the center. Air Force pilots who expected to go on bombing missions to
Germany thought it might be more dangerous flying into the vortex of a
hurricane than over an enemy stronghold with the air full of flak and
Nazi fighters rising on all sides. Nobody looked upon the assignment
with any enthusiasm. One discouraging fact was that the reports of
shipmasters who had been in the eyes of hurricanes didn't agree very
well. Few of them had the ability to describe what they saw. And those
who had the ability told a story that was not reassuring. For example,
one of the first was the master of the ship _Idaho_, caught in the China
Sea in September, 1869, as a typhoon struck. With little of the precious
sea room needed to maneuver, the ship soon was obliged to lie to and
take it. Afterward, when by some miracle the ship had made its way to
shore, the master calmly described his experiences while they were
fresh:
"With one wild, unearthly, soul-chilling shriek the wind suddenly
dropped to a calm, and those who had been in these seas before knew that
we were in the terrible _vortex_ of the typhoon, the dreaded center of
the whirlwind. Till then the sea had been beaten down by the wind, and
only boarded the vessel when she became completely unmanageable; but now
the waters, relieved from all restraint, rose in their own might.
Ghastly gleams of lightning revealed them piled up on every side in
rough, pyramidal masses, mountain high--the revolving circle of wind,
which everywhere inclosed them, causing them to boil and tumble as
though they were being stirred in some mighty cauldron. The ship, no
longer blown over on her side, rolled and pitched, and was tossed about
like a cork. The sea rose, toppled over, and fell with crushing force
upon her decks. Once she shipped immense bodies of water over both bows,
both quarters, and the starboard gangway at the same moment. Her seams
opened fore and aft. Both above and below, men were pitched about the
decks and many of them injured. At twenty minutes before eight o'clock
the vessel entered the vortex; at twenty minutes past nine o'clock it
had passed and the hurricane returned blowing with renewed violence from
the north, veering to the west. The ship was now only an unmanageable
wreck."
For many years, the classic case was the obliging typhoon that moved
across the Philippines with its center passing directly over the
fully-equipped weather observatory in Manila. It happened on October 20,
1882. The wind which came ahead of the center was of destructive
violence, reaching above 120 miles an hour in a final mad rush from the
west-northwest before the calm set in. It was not an absolute calm.
There were alternate gusts and lulls. The way the winds acted led the
observer to think that the center was about sixteen miles in diameter.
He said:
"The most striking thing about it was the sudden change in temperature
and humidity. The temperature jumped from 75° to 88°. The air was
saturated at 75° but the humidity dropped from 100% to 53% in the center
and then rose to 100% again as the center passed. When the wind suddenly
ceased at the beginning of the calm and the sun came out, many people
opened their windows but they slammed them shut right away, because the
hot, dry air seemed to burn the skin."
For more than fifty years after this, there were arguments about the
reasons for these changes in temperature and humidity. Some scientists
claimed that they were caused merely by the heating of the sun in a
clear sky and that the air which preceded and followed the center was
cooled and saturated by the rain. Some of the Jesuit scientists at
Manila did not agree. One weatherman showed, for example, that if they
took air at 75° and 100% humidity and heated it to 88°, the humidity
would fall only to about 61% and that the air at Manila at that time of
year had never had such a low humidity (53%), even when the sun was
shining.
The general conclusion was that the air descends in the eye of the
tropical storm. At least, they were convinced that it descended in the
Manila typhoon. When air descends, it is compressed, coming into lower
levels where the pressure is higher. This compression causes its
temperature to rise and the air then has a bigger capacity for moisture.
In other words, the air becomes warmer and drier. There never has been
full agreement on this question. Certainly, in some cases, the air is
not warmer and drier in the center.
In later years, typhoon centers passed over other observatories and had
various effects. However, one struck Formosa on September 16, 1912, and
the calm center passed over the observatory long after the sun had gone
down. In this case, the temperature jumped from 75° to 94° and this
could not be explained by the direct heat of the sun. But there were
different results in other cases and in one instance the temperature
fell a little.
All of these observations were confined to ground level and what the
observer could see from there or from shipboard, where he was being
bounced around by violent seas and sometimes was thoroughly drenched by
the mountainous waves breaking over the decks. One example was the
_Idaho_ in the typhoon in 1869.
A half-century later, two British destroyers were trapped in the same
region by an unheralded typhoon. Setting out for Shanghai in the early
morning, they rounded the Shantung Promontory and headed across the
Yellow Sea at fifteen knots, with sunlight gleaming on the water ahead.
The weather looked favorable, barometer high, wind light, but it failed
to stay that way very long. By ten o'clock there was a strong wind on
the port beam, blowing gustily from the east, and an ominous rising sea.
Reducing speed to eleven knots, the commander of the destroyer in the
lead--called the _Exe_--found by dead reckoning that he was only about
eight miles from land and, although he was running almost parallel to
the coast, their situation was beginning to look dangerous. He had to
make a decision as to his future course.
Among other disturbing factors was the design of the ships. These
destroyers were of a new type, with a large forecastle which made it
likely that they would drag their anchors if they tried to lie-to in a
sheltered place on that exposed coast. The two ships held their course.
By noon the visibility had dropped to less than a mile. The commander
feared that he would be unable to identify any land he might see through
the increasing gloom and concluded that his chances of finding a safe
shelter among the rock-bound islands along the coast was fast becoming
nil. So he signaled to the other destroyer to head fast for the open
sea. In the next hour, the wind and sea mounted rapidly and he was
certain that they were being overtaken by the dangerous sector 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 and the proper course under
the circumstances. According to the latest books which the lieutenant
had studied, they should have steamed toward the northwest but this
would have thrown them onto a lee shore. The commander decided that
there was no choice except to hold their course and run the chance of
going into the dreaded center of the typhoon. So they got busy, doubly
securing all movable gear and seeing that all was snug for a frightening
trip into the unknown. The commander was annoyed, not so much by the
battering the 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 and towering seas
for hours. The other destroyer had been lost from view but now appeared
close on their beam. She assumed strange attitudes in the growing
darkness. "At times," the commander said, "she would be poised on the
crest of a great wave, her fore part high above the sea and her keel
visible up to the conning tower; the after part, also high in the
roaring wind, leaving her propellers racing far out of the water. Then
she would take a dive and an intervening wave would blot out this 'merry
picture,' and then, to our relief as the wave passed, a mast would
appear waving on the other side and then we would catch sight of her
funnels and finally her hull, still above water." As darkness closed in,
the crew of the _Exe_ were glad they could no longer see the other
destroyer for it made them vividly conscious that their own little ship
was going through equally dangerous contortions.
During this time the destroyer _Exe_ had suffered much damage. The upper
deck had been swept clear. Much water was getting below and the pumps
were choked. The commander was weary from holding on to the bridge and
trying to keep his balance. The crew was frightened more than ever by
the increasing power of the storm and the inexorable approach of the
unknown horrors in the center.
The awful night passed in this terrifying manner, with the barometer
steadily going lower, and the quartermaster straining to keep the craft
on course. With powerful winds full in his face and drenched by spray,
he managed to hold the ship most of the time and made the best use of
her high bows. When he failed and allowed the ship to get a few points
off course, the steep waves threw her on her beam ends and came crashing
along the upper decks, making it a tough 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
the blackness of the storm he had no way of judging the direction except
by the crash of the wind and water in his face.
In a storm like this, the crew think that they are probably on their
last voyage. They can feel tremendous masses of water strike with
immense force and, after the shock, the vessel shivering as though the
hull had given way, leaving them on the verge of diving toward the
bottom of the sea. Sometimes the _Exe_ was mostly out of water--they
could sense it in the darkness--and then she took what they called a
"belly-flopper" and every man felt sick, fearing the end had come and,
after a moment, fearing just the opposite--that it would not be the end,
after all, and they would have to take more of the same.
Now the lieutenant crawled out from below and, by a series of lurches
between gusts, pulled himself to the side of his commander. "Things look
better," he shouted. "The barometer is up a little." But soon after that
he found he had made an error. He had read it an inch too high.
Actually, it had dropped almost an inch in three hours, showing that the
center must now be drawing near. Shortly the rain ceased and the wind
dropped. At 7:00 A.M. they were passing into the vortex.
The ocean now presented a fantastic spectacle. They could see for
several miles--a cauldron of steep towering cones of water with spray at
the crests--a brightening sky over a chaotic sea. Some of these columns
of water would clash together on different courses and produce a weird
effect. The wind became light and a few tired birds sought haven on
deck. This scene lasted only ten to twenty minutes and then the dreaded
squalls ahead of the opposite semicircle of the typhoon began to hit the
vessel. By 7:20 A.M. the full force of the most vicious gales was
bringing new miseries to the exhausted crew.
After three hours, the typhoon began to abate and the commander was
feeling a little easier about his damaged ship until one of the officers
reported that they had sprung a leak. The compartment containing the
fore magazines was flooded and soon filled up. "So the destroyer went
her way," the commander reported, "with her nose down and her tail in
the air." She made it to the mouth of the Yang-tse at 11:00 A.M. Up the
river a distance they found their companion destroyer. Its commander had
been much impressed by the blue sky and calm in the vortex, also by the
large number of birds, mostly kingfishers, that came on board.
Examination of the _Exe_ showed that a part of the bottom had been
battered in, shearing the rivets and opening the seams. After thinking
about his good fortune in coming through the typhoon, the commander
wrote in his report: "When I recall (which I can without any trouble)
those awful belly-floppers the craft took, and realized by inspection in
dock what amount of holding power a countersunk rivet can possibly have
in a three-sixteenth of an inch plate, I wonder that I am now in this
world." Actually, the commander of the _Exe_ had escaped the worst of
it. If he had missed the vortex and had passed through the right edge,
where the forward drive of the typhoon was added to the force of the
violent inner whirl, he might not have lived to tell the story. Many
others have failed under similar circumstances.
Shanghai suffered severely from this typhoon. A flood in the river and
on a low-lying island drowned five thousand Chinese.
All these accounts agreed on one thing--the ring of gales around the
center. Some were more violent than others but the ring was always
there. On the eye of the hurricane, however, there was less agreement. A
strange case was the experience on the American steamship _Wind Rush_,
in October, 1930, off the west coast of Mexico. She was caught in a
violent hurricane and the master suddenly saw that the ship had passed
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 no wind and smooth sea, and the
sun was shining."
There have been similar instances of vessels in the vortex of hurricanes
without much disturbance of the sea, but these are exceptions. Most of
them have reported confused cross seas, described as "pyramidal" or
"tumultuous." In November, 1932, the master of the British steamship
_Phemius_, on a voyage from Savannah to the Panama Canal, was so
unfortunate as to become entangled in the outer circulation of a
late-season hurricane moving westward in the Caribbean Sea. It turned
sharply northward and the _Phemius_ was trapped by the ring of fierce
gales in the central region. She rolled through an arc of 70° while the
gusts came with such force that the funnel was blown away. The master
put the wind at two hundred miles an hour. Hatches were blown overboard
like matchwood, derricks and lifeboats were wrecked, and the upper and
lower bridges were blown in. The ship was rendered helpless and was
carried with the hurricane in an unmanageable condition.
Twice the _Phemius_ drifted into the vortex, with high, confused seas
and light winds. The second time the vessel was besieged by hundreds of
birds. They took refuge in every part of the ship but lived only a few
hours. Driving toward the coast of Cuba, the hurricane ravaged the town
of Santa Cruz del Sur, hurling a tremendous storm wave across all the
low ground, engulfing the town, and drowning twenty-five hundred persons
out of a population of four thousand. The _Phemius_ was left behind in a
helpless condition and was taken in tow by a salvage steamer.
The width of the eye of a hurricane commonly varies from a few miles to
twenty or twenty-five. The smallest known was entered by a fishing boat,
the _Sea Gull_, in the Gulf of Mexico, on July 27, 1936. The master,
Leon Davis, was fishing a few miles east of Aransas Pass, Texas, when he
became involved in a small hurricane. "Suddenly," Captain Davis said,
"the wind died down, the sun shone brightly and the rain ceased. For a
space of about a mile and a half, a clear circular area prevailed; the
dense curtain of rain was seen all around the edge of the circle; and
the roar of the wind was heard in the distance." On the other hand, one
of the largest eyes yet known attended a big hurricane in October, 1944.
It blasted its way across Cuba and entered Florida on the west coast,
near Tampa. As it neared Jacksonville, the calm center was stretched out
to the remarkable distance of about seventy miles. This was a kind of
freak; some of the storm hunters thought that it had been distorted and
finally drawn into an elongated area by its passage over the western end
of Cuba.
All of the available records of this kind were consulted in due time by
the men who were assigned to the perilous duty of flying military planes
into the vortices of hurricanes in the West Indies and into typhoon
centers in the Pacific. But one of the best of these reports--of weather
and sea conditions observed on many ships caught at the same time in the
central region of a big typhoon--was not available until long after it
happened. The Japanese kept it secret for seventeen years.
The reason for keeping the data secret was the fact that while on grand
maneuvers, the RED Imperial Japanese Fleet was outmaneuvered by a pair
of typhoons and was caught in the center of one of them and severely
damaged. It happened in 1935 and was not reported for publication in
America until 1952.
Just how this happened is not altogether clear. It was in the middle of
September, 1935, when the first typhoon appeared, northwest of the
island of Saipan. It increased in fury as it moved slowly toward Japan.
On the twenty-fifth it 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 toward Japan. It turned more to the
northward than the first typhoon and missed Japan altogether. As it
approached Honshu, late on the twenty-fifth, the RED Imperial Fleet was
passing through the Strait of Tsugaru into the Pacific--squarely in
front of the typhoon center.
The logical explanation for this apparent blunder is that the commanders
wanted more sea room than was at hand in the northeast Sea of Japan to
maneuver in the first typhoon and hoped to get well out in the open
Pacific before they could be cornered by the second one. But it turned
northeastward and went faster and farther out in the Pacific than they
had expected. In fact, its forward motion was more than forty miles an
hour in these last hours before its furious winds surrounded the fleet.
It was a bad calculation for the naval commanders and perhaps 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 Meteorological Observatory in Tokyo. He was in part responsible
for the predictions. In 1952 he made the report which was published by
the U. S. Weather Bureau early in 1953. Taking the view of the
weatherman, Arakawa said that although the damage to the fleet was
unfortunate, there was _fortunately_ a magnificent collection of reports
from the central region of the typhoon for scientific study.
The fleet was caught in the central part of the big storm on the
twenty-sixth of September. Among the ships involved, many of them
damaged, were destroyers, cruisers, aircraft carriers, a seaplane
carrier, mine-layers, transport ships, submarines, torpedo boats, and a
submarine depot ship. The fleet suffered damage mostly from the
tremendous waves in the right rear quadrant of the typhoon. Here the
rapid forward motion of the storm was added to the wind circulation and
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 excessive storm waves, and many officers and
sailors were lost."
In the calm center, the clouds broke and faint sunlight came through.
The diameter of the eye was nine or ten miles. To the right of the eye,
some of the waves measured more than sixty feet in height. The maximum
roll of the ships in this area--the total angle from port to
starboard--reached 75° on some of the ships. The wind was steadily above
eighty miles an hour; the gusts were not measured but probably went as
high as 125 miles an hour.
Many of the ships took frequent observations while in the typhoon and
the data would have been extremely valuable if released to the storm
hunters at that time, but when the report was published in 1953 a great
deal of new data had been obtained by airplane, both at the
surface--where Arakawa's observations were confined--and at higher
levels. It was a little more than nine years after this Japanese
incident when the U. S. Third Fleet was caught in a typhoon east of the
Philippines and suffered at least as much damage as the Japanese in
1935.
One fact is clear. For many years the storm hunters had been gathering
information about hurricane and typhoon centers from observations on
land and sea but they knew very little of what went on there in the
upper air. World War II brought a new era.
_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 finding and predicting
hurricanes became steadily more difficult. Ships of countries at war
ceased to report weather by radio and fewer vessels of neutral nations
dared to risk submarine attack. After Pearl Harbor, the American
merchant marine also stopped their weather messages and the oceans were
blanked out on the weather maps. Already the British had been confronted
by the lack of weather reports from the Atlantic and the seas around the
British Isles, and this was extremely serious in their fight against
Nazi air power.
Notwithstanding the alarming scarcity of planes for military purposes,
the British were forced to send aircraft on routine weather missions.
They usually flew a track in the shape of a triangle--for example, one
leg of the triangle northwestward until well out at sea, a second leg
southward across the ocean about an equal distance, and the last leg
back to home base. Other triangles were flown over Europe and back and
over the North Sea. As time went on, the pilots of these observation
planes gained much experience in flying the weather, including some
fairly bad storms, but no one had occasion to fly into a hurricane.
There was a good deal of talk about the situation in the United States
in 1942, however, because of the danger that the West Indian region
might become a theater of war, if the Nazi armies gained control of West
Africa and attacked the United States by air, across Brazil and the
Caribbean.
With this threat from the southeast, the United States took action,
which was a repetition of the events during the Spanish War in 1898.
Military weather stations were set up in the West Indies and aircraft
were prepared to fly weather missions in the area. At the same time, the
United States was getting ready to ferry planes across the South
Atlantic via the Caribbean, the South American Coast and Ascension
Island. It was very definitely evident early in 1942 that hurricanes
might play a critical role if the West Indies became a theater of war.
By 1943, however, there were two surprising turns of affairs. The Allies
invaded Africa late in 1942 and the first flight into a hurricane
center, unscheduled and unauthorized, came in 1943.
The first to fly into the vortex of a hurricane was Joseph B. Duckworth,
a veteran pilot of the scheduled airlines, who was at the time a colonel
in the Army Air Corps Reserve, in command of the Instrument Flying
Instructors School at Bryan, Texas. It was one of those rare
combinations of circumstances by which the man with the necessary skill,
experience, daring, and inclination happened to be at the right place at
the right time. With a full appreciation of the danger, he flew a single
engine airplane deliberately into the hurricane and proceeded on a
direct heading into the calm center, looked around, and flew back to
Bryan. Spotting his weather officer, he bundled him into the back seat
and duplicated the feat immediately!
Joe Duckworth was born in Savannah, Georgia, on September 8, 1902,
which, incidentally, was the anniversary date of the terrible Galveston
disaster of 1900, and it was a hurricane at Galveston into which he flew
in 1943. Joe's mother was Mary Haines, a Savannah girl. His father,
Hubert Duckworth, was a naturalized Englishman who had been sent to the
States to take over the American cotton offices of Joe's grandfather,
after whom he was named. When Joe was two years of age, the family moved
to Macon, Georgia, where his father was vice-president of the Bibb
Manufacturing Company.