Part 12

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.